This is my favorite puzzle game of the year, and you can play it via Netflix

This has been a particularly great year for puzzle games. Lorelei and the Laser Eyes and the recent remake of Riven offer up some mind-bending puzzles to solve, while games like Isles of Sea and Sky and Mars After Midnight find an innovative gameplay conceit and explore the concept to its fullest. The latter type of puzzle game I described tends to be more appealing to me, and a new game launching this week checked off all the right boxes for me. Arranger: A Role-Puzzling Adventure from developer Furniture & Mattress is coming to PC, PlayStation, and Switch on July 25, but you can play it on mobile at no extra charge if you’re a Netflix subscriber.

Arranger is a grid-based puzzle game where the world is made up of tiles, and players slide them around as they move. It’s one of those genius gameplay concepts that has existed in bits and pieces in other games, but has never been explored to its fullest like this before. Arranger does just that while telling a coming-of-age story that emotionally ties back into that gameplay mechanic. It’s my favorite puzzle game in a year that has already been outstanding for the genre, and a must-play for fans of the genre.

Putting the right pieces into place

Arranger creates the perfect setup for a game where players must arrange and move tiles. It’s a coming-of-age story about a girl named Jemma who was abandoned and left to grow up in a village when she was younger. Unlike the people around her, she can see and move the world, which is split up into floor tiles. That causes issues. Everyone in her hometown seems to want her to leave, and she does so after accidentally awakening some static, a mysterious, controlling substance, in a cave right outside of town. Throughout Arranger, Jemma explores the outside world and learns more about her origins and why this static has overtaken the world.

One of the first things players do is knock someone on a ladder over by clumsily moving a row of tiles. That perfectly captures feelings I had