Arranger: A Role-Puzzling Adventure is a puzzle videogame with story-driven exploration elements. I play as Jemma, an orphan girl who has a unique aspect to her existence. Arranger’s world is built on a grid and instead of walking from square to square, Jemma causes the row of tiles she stands upon to slide forward with her footsteps. Only objects and people affected by a malevolent force called Static are immune to her curious and involuntary powers. Now an adult, Jemma resolves to leave the adoptive village that mostly tolerates her peculiarities to explore the Wilderness beyond its gates and find other people like her. During her quest she is forced to confront the sinister connection between her powers and the Static.
Arranger is built on puzzles that explore Jemma’s unusual reality: When she moves, instead of taking a step forward, the stripe of earth beneath her feet slides forward instead. Jemma technically never moves during her entire adventure, finishing the story and learning the true meaning of home and family still standing on the tile where it began.
Arranger’s opening hour is its least restricted and most chaotic. While exploring Jemma’s adoptive village, she encounters the fewest restrictions to her movement, granting me many chances to observe the unique rules that govern her movement. When Jemma walks out the door of Susie Q’s flophouse, she pulls Susie’s clean floor out with her and an oven follows in her wake, carried by the sliding tiles. Perimeters in Jemma’s world are marked by thick brown lines; when a tile disappears into a perimeter wall, it magically reappears from the opposite wall. Jemma can even use this as a shortcut, stepping into a wall and teleporting to the opposite side, essentially traversing a long hallway in a single step. Walls are not strictly barriers to her, they are doorways.
While completing a last-minute errand for Mage Micah, an eccentric village resident, Jemma encounters Static for the first time. Objects and creatures affected by Static are recognizable by an eerie purple glow that surrounds them. Once affected, they no longer respond to Jemma’s world-sliding capabilities. The ground will slide beneath a Static-affected thing, but if another item or being is pulled into Static, then Jemma’s movement is also interrupted. Her movement is blocked by Static as though it were a solid wall.
These facts form the basis for most of Arranger’s subsequent puzzles. I must find a way to move Jemma through many different environments, sliding some objects into others like keys into locks, and maneuvering around or eliminating Static-bound objects that get in her way. Jemma’s brief excursion into Mage Micah’s basement is a good introduction to these puzzle-solving mechanics. There she must slide swords into Static fiends that have overgrown the basement with immovable purple pustules. It’s a straightforward set of puzzles that push me into living in Jemma’s unusual shoes.
Once she leaves the village and enters the Wilderness, Jemma encounters new environments that add new rules and complications to her movement. In the fishing village of Merritton, Jemma discovers an exception to her movement: rafts. She may ride on a raft like any normal person because it is the craft that moves instead of her. Puzzles in Merritton grow especially complicated when a raft can be used to change the location of a space’s perimeter. In a subterranean kingdom, Jemma encounters magical doors that behave like portals. Keeping the unique rules of portals and Jemma’s movement in my head simultaneously provides much of the puzzle challenge in this region. While exploring a laboratory, Jemma encounters orbs that generate Static fields, but are immune to Static themselves, giving her the unique opportunity to manipulate Static instead of being manipulated by it.
Every region introduces some unique mechanic that keeps the puzzle solving fresh. I never feel like Arranger is repeating itself even though it never complicates Jemma’s core abilities beyond moving up, down, left, and right.
An especially clever addition to the puzzle solving are the boss fights. Arranger smuggles the idea of roleplaying into its subtitle, but this refers to being immersed in Jemma’s movement ability and not the idea of a traditional videogame RPG. Jemma cannot die, she has no attributes to configure, and the only combat she performs involves weaponizing her sliding powers. This transforms boss fights from a titanic struggle against a powerful foe into engaging with an especially complicated and devious puzzle centered around a large Static-affected creature.
Like the puzzle mechanics unique to each region, each boss Jemma defeats has a completely original idea. Before escaping the barrier that protects her adoptive village from the Wilderness, Jemma must defeat its guardian, an undulating pile of swords and axes that can be compelled to stretch and contort, ultimately revealing its weakpoint on its hidden tail. Later, she fights a kraken whose disparate weakpoints must be attacked simultaneously with the help of multiple remote controlled bird drones. No puzzle makes me work harder or think longer than these encounters which is exactly how a boss transfigured into a sliding puzzle should work.
On her way to her destinations from the Wilderness’ central hub, Jemma passes through regions that can feel like padding, existing to make her expend shoe leather and make the world feel larger. If I take a closer look at these connecting areas, I find that they do contain more illusive and esoteric puzzles. On the way to Merritton, a creepy zoologist needs help matching animals in mating pairs. The forest path leading out of Jemma’s home village hosts fireflies that prove more than decorative. In a dusty canyon, Jemma helps miners on their hunt for precious gems. Like the main puzzles that guard the story’s next steps, each of these scenarios introduces unique mechanics. Arranger adamantly refuses to recycle ideas.
