A Little to the Left is the best puzzle game
Cleaning isn’t a task that is typically front and centre of your mind as something you enjoy doing. More likely it’s something which you have to do. So when you get asked to tidy up in a video game, the idea of doing it doesn’t initially sound like a good idea.
Why would you waste hours of your life cleaning and organising a virtual space when you can just continue to ignore your digital responsibilities as much as you ignore your real life ones?
That was my initial thought when I saw A Little to the Left, a game which features cleaning and organising at its heart. But, over the time I was playing it, I found it to be more than just an avoidance of the tasks I really needed to do. It’s something far more than what it seems and as far as cleaning goes, it was more interesting than I thought it would be.
What is A Little to the Left about?
A Little to the Left is a puzzle game made by Secret Mode where the aim is to organise a series of items until the space is clean and tidy. You twist, turn and stack items until the space you are working with is back in order again.
With no timers, you are free to play the game at your own pace until you solve the puzzle in front of you. In some cases, you will find there is more than one solution and you will know which levels have more than one way to solve them by the stars which appear at the end of the level showing you how many solutions there are.
Pretty game with simple gameplay
A Little to the Left is a stunning game from the moment you open it up. The opening menu features a hand drawn style with a cat swishing their tail back and forth. The levels maintain this same art style with more pastel colours being seen throughout the game.
Credit: Secret Mode
The music also adds to the serenity of the levels and is a stunning melody throughout. It almost feels like I’m stepping back into my childhood with the animation style and the sound of what appears to be an electronic harp played through a keyboard. There’s a softness to the sound which is intriguing and inviting, and that is the perfect sound for A Little to the Left.
The levels themselves are not too complicated. You see a load of items in disarray and a couple of seconds later, you have an answer to tidy them all up somehow. Sometimes the solutions come in the form of organising by shape or by colour, whilst other solutions may not seem as obvious until you play around a bit.
There’s not really any direction given in the levels themselves to direct you to organise the items in front of you and there’s no naming convention to help you learn where you are in the game. Across the 80 levels, there was a lot of variety in the household items you have to clean up. However, the solutions can get to a point where it feels like you have solved the puzzles before. There is a lot of crossover in the solutions, but there is a good amount of time between these levels so that it doesn’t feel boring quickly.
I wasn’t really left at a sticking point with A Little to the Left and I didn’t need to look up a guide for the most part. There are only a couple of levels which are a little trickier to understand but, by and large, the guide didn’t come out until I went back through the levels a second time to see if I could find the second or third solutions to the levels which add additional ways to solve them.
Controls can be a bit clunky
Where I was a little bit stuck was in the controls of the game. It’s not that they were bad by any means, but I did get confused on what would and wouldn’t be accepted.
There’s a snapping feature in the levels to help you place items correctly, whilst this is really helpful to make sure you aren’t putting things in the wrong places, it wasn’t the easiest thing in the world to use. More often than not, I would drag an item into the right space, see and feel the snap and when I dropped the item it wouldn’t snap to the spot it wanted me to place it. This happens quite a lot throughout the levels and was frustrating when you know exactly where something should go, but you just can’t place it down.
Credit: Secret Mode
This tends to happen more in the levels where precision is the solution to the level. For example, there is a level with a load of spoons which need to be laid out on the table. Because the space is just blank, having the snap to tell you where there is a valid placement is really helpful. But if the item isn’t landing in the right place, it can be really frustrating. What also doesn’t help with this is there is sometimes a sound effect which goes off to say something like this is in the right place, but it’s so quiet that you are likely to miss it and end up moving an item which was placed correctly.
What a cat-astrophe
What makes A Little to the Left slightly different from many other puzzle games is the addition of an antagonist to the player.
Every now and again the cat which appears in the logos and menu will pop out of no where and decide to just be its own cat-like self and knock all of your hard work back to the beginning either with a well placed paw or a misguided tail. This furry fiend is as cute as it is annoying. Fortunately, the frustration this cat causes is only limited to a couple of levels so you won’t hate the thought of the cat appearing, but more than once I did find myself screaming “Hey!” when our little friend decided to play with my perfectly organised household items.
Credit: Secret Mode
I would have liked to have seen the cat a little more often throughout the levels as its appearance is sold as one of the core gameplay mechanics in A Little to the Left, but you really don’t see the cat often enough for me to consider it an important part of the game though.
Accessibility in A Little to the Left
Accessibility in A Little to the Left is varied compared to other cosy games I’ve found. You have separate sliders for the music and SFX which you will probably want to adjust if you have sound sensitivity. I had to set my music volume to 30% as it was a little loud in places, but the sound effects were pretty quiet.
Credit: Secret Mode
There is a tutorial for where all of the buttons are should you need them, but there were no options to remap these on PC. Despite the lack of remap options, I found it nice to have a guide for the controls to make it clearer what you needed to click, but if you are on PC, you will mostly be using the mouse to point, drag and click.
What I did like seeing were options for cursor assist and to turn off wiggle effects. So, if you need to adjust your game using these, you can do so.
However, I think if I were playing A Little to the Left on Switch, I would have a really hard time with the game because a lot of the accessibility options are primarily designed for amending gameplay on PC so if you are planning on playing this game natively on Switch, you may need to factor this in.
Summary
A Little to the Left is an adorable cosy puzzle game which I really enjoyed for the time I played it. If you are looking for a simple tidying and organising style game, this one is the perfect game for you. I loved spending an afternoon playing A Little to the Left and it was a nice way to switch off and relax even with a mischievous cat deciding it wanted to make a mess after I had tidied up.
The gameplay is fun but can be a little repetitive at times, but by and large, I would count this as a comfort game which you could easily switch off too. There’s also the fun addition of 2 DLCs to extend the cleaning fun which I will have to check out at some point as there is definitely something in this game which makes me happy doing virtual organising compared to the real organising I have to do around my home!
