Arranger: A Role-Puzzling Adventure

The vibe of the whole game is "feel good while solving puzzles" and everything about the game has been crafted to work towards that purpose. This is great example of "try the demo. If you like it, you'll like the game." If you enjoy the demo the main game is about 7-8 hours more of the same thing (with puzzles that don't feel like they're tutorials/fetch quests). New mechanics and challenges are introduced regularly and keep things feeling fresh despite everything being based on the sliding-tile-floor mechanic. Demo progress transfers to the main game, so you can pick up where you left off (though you may want to start from scratch if you want the few achievements you missed.) Everything about this game oozes polish. The visuals, music, sound effects, and little animations all feel so pleasantly crafted. The characters are there to keep the story interesting and give you a moment to rest between puzzles and they're all great. Everyone has a bit of personality without ever going over-the-top. The story is enough to give the player motivation to move forward without ever getting in the way. The art style reminds me of Braid. The only hiccups that bothered me were that after completing the tutorial there were some achievements that were locked behind my demo progress, so I had to start a new game and play through the first 10 or so minutes to unlock them. There are also a few achievements that are missable due to an area in the game being locked out at one point (though story-wise I feel like it wouldn't be too hard to update that area and let the player back in). But it's a testament to how much I enjoyed the game that I didn't mind speedrunning back to that point in the story to get those last few achievements. The game auto-saves and you can't change the save slot or stop it from auto saving. If we could change our save slot mid-game, that would solve a lot of my issues with the missable achievements. But these are minor gripes. I still highly recommend this game to anyone who enjoys the demo.

Unfortunately no, can't recommend this. It started when I went to boot the game and it said the game was better with a controller, so I went and got the controller, plugged it into my computer, booted the game... only for there to be no controller settings. Not a good start. The game also throws you into a tutorial of sorts with *way* too much dialogue. About 10x too much. I just got here and I'm trying to figure out what seems to be an interesting tile-shifting mechanic, but instead of being given time to really play with it I gotta listen to these absolute strangers tell me about their lives and I. Do. Not. Care. Let me play the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ game. It's not just annoying, but it keeps interrupting my ability to learn the mechanics. Those unknown characters I'll never see again should get one line each, tops. If I have to keep pressing X forty-five times until I can play the game again I'm going to start breaking windows in here. Okay, so I thought, let's get through the tutorial, then the game will get fun. Unfortunately that's not the case. I think I made it two screens past when I realized it was just going to be tedious. Sorry. The twist on the Sokoban premise is interesting but it's still Sokoban: you know what to do, but getting the motions right is insanely boring. The first twenty seconds of a puzzle are alright while you're enjoying the charm and seeing what the game is asking you to do, but actually doing it is a slog, and making any mistakes in your pattern can totally throw you off. If the game gets better later, I'm not willing to trudge through this crap to make it there. I wish I could like this, but I hated every second I was playing.

I have nothing to complain about. Although I can nitpick a bit -- they didn't really explain the fishing. And, there is no "post game" to do things you didn't do during the game. The game uses a somewhat simple gameplay mechanic from start to finish; the puzzles that built around that are not particularly difficult, but still nice. Game looks pretty good too. There is no combat in the usual sense, and nothing is "timed".

Basic puzzles one step above generic socoban and a story that's also boring

This was a lot of fun, Arranger has a cute story to go with it, and no review would be complete without talking about the puzzles. They are VERY well designed and range from easy to "I'm going to take a break". I can see the creative time that went into the game and the end result is a feeling of satisfaction when you finally figure them out. I only have around half of the achievements now, which tells me there's a lot more for me to explore. Or should I say, Arrange?

Ok this game was very cute, chill, but also mentally challenging puzzle/RPG The story was cute, the gameplay was fun, and the game doesn’t wear out its welcome. Took me like 11 hours to finish. I feel like the pacing was perfect because any longer and the game would have started to slog. They do a great job of introducing new gameplay mechanics and puzzle mechanics to keep the game fresh. Probably a good 8/10 for me

