Arranger is a puzzle game about movement, both metaphorically and literally. Movement is the basis of the puzzles in Arranger, and it’s demanding to explain without showing it (if you can watch the trailer, that’ll assist). The world of Arranger is divided into a grid, and you don’t move the main character, the feisty, misfit girl Jemma, across the squares. Instead, imagine that the row or column Jemma is in becomes a moving walkway, and you control its direction and speed. Jemma stands still, and you move the ground and everything on it left, right, up, or down – like How To Say Goodbye, but with more squares. It’s one of those things that makes sense when you do it, trust me.
Jemma lives in a miniature town inside The Hold, a barrier of sorts that protects its inhabitants from Static, a purple-rainbow oil slick, a force that locks people and things in place. But Jemma, being the adventurous type that she is, wants to leave the city and see what else is out there. This forms the first part of your adventure, as early puzzles teach you how to navigate the Arranger’s moving grid. Bully blocking your way? It turns out the grid wraps around, so you can walk through one end and emerge on the other. Need to move a box of junk somewhere? Learn how to pull and push it with Jemma, or how to move it without moving This.
Ultimately, it’s a basic puzzle game concept, as most of the puzzles boil down to “get from one side of the screen to the other,” but basic doesn’t mean bad, and it’s amazing how much variety Furniture & Mattress manages to pack into its 8-hour runtime. There are a ton of themed areas throughout the game—a beach village, a tech dungeon, an orange, rocky desert covered in cacti—and I suggest you pay attention to the illustrations that form the backdrop to scenes and serve as comic-book cutscenes when something’s happening. It’s a really effective way of adding character and detail to an otherwise distant 2D game.
But of course, the puzzles are varied, too. Rocks affected by Static block your path, while other objects must be carefully moved around them, carefully arranged in a Tetris-like configuration that leaves Jemma enough squares to pass through. Rubbery, screaming Static monsters appear and block the grid, and you have to push or pull swords towards them to clear the path. Early on, a man asks you to shear his sheep in a sort of time trial, and hooboy, aren’t they real sheep? There are puzzles to solve while being paired up with another character, and one where you have to steal a girl from her house by blocking her parents’ view with their own furniture. The slightly disappointing parts are the meager boss fights, which all involve moving a bunch of stuff into place while an octopus/worm/blob patiently waits for you to manage to stab him in the substantial eye with a dagger.
Overall, Arranger never gets aged. While all the puzzles have the same concept, they get noticeably harder, and some of them hit your mind in a way that feels like hitting a brick wall. I struggled for a long time with some of the late-game puzzles where Jemma has to move machine parts to rework the floor plan of a level, but I loved moving obstacles around laser traps in the creepy lab.
But fear not, as there are optional settings that let you skip almost every puzzle in the game (apart from optional puzzles like finding the necklace in the mine, which was, honestly, a piece of cake that I never managed to solve). It’s a genial touch that I appreciated as a puzzle fan who’s always trying to get others to try games in a potentially unfriendly genre.
I have a feeling the humor in the writing will also win Arranger fans. The weird sheep are one of many examples where I found myself laughing out deafening. A female inventor explains that she has created a robot that doesn’t feel love, which Jemma thinks is really cold; the robot itself takes a moment to make a unhappy face. There’s a running joke in a section set in an underground commune with many age-old traditions that really made me laugh, so I won’t even spoil it. It’s well done, to the point that the ongoing tone contrasts with some of the more thought-provoking gaffes. One town has stopped talking because it uses a fleet of mechanical birds to send each other tiny messages instead. Take ThisElon. Another example of this is unfortunately the final moral of the entire game. It’s satisfyingly on point, but weighty and predictable, especially when you pair it with things like non-sheep.
I’m a bit of a grump about this. Overall, Arranger is an imaginative, light-hearted, fun game that doesn’t overdo its appeal. I think it will be a substantial challenge for puzzle lovers, but it’s nice enough to throw at someone who’s just starting to get into them. Specifically, I still haven’t managed to solve the optional mine puzzles. But that just makes me want to give it another try.
This review is based on a test version of the game provided by the game developer.
