We hope that this list is in the right order.
The Canadian independent developer Max Inferno’s game A Little to the Left is all about getting things in order. Its strange puzzles, in which you might have to line up pictures on a wall, peel stickers off of fruit, or match shadows to the right objects, are for people who like the thrill of turning order into chaos. Even though some of the game’s harder challenges can be boring or hard to understand, most of them are cute, fun, and sometimes sneakily clever.
You’ll never run out of things to organize thanks to the game’s regular daily challenges and its library of over seventy-five puzzles. Here are ten of the most creative or fun puzzles in the game.
Putting Away Cat Toys
Home Sweet Home, the first chapter of ALttL, has easier tasks that are more like games than puzzles. Still, they’re fun, and they’ll teach you some basic things to look out for as you move on to the game’s harder challenges.
In one of these steps, you have to put cat toys in a basket. The cute hand-drawn art style of the game is on full display here, and the cat’s role in many of the puzzles to come is hinted at. You might even want to play for a while with the toys that squeak and jingle.
Arranging Game Cartridges
In this stage, you have to move game cartridges that look like NES games until they are all lined up in a neat stack. Anyone who has classic games on their shelves and wants to show off the labels nicely while using as much shelf space as possible will understand this process.
There isn’t much to solve in this early puzzle, but it feels good to get the games in order. As a nice extra, whenever two cartridges slide into place, a cool 8-bit sound plays. If only sorting your games was this easy in real life.
Spider Web
After a few chapters of realistic situations, the puzzles in the later parts of the game become more silly. In this step, you have to put the right-colored flies in the right spots on a spider’s web so that the final image is symmetrical.
As you catch each fly, remember where the other fly of the same color is on the web, and then put your fly in the right place on the other side. Once they are all in place, put a firefly in the middle, and you’re done!
Pasta Sorting
In the second chapter, you’ll be in the kitchen and have to sort different kinds of noodles. At this point in the game, you’re used to wanting to put things in order by size and shape. This puzzle throws a clever curveball by instead having you put things in order by how curvy the pasta is. Start with the thick straight noodles and then put them in order by how much they curl or twist.
This puzzle is funny in a subtle way because you have to sort things based on what looks good but isn’t very useful. We wish the game would try this joke more often, but we’re still glad to be in this fusilli situation.
Candle Lighting
Candles add a mysterious magic to this stage. You are given a match that you can use to light the candles, which makes them burn and shrink, but if you light them again, they will grow back. This is a great example of how ALttL leaves hints but still lets you solve puzzles on your own.
Start by making all the candles the same height as you raise and lower them. But there are more than one way to solve this puzzle. What other ways could things look good?
Constellations
ALttL’s familiar, everyday situations, like sorting batteries, fixing broken dishes, organizing a medicine cabinet, etc., are always fun, but as the game goes on, it gets more and more unpredictable, which is a lot of fun. In this puzzle, you put stars in the sky to make a series of constellations.
Move a star around the night until it fits where it should. When you get close, a shimmering trail will appear that connects it to other stars. You can also look at the constellation itself to see where more stars are needed to finish the picture.
Crystals In A Drawer
We don’t know why this puzzle was so memorable, since it is one of the easiest puzzles in the later stages and not very hard. It felt good to do a puzzle that felt like a puzzle. Maybe it was because it came after some vague situations where you had to put shells or leaves in symmetrical patterns.
Putting these crystals together to make a perfect square was just as satisfying as putting together tangrams or other shape-based puzzles. It shows that the people who made the game don’t just know how to make housework fun. They also know how to make classic spatial puzzles.
Petting The Cat
After seeing the cat briefly in earlier stages, you finally meet it in one of the game’s final puzzles. You’ll find out quickly that you can pet them, but they don’t always like it. The key is to pet them at the right time, which is shown by the colors in the background. This makes Octordle, for one stage, a rhythm game.
This puzzle almost seems like it could be a WarioWare microgame, which takes a strange, everyday task and turns it into a short game. If you play on Switch, you can even feel the cat purring through the console, which is a great way to use the HD rumble.
Mysterious Pictures
This puzzle is easy to remember because it has a series of pictures in frames. Your first thought will probably be to try to straighten them, but that seems too easy for now and doesn’t work when you try it. The trick is to watch the animations in the pictures and move a ball from one picture to a hole in another picture.
It sneakily goes against everything you’ve learned in the game so far, relying more on observation and creative thinking than on sorting or spatial reasoning. After so many puzzles that are based on everyday life, the fantasy tone also stands out.
The Final Meal
In one of the game’s last puzzles, you have to put together the ultimate compartmented food tray. This is where the game’s organization fantasies really take off. Stacks and stacks of tiny plates that fit together perfectly. A set up that looks like a bento box, with containers that are the same length as a carrot or a half-eaten sandwich. Even the largest bowl is just the right size for three asparagus stalks.
As the music gets more tense and the plating gets more and more ridiculously complicated, it’s a celebration of how much fun it is to get things in order. And at the end, there’s a joke about not being able to find a lid for it. (Oh well, I guess some things never change, even in A Little to the Left‘s clean utopia.)
