Hello! Nick Suttner here. You may have seen my name on PlayStation Blog before in various guises (most recently, as the writer behind Carto), but I’m super excited to be coming to you today as co-founder of the small studio Furniture & Mattress, to reveal our debut PS5 game Arranger: A Role-Puzzling Adventure.
What the heck is role-puzzling, you may ask? Well, we’ve spent the past few years building the kind of world that you’d expect to find in a role-playing game: curious towns and moody wilderness areas to explore, quirky characters to meet, and weirdo monsters to battle in dungeons. But in Arranger, everything is expressed through the language of a puzzle game. Hence: role-puzzling!
The entire game world exists on a sprawling, interconnected gameplay grid, and as our protagonist Jemma moves around, everything on the same row or column moves with her. She can also loop herself – or other objects – from one edge of the grid to the other. Over the course of our 8-10 hour, single-player adventure, we regularly twist and subvert these simple mechanics in a host of interesting ways, trying to keep things breezy while still providing some satisfying head-scratchers. (And several assist options to skip past them if you’re not in the mood.)
Of course, no RPG would be worth its mettle without a satisfying story. And like our puzzles, we’ve tried to craft something fun and light-hearted, with some challenging themes and ideas if you’re open to them. Foremost, it’s a journey of self-discovery, as small-town misfit Jemma heads out beyond the confines of her hometown for the first time – only to find an exciting, yet divided world, overrun by the immovable force known as static. Can she disrupt a stagnating world, and shake things up a bit?
Admittedly, we didn’t keep all of the RPG tropes. We don’t have any XP to accrue, or new powers to unlock that gate progression – instead, we supply a regular stream of new ways to test your understanding of the mechanics. And there’s no in-game inventory to manage, either – everything you’ll need to interact with exists on the grid alongside Jemma. So if you find a locked door, well, you’ll need a key of course – but in Arranger, you’ll need to figure out how to move it there one tile at a time, down sometimes twisty paths and past unexpected obstacles.
Lastly, if the art looks at all familiar to you, there might be a good reason. That’s because the game is art directed by my co-founder David Hellman, artist behind the modern classic puzzle-platformer Braid. It’s his first full game as lead artist since, and along with a small crew of super talented artists to support him, they’re striving to create something visually striking and unique. David also leans on his background as a comic artist for our cutscenes, creating evocative comic-style panels to express many of our most important story beats. Along with my other co-founder Nico Recabarren, designer of fan-favorite Ethereal, and the incredibly talented composer Tomás Batista, we’re bringing decades (!) of game-making experience to the sensibilities of a tiny team, to craft you something special.
Arranger: A Role-Puzzling Adventure launches Summer 2024 on PS5, and we couldn’t be more jazzed that we can finally reveal it to you. Thanks for checking it out!