One of my favourite things in games is when the world wraps around. It’s a simple kind of magic, and it’s been there since the bright, fizzing days of the arcades, and yet I never even come close to getting tired of it. You race all the way to the right of the screen, and then – wow! – you’re suddenly back at the very left. You run all the way to the top, and with one final push you find yourself back at the bottom.
Arranger: A Role-Puzzling Adventure is even more in love with this than I am. It’s wraparound screens: the video game. Arranger tells the story of Jemma, a misfit trying to escape from a culture of cheerful stagnation. She leaves her home town and moves across the wider world trying to put right what has gone wrong and, in doing so, find a place for herself. All great. But she does this by manipulating a grid system of movement which means that if she moves off the top of every column she will appear back at the bottom, and if she moves off the right of every row – well, you get the idea.
There’s more, of course. Each row or column Jemma is in moves as she does, which means that anything on the row or column moves along with her. This is a puzzle game, and this stuff forms the heart of the puzzles. Most objects just come along with Jemma, wrapping merrily around as she does. But some, lined in purple, are either locked in place, which means they don’t move at all, or will move but won’t wrap: they’ll snag on the edges and freeze the whole line.
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