Arranger: A Role-Puzzling Adventure (2024)

I really enjoyed this one! It took about 9 hours to complete.

The core gimmick is that when your character moves, the entire row or column they're on moves with them, with some objects that also move with the tile they're on, and others that are fixed in place.

The pacing is great, and I want this sentence to have more words because that's such a big deal, but I'm not quite sure what else can be said about it. It's just great, it never drags or feels like you're rushing through anything, which feels like a rarity in games. There is no hand-holding, and they continuously introduce new, often more challenging mechanics in each new area, so none of the puzzles ever felt stale.

There is a type of combat, which starts off with figuring out the right way to line up tiles so you can push a tile holding a sword into a tile holding an enemy, and evolves into increasingly more complex variations on that theme as you get deeper into the game.

Aside from the main campaign, in each of the three Wilderness areas you cross to get to one of the main towns, you can solve three puzzles to access a secret optional temple. The three entry puzzles are totally different in each area! In one you have to play matchmaker by bringing two animals together, in one you have to find and traverse some mines to get gemstones, and in one you have to uncover a variety of secret/unmarked pathways. The optional temples each contain a single 3x3 slide puzzle and you get a verse of poetic lore upon completing each one.

I really liked the art style. It's a top-down and it has a general environmental background plus these sort of comic book-style patches of more detailed drawings, to convey the mood and happenings in the environment.

This was neat - sometimes the backgrounds would change when you crossed a particular point in the level:

There's no voice acting or cutscenes. At a few points, story beats are conveyed by layering 5 or 6 such comic book panels on the screen one at a time, but aside from these, the story is mostly just conveyed through what you do and the conversations you have with NPCs.

The dialogue is mostly charming with a quirky humor not unlike a classic Zelda game, but did get a little trite/cliche the rare times it tried to say anything serious.

Music was pretty nice too - one track that I really loved (it low-key gave me Outer Wilds theme vibes) and while none of the others really stood out, they were pleasant.