Arranger: A Role-Puzzling Adventure Is an RPG With a Tile-Sliding Twist

This summer, developer Furniture & Mattress will release its debut title, Arranger: A Role-Puzzling Adventure, a role-playing and puzzle game built around a unique tile-sliding movement system. Ahead of the game’s release, Restart had the chance to go hands-on with Arranger at Summer Game Fest.

Arranger: A Role-Puzzling Adventure follows a young girl named Jemma who’s tired of small town living and wants to explore the wide open world. Players will help Jemma navigate environments by moving the ground under her feet in a system that makes movement a never-ending puzzle.

The in-game world is situated on an interconnected grid, so when players want to move Jemma vertically or horizontally, the entire column or row Jemma is standing on (and any normal items also on those squares) will shift accordingly. This allows players to move objects around by standing near them and shifting their respective column or row. For instance, players can stand on the same row or column as a sword and “push” the sword into enemies to defeat them.

Columns and rows also wrap around the edges of the grid, allowing players to quickly traverse or move items across large sections of the grid without moving one square at a time.

In addition to enemies, Jemma’s world is full of obstacles to avoid or overcome, such as buttons that must be pressed and rocks that can’t be moved. As an example, in our Summer Game Fest demo, we discovered a button inside a building that must be pressed to fill a gap in Jemma’s path. Obviously, Jemma can’t stand on the button while also walking across the gap, so we needed to find something to move on top of the button instead.

In this case, the solution was found in a stool outside the building that had a paint can on it. We first had to knock the paint can off of the stool before we could move the stool into the building and onto the button to create a path for Jemma to move forward.

Since Arranger’s movement system is a puzzle in and of itself, players may find themselves relying on trial-and-error to navigate the in-game world, depending on their spatial reasoning skills and how good they are at mentally visualizing the way the environment will move before taking any real action. To prevent players from becoming frustrated if they feel truly “stuck,” Furniture & Mattress incorporated a skip feature that will allow players to bypass certain puzzles and move on.

Arranger: A Role-Puzzling Adventure

Release Date: July 25, 2024

Digital Only

• WindowsBuy
• Netflix GamesBuy
• Nintendo SwitchBuy
• PlayStation 5Buy

Arranger: A Role-Puzzling Adventure promises an 8-10 hour single-player campaign. The game hits Switch, PlayStation, and PC through Steam and the Epic Game Store July 25, 2024. Arranger will also be released on Netflix Games this summer.