Another chill relaxing game. I think the heat has been getting to me… This one is about organising and arranging things.
There really isn’t too much to say here, A Little To The Left is a super relaxed puzzle game about pattern recognition. You’re presented with a jumbled mess of a scene, and all you have to do is arrange everything to look good. Sometimes that involves positioning things to line up neatly, sometimes it involves ordering things following a specific pattern, and other times it involves taking the jumbled mess and putting it away inside the super oddly shaped tidy inside the drawer.
Visually this game is wonderfully charming. You’re working in all parts of the house from the living room bookcase to the kitchen cabinets, bathroom sink cupboard, even to the workbench in the garage. There is lots of variety. There are also a lot of puzzles about nature, lots of puzzles that are devoid of context, such as just sorting pencils on a table, and some of the puzzles even have multiple solutions. It’s fun to go for them all, but it might also drive you a little bit crazy if you’re not wired up to notice some of the trickier patterns. There is a hint system though, where you get given a page with a scribbled out hint, and an eraser so that you can reveal as much or little of it as you need.
There is probably some wider discussion to have about this game, perhaps on the topic of OCD or other obsessive thoughts, but I’m neither qualified nor awake enough to have a complex discussion about the underlying meanings here. I just recommend games that I like and that I think other people will like, and sometimes those recommendations have to come with a big “trust me it’s good” stamp, even for super small and simple games.
Also, there is a cat in the game.
I guess I could pad out the word count slightly by talking about a few other small puzzle games that have the same level of energy. On PC, I highly recommend anything by Rainbow Train Maciej Targoni, who makes a bunch of cute little chill puzzle-adjacent games, the standout for me being their first game Hook, which is simply about untangling hooks and needles in the right order, and on android… I was about to say the Unpuzzled series has the same vibe as these all do, but that game seems to have become lost to time. The state of mobile gaming is stunningly bad, unfortunately. If I had to pick one, probably Infinite Energy, but definitely play it under pihole or blockada, as between my last time playing this 2 or so years ago, and now, the monetization situation seems to have gotten much worse…
Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1629520 £12.99
Switch: https://www.nintendo.com/en-gb/Games/Nintendo-Switch-download-software/A-Little-to-the-Left-2292011.html £12.99
Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.SecretModeLimited.ALittletotheLeft&hl=en_GB Short demo with £9.99 full unlock IAP
Leave a Reply