For some, games can be a refuge that helps the disenfranchised or used to help those who feel like they don't belong anywhere. Some stories are made with that guiding principle in mind and Arranger: A Role-Puzzling Adventureis one of those games. After my pleasant chat with Furniture & Mattress’ Nick Suttner & Nico Recabarren, I got a clear idea of how Arranger, the team's puzzle adventure debut, is a story of belonging - as well as being a pretty dang good puzzle game.
The team is an all-star cast of game developers with some indie hits under their belts, including Braid, Ethereal, and Carto. The studio came together from a particular demo Recabarren created that he wanted to revisit with Suttner.
“We were looking for something to dive into together,” Suttner tells me. “Nico had been working on a bunch of smaller projects and he had one from earlier that he was like, 'Actually, I want to sort of revisit this one, do you want to come on and work with me? Be the writer and help produce in more of an ambitious way?' because he hadn't put out like a console game before.”
That demo would later become the "role-puzzling adventure” Arranger, a game that takes place across a world of tile-based movement and gameplay. As Suttner puts it, they wanted to make a game, “in the framework of and what feels like an RPG or an adventure game", but with “the vocabulary of a puzzle game.” This involved a lot of iteration from Recabarren, which he lovingly explained felt “like being a Roomba, and bumping into walls until you find the exit.”
Beyond the technical obstacles, I also got some insight into the kind of adventure players will be getting with the puzzles - which naturally at Thinky Games, we wanted to know about. “We have a very comfortable way of introducing new puzzles,” Suttner told me. “Most of the puzzles are structured into sets based on a certain mechanic, so they don't get too deep and too complex for us to develop. We just show the novelty element of it.” That's not to say they are all easy, and players can expect some optional, more demanding challenges along the way.
We also had a little chat about the RPG elements, or rather, their lack thereof in the traditional sense. Both Recabarren and Suttner admit it is “a little bit cheeky” how they reached that conclusion. Or, as Recabarren puts it, “I feel like it's mostly about the vibe of an RPG. More than actually, like, a strict set of rules.”
“I think to me, it's that sense of wandering around a fantasy world and going to different towns and talking to characters and getting caught up in quests,” Suttner says. “That's why there's a loose distinction there. But there's a lot of that feeling and a lot of narrative tropes like the hero's journey. We wanted to lean into that and then put our own twist on it along the way.”
“I think with the mechanics, we wanted to have some equivalent of items. We have swords, and we have other mechanisms, but they don't exist in an inventory, they exist in the world. There's no inventory, you just push things around. Everything exists on the grid and coexists with you in a more physical way.”
But these puzzles and game elements aren't meant to be the singular focus. They primarily serve the characters and narrative, which Suttner and Recabarren had much to say about.
“The puzzle satisfaction was obviously a huge part of it,” Suttner says. “But we also want the art and the story to support this, so you have other reasons to play. You want to see what happens next, you want to know what's around the next corner. So, in that sense too we wanted to keep things moving and have some forward momentum.”
The story, centred on a young girl named Jemma, was mentioned extensively during my time with Recabarren and Suttner and was one of the aspects they were most proud of. It is a tale of being different and a misfit, a theme that plays into both the design and the adventure.
Suttner explains: “Once we figured out who the main character was and what she looked like, we made that a central element of the story. That was an important moment because everything grew from there.”
“We wanted to tell this story about a girl going out into the world who feels like a misfit and wants to find a place where she fits in better or find her people. We take that to hopefully some unexpected places and it becomes a story that's more than just about her and shift focus to the wider world.”
“You have this chaotic entity, and we liked that and decided to lean into that. 'What if a character couldn't help but move through the world and make a mess all the time?' And that is probably like a lot of us in some way.”
Arranger is out July 25 on PlayStation, Nintendo Switch, and PC via Steam and Epic.
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