Welcome back to another Indie Game of the Week where this time we're taking a break in the ol' Casual Corner with the wholesome organizational puzzle game A Little to the Left. Now, if you were to ask me which game best served as a paean to one's OCD tendencies I'd probably point to Donkey Kong 64 and its vast pile of banana-flavored junk to collect—and I'm not comfortable with how many times a month I invoke that game in particular these days; it's getting worrisome—but it looks like there's a new contender for that throne. A Little to the Left is all about being faced with a group of objects and sorting them in the way that makes the most intuitive sense to the player. This might involve placing cutlery in a tray with slots perfectly sized for each knife, fork, spoon, and other tabletop accoutrement, or it might mean sorting a group of pencils by their height, color, or sharpness. Most puzzles have a single solution you need to glean, but others might have two or three: your own organizational senses could intuit one result right off the bat, but you'll need to adjust your thinking a little to glean the others.

The game presents these puzzles one after the other sequentially, with each group of about twenty or so having some sort of connecting domestic theme: kitchen items, living room objects, garden plants, etc. Generally, you can't move onto the next puzzle unless you figure out at least one of the solutions for the present, though there's always the option to skip (this option given the self-aware name of "let it be", suggesting the game knows as much as anyone how slightly insane this desire to keep things tidy and orderly might seem to those without that urge). The level of intuition the game operates on is usually spookily accurate—even if I didn't figure out the current solution immediately, it would make sense once I did—but you do get the occasional moon logic approach, or those where the alternative was basically the same as the first but with a slight tweak. If it can be a little frustrating to encounter these it's probably only because you've no doubt been gliding through a group of intuitively-clear puzzles only to suddenly and abrasively hit a logic roadblock. That the overall ratio, at least for me, was overwhelmingly towards the "oh yeah, of course" side is either a plus in the game's book in being able to presage so accurately its players' idiosyncratic thought patterns, or a minus in mine for being so easy to read.

While there is some inherent appeal of having a large collection of knick-knacks to sort out, as a game A Little to the Left is full of grating annoyances mostly of the QoL and UI variety. I think this is often the case with new developers that just need some more experience under their belt; I don't know how much game design background the two leads of this project had, who appeared in one of these State of Play/Nintendo Direct things as an affable Canadian couple who were maybe a little too obsessed with their cat (more on that in a moment), but navigating the game and its puzzles was often an irritation. For one, puzzles aren't numbered or named which makes tracking them for online hints aggravating. The achievements are completely busted too: there's one for playing its "Daily Tidy" mode a hundred times, and another for playing thirty consecutively, even though these Daily Tidy levels are taken directly from the game's progression and would therefore be puzzles you've already solved. Why would anyone keep coming back for three months to tackle the same puzzles they've already seen? There's also separate achievements for using the hint system (which only ever gives you the most obvious solution, making it near useless for fully completing those puzzles with multiple) and the skip level system several times each but also on top of that some "no hint"/"no skip" achievements that are instantly voided if you use either, and they put these lower down the achievement list than the "use hints"/"use skips" ones. Just sloppy, pointlessly antagonistic stuff from a game that's otherwise so chill and amiable.

I also thought the end was an incomprehensibly weird sequence that essentially deified the game's irksome feline villain as some sort of God of Chaos that kinda popped out of nowhere, and was so unrelated to anything else that I feel fine with spoiling it here. I couldn't tell if the game was ultimately telling us to fall in love with the cat or not, since it was invariably a progress-erasing nuisance in every instance it appeared, but for as fluffy as that little guy was I can't say I had too many positive feelings towards them by the end of the game. Then again, I suppose how else do you end a game like this but with a whimsical out-of-left-field cutscene? Even so, it felt like I understood even less than I thought about what the game was trying to tell me about my own obsessive tendencies and maybe letting go of same. Instead I was stacking Tupperware boxes to help a cat reach the moon so it could be reborn as some kind of immortal nocturnal terror ready to throw the entire world into disarray. Great? I guess that's the result I always wanted as the type of neat freak this game is ostensibly aimed at? ...I'm just overthinking all this, aren't I? Yeah, I'm seeing it now.

I don't want to come off as too negative about a game this cute and low-key rewarding because casual games rarely deserve the derision they tend to receive for not being "real games", especially if they're somewhat novel like this. A Little to the Left is frequently a delight and scratches an organizational itch very few other Indies ever acknowledge: the only example I can recall right now is Wilmot's Warehouse with regards to those rare few games that massage the particular part of the brain that needs to have anything "just so" in a manner that might only make sense to the beholder and be utterly mystifying to anyone else. The whole "well, this desk is not untidy if I know where everything is" paradigm. For attending to that slightly disquieting part of my jumbled mind, and giving me the comfort of knowing a game like this couldn't exist and sell if it wasn't a more universal impulse, I do appreciate what the game is doing here. I just wish the QoL stuff in the periphery was a little more polished, but then I suppose that's what sequels are for.

Rating: 3 out of 5.