Die Voraussetzungen für Arranger wären eigentlich ideal für mich: Ein kleines Story-Adventure, das Puzzling mit einer netten Geschichte verbindet. Es könnte also eigentlich voll einschlagen. Und ja, das Spiel ist nicht komplette Grütze, bei weitem nicht. Aber leider ist es eben auch nicht wirklich gut. Genauer gesagt verspielt es seine durchaus vorhandenen Stärken durch seine Probleme. Vom Grundprinzip her spielt man Jemma, eine Person mit speziellen Eigenschaften. Sie kann sich nämlich nicht normal durch die Welt bewegen, sondern bewegt immer die ganze Welt mit sich, sprich man verschiebt Bodenplatten und bewegt sich dadurch durch die Welt. Auf gut Deutsch besteht die gesamte Fortbewegung aus Verschieberätseln, denn natürlich besteht die ständige Herausforderung darin, ständig irgendwelche Hindernisse zu überwinden. Und das Spielprinzip könnte an sich funktionieren und macht durchaus Laune. Es kommen auch immer wieder neue Herausforderungen und Funktionen dazu. Trotzdem bleibt das Gameplay letztlich sehr dünn. Vom Gameplay her ist Arranger für mich darum ein klassisches Beispiel von "it overstays it's welcome", für ein Spiel, das sein eigenes Spielprinzip überstrapaziert und selbst mit nur rund sieben Stunden Spielzeit schlicht zu lange dauert für das Spielprinzip. Das alleine wäre aber wohl noch ertragbar, wenn das Spiel ansonsten genügend liefern würde. Und tatsächlich ist da vieles auch sehr gut. Die Grafik ist eine ansehnliche und passende Comicgrafik, der Soundtrack passt ebenfalls. Von der Präsentation her wäre also eigentlich alles bereit. Wäre da nicht das Writing, wo das Spiel für mich wirklich abfällt. Und auch hier gilt: Es ist nicht einfach grottenschlecht. Eigentlich ist es sogar ziemlich clever, das Gameplay auch storytechnisch umzusetzen, und man merkt deutlich, dass immer wieder Humor eingebaut werden soll. Nur wirklich zünden mag das alles nicht. Und das liegt an mehreren Problemen. Zum einen bleibt das Ganze insgesamt irgendwie belanglos. Es kommt kaum echte Spannung auf. Dazu sind viele Figuren einfach nervig geschrieben. Gerade die Hauptfigur mit ihrem ständigen „Ich bin Aussenseiter“-Blabla fand ich auf Dauer einfach nur mühsam. Das grösste Problem ist jedoch, dass das Spiel denselben Fehler macht wie aktuell Hollywood. Man spürt dem Spiel von A bis Z an, dass hier eine Botschaft vermittelt werden will. An und für sich habe ich überhaupt nichts gegen eine gute Botschaft in einem Spiel, nur darf es eben nicht so ultra-preachy sein wie hier. Man hat ständig das Gefühl, dass es nicht darum geht, eine gute Geschichte zu erzählen, die auch eine Botschaft enthält, sondern dass eine Botschaft vermittelt werden soll und die Geschichte irgendwie drumherum gesponnen wurde. Das führt zu den für solche Fälle klassisch plumpen Charakteren, zu nervig kitschigen Szenen, die einen nur mit den Augen rollen lassen, zu kaum vorhandener Spannung und dem ständigen Gefühl, irgendwie moralisch belehrt zu werden. Und auch wenn das bei weitem nicht das entscheidende Element war, passte dazu für mich auch, wie bei einer Figur penetrant eines dieser modernen Pronomen benutzt wird, die man als Normalspieler gar nicht versteht. Auch das hätte man problemlos übersehen können, wenn der Rest gestimmt hätte. Aber es zeigt eben genau, welchen Groove das Spiel insgesamt hat. Letztlich wird Arranger durch dieses dauernde Grundmoralin einfach nur zäh und plump. Ja, wie gesagt, es ist keine Totalkatastrophe. Aber am Ende war ich ehrlich gesagt einfach froh, als es vorbei war. Ich spielte sogar mit dem Gedanken abzubrechen, wollte dann aber doch noch wissen, wie das Ganze ausgeht. Nur leider fällt auch das Ende ziemlich nichtssagend aus und endet letztlich wieder in einem übermoralisierenden „Juhui, alle sind happy, weil wir jetzt den moralisch besseren Weg einschlagen“. Fazit: Arranger bietet ein interessantes Spielprinzip, das leider an der Umsetzung scheitert. Das Grundgameplay trägt die Spielzeit nicht wirklich und das Writing wirkt viel zu stark nach „Wie vermittle ich meine moralische Belehrung?“ statt nach echtem Storytelling. Ein Spiel, das man sich darum besser spart, weshalb mein Fazit klar lautet: keine Empfehlung.

I had a great time playing through Arranger. It's a breezy, light puzzler with a great visual style and interesting mechanics. There various mechanics introduced throughout the game often don't extend beyond the region they were introduced in, but it was quite pleasant to encounter new wrinkles to the established formula, and I felt engaged throughout. One thing that surprised me was how effectively it conveyed tone -- when traversing through areas, the game makes really skilled use of fixed camera zoom changes, soundtrack, and sound effects to give a surprising sense of space and emotion. It's quite well done! As to the "breezy" and "light" aspects: none of the puzzles in the game are particularly hard or involved. The rooms where the puzzles live are often pretty small, so even if you don't intuit the solutions it's not difficult to stumble on them through pure trial and error. There's also an option in the game settings which can let you skip most puzzles if you want, in case there's something annoying you. For myself, I found that whenever I was "stuck" it was just because I was forgetting some fundamental aspect of the game's movement mechanics. The one caveat I'd mention is the fishing game encountered in one area -- I'd been consistently misreading the visual cues. To anyone else wondering how the heck to manage those: when the underwater-fish icon *disappears*, that's when you've got a fish reeled in. I kept on assuming that the fish going away meant that I'd "missed" the catch somehow. As for one slightly negative point: the game *does* wear its themes very obviously on its sleeve. IMO the dialogue could have benefitted from some more subtlety, rather than explicitly spelling out the game's main points. It'd also be nice to have a button to completely cancel a dialogue tree, Most NPCs end up with two responses to your interaction: the initial longer one, and then a shorter secondary one (which repeats). But sometimes the secondary one is rather long, and sometimes you end up just repeating the primary instead. It can be a bit of a drag clicking through the same thing you've already heard, especially when the back-and-forth lasts for a dozen interchanges. Still, very minor quibbles for me! I'd definitely recommend it to anyone looking for a cozy puzzler, so long as you don't mind some relatively straightforward puzzles. Well done, IMO!

Wonderful game! I really enjoyed it. I played through the entire game in one day, I couldn't put it down. :) If you like sliding puzzles I'd recommend it. It wasn't too heavy on the story, but where there were story breaks they were pretty short and to the point. Art is original and interesting. There's a neat layering thing they did with the levels that is really nice. Sometimes the movement was almost too much for my motion sickness, but I made it through. Could be a problem for people who are affected by it more severely though.

Arranger isn't a bad game, it's just a bit expensive at full price, and too easy. I also found the story and characters bland and uninteresting with some small exceptions. If you're new to the sokobon genre, this is a great game to start with but wait for a sale. For more experienced sokobon players, be warned, there are very few challenging puzzles. I had no issues with performance.