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A Little to the Left of my Expectations

In honor of Garfield’s Birthday, I finally went ahead and bought mischievous cat-featuring puzzle game A Little to the Left from the Nintendo Switch eShop, and that was my first mistake. If you take anything away from this review, let it be “Buy the PC version”. (Also I will have Pictures of Puzzles, so spoiler alert and all that.)

It’s Very Good!

The game usually does a good job of telegraphing what you’re supposed to do, in addition to introducing new mechanics. The puzzles strike a good balance of variety and familiar repetition, and the potential for alternate solutions for some of them is a nice touch. There’s also a lot of quirky humor spliced into puzzles, in addition to an occasional cat paw to get in your way. If you’re not a cat person, I can see how this would get very frustrating, but I feel anyone who watched the trailer is like me and just laughed off the cat’s chaotic inclinations. And generally speaking, the BGM is a soft little accompaniment as I plugged away at some of the slower solutions.

But Sometimes It’s Pretty Bad

Honestly, my experience with this game was a wild ride of highs and lows, peaks of perfection followed by valleys of vexation, et cetera. It’s weird to say the game is too good for its own good, but it really felt like a gut punch whenever I ran into Issues, because otherwise It Just Worked!

You wouldn’t know from looking at it, but this is one of the worst designed puzzles in the game

So what’s the problem here? Reviews tend to be pretty positive?

I’ll start with the controls. As far as I can tell, the vast majority, if not all, of the reviews published for this game played the PC version, with a mouse. And even then, you’ll find people complaining about “fiddlyness”. (More on that later.) The experience with an analog stick controller is…an experience. You’re basically just controlling a mouse cursor, and while there’s a “Quick Select” that locks the cursor on to nearby objects, I found using it very imprecise.

This control method becomes even more painful when having to select tiny items, like cotton swabs or sandwich crumbs – again, the Quick Select should be useful here, but if you have a bunch of items on the field, which you often do, it can just be trading one frustration for another.

Alright, back to the fiddlyness. Some of the puzzles involve sliding things on a fixed axis, others involve plopping things into fixed slots or containers. Sometimes these ‘slots’ aren’t always visible, but usually that’s not an issue. (Usually.) But a few involve very precise solutions, the sort of thing I would want a ruler for, that not only do you have to eyeball, but also execute. Again, these puzzles were a common complaint for PC reviewers, so you can imagine the added difficulty with the wonky analog stick controls.

Can you tell which of these was the accepted height-based solution?

To the Point of Unplayability

There’s an option to skip puzzles, and reader: I had to skip multiple puzzles. This wouldn’t sound notable, but as I mentioned before, the majority of the puzzles either make sense, or at least have a clear means of trial and error. (Also, like, I hate to say it but. I’m pretty good at puzzle games.)

This is entirely in part because a few puzzles are, to use the word I came across in several reviews, “obtuse”.

It is worth noting that A Little To The Left isn’t perfect with its gameplay, and in spite of it being a relatively short experience there are some puzzles that likely could have been removed.

Rob Gordon, Screenrant (emphasis mine)

I vote to remove this one based solely on the psychic damage it did to this former radio DJ

The review I found myself nodding along to the most came from Siliconera – I highly suspect the author was one of the few that tried to play through the entire game. Not that other reviewers didn’t – again, there is an option to skip puzzles. But only this review mentioned the specific pitfalls of the handful of badly designed puzzles.

It feels like a forced obtuseness. It’s generally a lot of fun and soothing, but that makes the times when it gets a little too rudimentary or out there stand out…it ranges from no-thought-required levels to ones that might initially seem unfathomable.

Jenni Lada, Siliconera

The game insists on not having any text outside of the menus, and this extends to the hints available for each puzzle. Sometimes this is fine, but other times the graphic provided just serves to confuse you further.

See the clasp that opens the glass box? Not the hinges, the clasp. Ok, now click on it with an analog stick cursor.

For me, however, there was a clear theme with some of the Bad Puzzles.

Did Anyone Test This for Accessibility?

While playing the game on my Twitch stream, I remembered a particular American football game, between the Buffalo Bills and the New York Jets. Despite being the commish for a fantasy football league that I’ve won 3 times, I’m actually not a big sports fan. I can barely remember particular Superbowls, let alone regular season games. But I remembered this one.

That year, Nike took over uniform designs, and one of their first decisions was to bring back a promotion known as “Color Rush”. All you need to know is it meant teams would be wearing monochromatic uniforms. So that game, in November 2015, the Jets donned all green, and the Bills donned all red.

Can you guess what happened?

That’s right, it wasn’t until after multiple sports reporters pointed out the game was unwatchable that someone upstairs realized they needed to consult an expert to avoid combinations that cause complications for colorblind viewers. (If you’re wondering, red/green colorblindness is the most common variety, occurring at a rate of about 8% in men.)

I’m not colorblind, not even a bit. I had a very thorough eye exam recently and aced all the color vision tests. And even I struggled with the puzzles where I had to sort by color due to the choice of palette.

Well, well, well.

And there’s a fair few puzzles that involve sorting by color, sometimes very subtly. Others rely on seeing very faint shadows, or distinguishing very low contrast silhouettes. I understand the want to maintain a certain aesthetic, but there were a few puzzles with very bright, highly contrasting colors as well.

Hope your display is up to snuff!

While I may not be colorblind, I do have astigmatic vision. It took me a bit to realize that some of the puzzles have a slight animation added to them, where the foreground objects have a slow little fuzzy outline effect. Again, I understand the artistic intent, but it was so subtle that I spent half the game thinking my toric lenses had just rotated out of position. (At least there weren’t any screen flashes.)

This puzzle had a visual cue that I swear is the exact same as an eye exam test

All of this, of course, is in addition to the handful of puzzles that require you to be almost pixel perfect in lining things up, something that resulted in me pausing to do wrist stretches throughout playing. There’s even more things I could mention (the too-soft “You did it!” chime, the missed opportunity to use haptic feedback, occasional discordant SFX, the glitch I ran into during the final puzzle sequence that forced me to restart), but I think you get the (neatly-straightened) picture.

Will I Get the DLC?

In response to player demand, there will be a Cupboards & Drawers DLC pack released on June 27th. It’s no surprise that these were the most popular puzzles:

A “drawer” type puzzle from the base game. Those nails were painful to pick up with the analog cursor.

Of course, making a game is hard, and there’s always things you can do better. But the frustrating thing is they did do better! Most of the time they did really well! So why did the small minority of puzzles that fell flat make it into the final product, a few bad fruit-sticker-covered apples to ruin my fun?

Oh well. At least I got to pet the cat.

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