Arranger – PS5 Review

Arranger is an adventuring puzzle game from Californian/Argentinian studio Furniture and Mattress, a coding super group with credits on games like Guacamelee, Celeste and Braid.  And, unlike a lot of games that we review, this one genuinely has a fairly original core mechanic.

You play as Jemma who, after being abandoned as a baby in a small town and never fitting in, decides to go on a journey of self-discovery outside of her cosy, safe world.  There’s probably an allegory here for young people, mental health and identity but within the confines of Arranger, this all just means you need to get out and see what the wider world has to offer.  Getting out isn’t easy though as your town is protected from a mysterious force known as The Static which prevents things from moving and so it is up to you to figure out how to beat it.

The game uses a sort of sliding puzzle mechanic that we’ve not seen used this way.  The world is essentially on a grid system and any row or column of squares that are not broken up will move and loop when moved, like a conveyor belt.  So instead of you moving, you’re really moving that group of squares as well as whatever is on them.  It’s hard to explain but this ability to move your surroundings (and to loop them) is the key to solving a lot of the puzzles in the game.  It’s like playing a typical top-down, 2D adventure game but mixed with a little Denki Blocks.

This is where the Static comes in though.  It doesn’t move and will block you, or any object, that tries to move through the space it is on.  For the most part you’ll need to work around it but sometimes you can combat it head on.  For example, some Static is created by monsters and you can clear them by moving a sword onto the space where their head is.  And there are lots of other puzzles to work through but they all just use the directional controls, which is pretty cool.

There’s often a problem with puzzle games that they add more and more mechanics until the whole thing becomes a miserable exercise in trial and error.  Think Hitman Go which started off with some cool little puzzles before eventually becoming a horrifically complex mess.  Well, Arranger never really does that.  Sure, there were times where we so stuck that we had to check a video guide but invariably when we saw the solution we realised that we’re dumb as shit.  If you’re ever stuck, you’ve probably forgotten that you can loop around to the other side.

And while the game’s story is pretty twee, we stayed engaged with it.  It’s an enjoyable experience that doesn’t overstay its welcome or bog you down with too much text or plot complexity.  For the most part you can just focus on the puzzles and the developers have cleverly put in an option to show you where your next objective is.  You can also enable an option to skip puzzles if you want too which is a smart way to ensure that everyone gets to experience the whole story.

Everything about the game is well-considered.  Even down to the presentation which mixes clean visuals and some excellent music to keep the whole thing pleasant to play while not devolving down into childishness.   We loved the way the game used comic style images as backgrounds for the levels too, it’s just a clever, stylish touch that really elevated things.  The artist here did the visuals for Braid, so it was always going to be a good looking game.

While it could all be a bit too ‘nice’ for some gamers, there’s just enough melancholy and humour in there to balance out all of the whimsy.  But also there’s just a level of quality, originality and love here to make Arranger stand out from the glut of shovelware, cheap ports and generic indie nonsense that has overrun PSN.  It might not be for everyone, but Arranger is definitely a gem.