Completing these optional puzzles allows Jemma to access special shrines. In contrast to Arranger’s original and clever conceit, these shrines are traditional picture sliding puzzles. Eight panels sit in a three-by-three grid. To solve the puzzle, Jemma must use the single empty square in the grid to slide the other panels around until they form a completed picture.
The primitive design of these ultimate bonus puzzles feels intentional. Completing them unlocks a message from Jemma’s predecessors, describing their first encounters with the Static and the persecution they experienced from other people. The puzzles are less advanced because they are artifacts and messages from a less advanced people, imparting their history to one of their last living descendants. The messages are brief and don’t tell Jemma much that she doesn’t already learn in the course of finishing the story. They are a disappointing addition. The sense of accomplishment I feel upon reaching these shrines is more rewarding than the knowledge they contain.
These hidden messages are only part of Arranger’s themes. Despite its puzzle solving concept and plain, grid-based world, it is still a deeply story- and character-driven videogame.
I see this narrative emphasis from Arranger’s prologue which shows how Jemma was left in the safety of her adoptive village. A nameless figure, their face hidden by a hood and scarf, arrives at the village’s sealed gates with baby Jemma held in their arms. As they bend over to leave her lying at the gate’s step, the action freezes and panels flash over the screen as though they have been cut from a comic book and overlaid onto Arranger’s grid world. These panels give me a closer look at the figure’s eyes, and they are filled with tears. Leaving their baby here is a difficult and unwilling task, but a necessary one.
These panel close-ups recur at key points across the story, giving the character’s greater opportunity to express emotions than their small and simple representations designed for exploring the world can provide. There’s even one memorable sequence where these panels appear in the empty space beneath the world grid. Arranger knows when to keep its visuals simple and when to deviate to maximize the emotion of the present moment.
My appreciation of these emotional moments are dulled by how I don’t like most of Arranger’s characters. Jemma in particular lacks any appealing qualities. On the morning she plans to leave the village, she knocks a person off a ladder using her sliding powers. Jemma’s protests that it was an accident would be a lot easier to accept if she wasn’t already on a last minute errand to dump all of her possessions before she leaves; she ends up leaving everything she cannot take on her adventure in an abandoned house. These introductory moments may be intended to portray Jemma as clumsy and misunderstood. Instead I see her as careless and lazy.
My disposition towards Jemma is not improved by how she behaves once she enters the Wilderness. Even though she professes a desire for adventure and is soon caught up in discovering more about other people with powers like her, Jemma’s first response upon meeting new groups of people is to judge them for being different from her.
Minutes after entering the seaside town of Merritton, Jemma decides their lifestyle of remaining in their homes and using robotic birds to communicate is unacceptable and immediately sets about dismantling the system which allows it. This arc feels unmistakably like a commentary about, or even a cry of frustration against, the necessity for social distancing during the COVID-19 pandemic during which social media supplanted face-to-face communication. It seems an unlikely coincidence that Merritton’s citizens use mechanical, blue birds to communicate and Twitter’s icon is also a blue bird. This subtext is frustrating because there was a reason for those circumstances in real life while in Arranger’s world it exists as a problem caused by a careless inventor which must be solved for Jemma to continue her journey.
I do not believe that Arranger’s message is intended to be that social distancing was unnecessary. It makes the good point that community requires togetherness. As Jemma puts it to the birds’ inventor, living apart is “fueling everyone’s apathy, and fear.” Jemma is an inappropriate messenger to deliver this message. She is a stranger to Merritton. She is a hero no one asked for, arriving to solve a problem she doesn’t really understand, solely because it inconveniences her own nebulous long term goals.
Jemma is an unappealing player character. Her flaws go unexamined, if the narrative even recognizes them as flaws. She does not grow because her mistakes are not acknowledged as mistakes. She floats out her door at the outset with no clear goal, wanders through random events where she arbitrates right and wrong from her own limited perspective, and the story ends with her heralded as a hero despite solving no real problems except her own.
As a puzzle videogame, Arranger: A Role-Puzzling Adventure is above average. It takes the familiar idea of sliding block puzzles and twists it into a new form I’ve never seen before. For that accomplishment alone it deserves effusive praise. It successfully embellishes its original idea for a puzzle game across many regions over about six hours of playtime, never repeating a puzzle or recycling an idea to pad itself out. Narratively, it is less strong. It has no hook to interest me in what happens next. Jemma leaves her home village for no apparent reason except wanderlust. Once she discovers a new community of people, she immediately resolves to change them without really understanding them first. When the narrative concludes the only threat she’s resolved is the one she placed herself in the middle of. Arranger delights me as a puzzle videogame and perplexes me as a story.