A Little to the Left Review – Tidy Tranquility

Puzzle solving is a part of every day life, regardless of whether or not we are aware. Cleaning out junk drawers to organize them neatly, or organizing bookshelves into categories are simple mental exercises that challenge our logic and creativity. It’s an ordinary task that can be relegated to the background, but A Little To the Left offers many challenges that will help you organize and feel fulfilled.  

A Little to the Left’s puzzles present tasks as simple as arranging pencils by height or stacking spoons by size. These bite-sized exercises don’t always make me sweat, but I enjoy the tactile sensation of, say, clicking and dragging bits of crumbs away from a dining table to create a clean surface for setting plates. If you find pleasure in even the simplest forms of tidying, you’ll likely sink into this game right away, and this intangible x-factor makes the experience satisfying. 

Many puzzles can have more than one answer. For example, you can arrange books by height or thickness, and I liked finding two or three alternative solutions to a straightforward problem I wouldn’t normally consider. Then things become a little more difficult. What’s the best way to arrange spice shakers with different amounts and color patterns? What time should I wind a clock’s hands to have the shadows align a certain way? These more difficult conundrums add a lot of flavor to the game. I think most solutions are clever and, at best, leave me feeling like Marie Kondo or Einstein. Some problems can feel open-ended.

When, for example, arranging piles of disparate shells or leaves to form a hidden pattern, I’ll stare at the screen for long periods wondering what the heck I was supposed to do. Every puzzle has some logic, and tinkering eventually leads to a breakthrough, but sometimes I still didn’t grasp the problem even after solving it. That’s probably more of a “me” issue; I vibe best with less abstract puzzles, like finding the optimal way to hang tools on a nail board. Some objects need to be placed more precisely than others. While tilting picture frames on a wall, I fiddled with one for way too long before, to my annoyance, it randomly settled on a pixel-perfect angle I’d covered numerous times. 

The game’s inventive hint system, where you manually erase an obscuring doodle to reveal a puzzle’s correct configuration, is cute and can be helpful, but it has flaws. First, it was rare that I desired to show a piece of the puzzle. I therefore had to make sure I did not reveal too many pieces. Since hints are in black and white, color-based answers don’t translate as well. Ultimately, simply looking at the solution isn’t the same as understanding it, making me wish the game presented hints with more direct guidance. Thankfully, A Little to the Left doesn’t require you to finish a puzzle to move on (at least for most of it). Selecting “Let It Be” lets you skip segments without consequence if they prove too tough or simply aren’t as fun. It wants you to think. But not at the cost of its tranquil atmosphere. 

Daily Tidy gives me an excellent mental kickstart and A Little To the Left is a great way to get my day started. These once-a-day challenges offer a decent dose of brain food once you’ve devoured the 70-plus primary puzzles or a good warm-up for them. So far, most of the ones I’ve seen are variations of riddles I’ve encountered, so I hope more unique challenges pop up in the future.

An enjoyable soundtrack with playful visual effects and a soothing, if not too much, cheerful sound effect add charm to the package. While A Little To the Left might have made me a little confused, more often than not, the cleanly organized spaces that I created left me happy and satisfied.