One of the most incredible things about indie games is bringing new ideas to game genres that have fallen into the doldrums of ideas. Among these genres is “Puzzle”, where the main mechanic is to bring challenges of logic and quick thinking to the player, but which until a few years ago only brought different challenges without many new features outside of that.

A Little to the Left tries to give the puzzles a new look, all in a very casual way, but what does it look like in practice?

A Little to the Left comes with progressive challenges

In practice, A Little to the Left already prepares a relaxing environment for the player, here the objective is to understand the logic of the puzzles and solve them. There is no timer or anything pressuring the player to solve the challenge.

One of the game’s geniuses is the puzzles that can be solved in several ways, as each line of reasoning can vary from player to player. The game’s graphics are good and there is very good use of colors and I didn’t have any problems in the puzzles related to this. And of course, as stated on the cover of the game, in some puzzles there is the presence of a cat that will mess up your solutions or curiously point to a clue to the solution to the puzzle.

The game has more than 100 puzzles available to be solved, which also has daily challenges for those who want more challenges and all accompanied by a very calm and fun soundtrack.

Play alone or solve the puzzles with your viewers

A Little to the Left can be played alone, obviously, but one of the most interesting things can be solving the most difficult puzzles with the viewers if it is being broadcast on livestream. It’s very interesting to see the community thinking together to understand the logic and solve the most challenging puzzles and thus bring that feeling of reward.

The game doesn’t have a lot of text and the puzzles are all visual, so the lack of translations to many languages won’t be a big problem that will make players and spectators give up playing.

A Little to the Left

PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series, Nintendo Switch (2022)

Performance

Streamability

Audience Engagement

Replayability

Summary

A Little to the Left doesn’t bring many new features to the genre, but it is very clever in offering several ways to solve the puzzles. By having visual puzzles, it also greatly increases accessibility for players of other languages not supported by the game. For livestreams, the genre can be a challenge to engage the audience, but if the challenge is overcome, streamers will have excellent content to interact with the community.

4.3