I don’t think I’ve seen a more captivating developer video than the original preview of Max Inferno’s puzzle game A Little to the Left. In this video, the game’s two developers showcase the game and the household items that inspired it. Of course, there are also cats, who play an important role in the game. The premise and trailer were so good that it was even more disappointing that it felt a little left out by the end of its short running time.
Little to the Left is designed around household items that form small puzzles. For those obsessed with symmetrical shapes and things that fit neatly in a box, it will feel right at home. There is no clear description or even a title to inform. Sometimes it’s a stack of books that you can move around until it’s neatly arranged, and sometimes you have to fit all sorts of cutlery in a drawer, figuring out which tray to put them in. It has produced some incredibly creative puzzles that all have roots in household items and are far more relevant than most puzzles in video games. For example, you can sort the books by size and shape, or by color. The game only rates by showing how many possible solutions are actually possible at the end of the puzzle. This makes going back and finding other solutions a lot more fun.
A big twist that A Little to the Left presents players is a cat who lives in a puzzle-solving house. While trying to solve certain puzzles, cats sometimes come in and try to play with the puzzle objects. Grab a puzzle piece and drag it out, or swipe your tail across the screen to ruin an attempted solution. This “hurdle” is both incredibly fascinating and frustrating. Seeing your efforts get knocked down by a curious cat can be a bit disappointing.
As the puzzle progresses, “slightly to the left” its solutions and questions become increasingly abstract. The space of household items changes as you move around planets and other high-concept materials. As fun as this can be, this is kind of where my interest in the game started to wane. It’s the cause. Before moving an object, you must select it using the cursor or buttons. Dragging and dropping objects can be surprisingly tedious, even with faster cursor speeds. In handheld mode, the use of a touch screen fixes some of these issues, but the controls associated with the gamepad just make the game less fun. The puzzles are very creative, but I relied too much on the hint system to figure out what I was supposed to do. Some difficulty spikes are unexpected and the puzzle order can feel a little unbalanced. It appeared frequently and formed a pretty big stumbling block until we decided to use a hint system.
Overall, I found A Little to the Left to be fun so far, but thought very little about the game after playing it. The puzzles are very clever and the way they seem to be integrated into real objects and locations sets A Little to the Left apart from many other puzzle games. It should be very accessible to people who don’t play games much, but by the end the game lost momentum and felt a bit too abstract on its own. I played the game in handheld mode with touchscreen controls because the controls felt like dragging when using .Little to the Left has a distinct and unique identity among other puzzle games. It has, and may not last all weekend, but it’s enough for those looking for a new type of cryptic challenge.
