Developer: Max Inferno

Publisher: Secret Mode

Played on: PC

Release Date: November 8, 2022

Played with: Mouse

Paid: $16.13 (Multi-game bundle)

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“A place for everything, and everything in its place” is the unspoken motto of A Little to the Left.  It’s a game full of slots that have been perfectly sized for the right object to fit in, be it a battery or a button.  Colour-coordinated bookshelves and leaves with perfectly matching holes await in what is surely an organization nerd’s dream.  Every level requires you to place objects so they slot together in a satisfying way, whether it’s by carefully sorting them or creating symmetrical designs.  Yet it’s also a game about letting go of that desire for perfection and accepting a bit of chaos, in this case taking the form of a mischievous cat who loves to mess with your meticulous patterns.  It’s an interesting dichotomy, one which saw me cursing the wretched feline to high heaven at the outset, but then gradually warming up to it by the end.  It’s an odd puzzler, in that it causes reflection as much on the solution being undone as it does on the steps taken to complete it.  I think it’s for the best, though, as it kept me consistently engaged and enjoying my time with it from start to finish.

A Little to the Left is split up into five chapters, each of which has a loose theme, such as food and kitchenware or the outdoors.  Within each chapter is a number of puzzles requiring you to organize some set of objects in a particular way, often via pattern recognition.  Some simple examples include sorting books from tallest to shortest, or placing batteries in a tray, making sure the correct ones go in the proper slots.  Later chapters introduce more variance, including freeform levels where you just have to create a symmetrical pattern, as well as more esoteric ones like changing match colours to form a rainbow or manipulating a ball through multiple picture frames.  I enjoyed the variety and found that – while some puzzles had the same solution – I never found myself getting bored.  There are also some that get a bit more brain-burny, which was a pleasant surprise, though thankfully never to the point of compromising the game’s chill, laid-back vibe.

Adding an extra wrinkle to some stages is a star rating system, which – unlike other games in the genre – doesn’t score you based on time taken or moves made, but rather on how many different solutions you’ve found.  For instance, maybe the books you sorted from tallest to shortest could also be sorted by colour or thickness.  Completing a level and progressing in the game only requires you to find one solution (and there’s also a skip level function if you’re truly stumped), but I regularly found myself wanting to discover all the possibilities as soon as I finished and the “one of three stars” screen showed up.  Some of these alternate solutions get truly devious, and I found myself using the game’s hint system and looking up answers online in my quest to find all of them.

Speaking of the hint system, it’s where my main qualms with A Little to the Left lie.  First off, it only ever shows you a hint for one of the possible solutions, even if it’s one you already found.  As such, the in-game hints can frequently be rendered useless if it just so happens you’ve already uncovered the pattern they describe.  The other issue is that the hints don’t so much suggest a solution as they do show you one.  If the goal is to sort some books by height, the hint will simply show you a picture of just that.  The game attempts to offset this by scribbling over the picture and giving you an eraser to use, meaning that theoretically you could only reveal a small part of the image before going back to the puzzle.  However, I think that relies too heavily on the player to show restraint and also doesn’t feel particularly helpful in a game where recognizing patterns is frequently the solution.  In the book sorting example, if I carefully erased and only revealed one or two books, that wouldn’t necessarily be enough to let me figure things out on my own, while uncovering more quickly would make the solution painfully obvious.

In addition to the main “story” mode, there’s also “Daily Tidies”, each of which is an individual puzzle taking inspiration from the main game’s selection, with a new one available each day.  To get recognition for completing the puzzle, you have to find all the possible solutions, but if you’ve completed the base game, chances are you’ll have all the necessary skills to solve them.  There is definitely repetition in the puzzles, which isn’t surprising given the relative brevity of the main game.  That being said, I enjoyed returning to it each day to spend a few minutes solving a little organizational puzzle, so much so that I actually unlocked the achievement for completing one hundred of them.  Thank goodness they got rid of the one that forced you to do a Daily Tidy every day for a year, though.

A Little to the Left ended up being oddly absorbing; despite its basic premise and pleasant, yet unremarkable presentation, I found that time flew while I was playing.  Its bite-sized puzzles consistently kept me coming back for “just one more”, and then before I knew it, one more turned to ten more and so on until two hours had passed.  It’s a short game, with the main story only taking me four hours to complete, plus another hour or so to mop up all the missing stars.  But the fact that I still looked forward to doing Daily Tidies for months after speaks volumes, and it generally was a cozy change of pace from some of the more intense games I’ve been playing recently.  It’s not going to blow the doors down, but A Little to the Left is a lovely little puzzle game that should slot nicely into anyone’s collection.

8.5/10