Some games wow through their gameplay choices, while others carry a message and impress that upon the player while working through each moment. One of my favourite games, Celeste, is both a brilliant platformer, requiring precision and patience, and a message to those who feel a little lost in the dark. There are many sensitive moments built on emotion and a shared human experience.
Celeste was written by Maddy Thorson who came out as transgender not long after the release of their game, making certain moments, like the section about anxiety, even more impactful.
Conversations just happen in Celeste. They take place between various characters and nearly always have an undercurrent of emotional tension. Hell, the whole story is about not feeling like you belong, battling dysphoria, and ensuring that you accept yourself for who you are.
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Conversations are similar in Arranger, though it’s more of a take on society as a whole, I can’t help but feel a connective thread to Celeste despite the differences in gameplay.
After escaping the opening village, where our protagonist Jemma feels hemmed in by the other villagers, she meets a man named Shrub who talks about how we, as people, build walls around everything, forcing isolation onto ourselves by not accepting the world as a whole.
At the time of playing Arranger, it had been a month after I moved into a new place. I moved from a shared accommodation, with a flatmate, into a flat on my own. While living on my own is a joy, it does sometimes come with feelings of loneliness, especially after always having someone else in the building, just there. Though loneliness is something I’ve struggled with over many years, for one reason or another.
In the conversation with Shrub, he commented something that affected me, “It’s hard to feel lonely when you’re at peace with yourself.” I was just as stopped in my tracks here as I was when Celeste put the player in the moments of a panic attack so well, showing something that many of us suffer with so deftly.
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Playing Arranger on Switch, I put the handheld down and just sat. Thinking about my own concept of what it is to be lonely, despite being surrounded by many. That peace is something difficult to come by in the real world, it comes more naturally to Jemma, our protagonist. She seems so accepting of everyone, and even herself, despite her feelings of isolation in a village of her peers.
Jemma has the unique power of being able to control the environment around her. She walks into the edge of the gridded map, let’s say on the left side, she’ll appear on the right side and everything on that row will move along with her, kind of like a conveyer belt. If she shuffles one square up, anything in that column also moves one square up. What comes from this is a fiendish puzzle game with a lot of heart.
As I made my way through the various areas, meeting the often funny characters throughout, these conversations carried on, nearly always with an eye on the greater landscape of society. It’s not a decisive skewering of anything in particular, but a look at some of the parts of society that have us constricted and isolated from others.
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Jemma’s ability is the core of Arranger. It feels a lot like one of those sliding puzzles you get in a Christmas cracker, the difficulty varying wildly. Some simple puzzles see you shuffling Jemma around an obstacle, while later levels will feature a huge boss who must be thwarted by positioning particular elements on the screen, thinking about how moving one will move the others. It’s like spinning several dozen plates at once.
Across the varied lands, you explore once Jemma is out in the wild, discovering what actually makes the world tick, and meeting people who expand her world, there’s a huge uptick in the comedy. Arranger is a remarkably funny game, often using humour to soften the frustration you might feel at being stuck on a puzzle for ages.
It’s tough to review a puzzle game. A release such as Arranger is , to some degree,only as good as its puzzles and my verdict will ultimately be impacted by my own stupidity. At one point, I was staring at a puzzle for around 20 minutes. I got up, went to the kitchen for a drink, returned, and suddenly it dawned on me that I wasn’t thinking about a different plane of movement. When Arranger starts bringing in rafts that sail over the edge of the grids, teleporting doorways that can be shifted, and grappling hooks that pull you into new areas, things become devilish.
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It’s a joy to watch as Jemma disappears off one side of the level to appear on the other, dragging along any NPCs or furniture that might be on that row. It never gets old and with each new area that brings in new mechanics, Arranger manages to feel fresh often. With a genuinely enjoyable story carried along by wonderful puzzles, Arranger manages to be one of the best puzzle games released this year.
Pros: Charming story, lots of humour, constantly evolving puzzles
Cons: Mileage may vary on tougher puzzles
For fans of: Unpacking, Braid, Tetris
8/10: Excellent
Arranger: A Role-Puzzling Adventure is available now on Nintendo Switch (version tested), PlayStation 5, and PC. Review code was provided by the publisher. Find a complete guide to GAMINGbible's review scores here.
Topics: PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch, PC, Steam