One game I originally discovered from Day of the Devs last summer that I was eager to play was A Little To The Left.
It was a game that spoke to me immediately with its gameplay of tidying things in different ways that just fed my ASD brain with so much delight.
What’s also very wholesome about the game is it is made by a duo in Nova Scotia who took inspiration of objects from their own home and their cat to make the game.
Many of the puzzles involve sorting or stacking items in a specific way and sometimes it creates a pattern or leaves everything symmetrical.
For instance, one puzzle involved aligning bread tags so the little teeth on them interlocked and another one had me arrange these books a certain way so the colours on them went from cool to warm. Thankfully, the game has a hint system if you get stuck because the solution wasn’t always simple, plus many of the puzzles also had multiple solutions.
Many of them were also heartwarming too but also had challenges like a cat that appears and tries to mess up my work like pulling on the place mat, or continuing to leave dirty paw prints every time to wipe them up! But the cat is so adorable I still love him, plus he does play a role in a puzzle toward the end of the game’s campaign that you have to solve.
Aside from that, there are also daily tidies you can complete and earn badges based on how many tidies you have completed. This is where I started to notice the flaws in this game. Many of the daily tidies I received I would sometimes do the same one over the course of a week or two, like the clock puzzle, the one with the spider web, or the puzzle with the snowflake involving some kind of kaleidoscope. The snowflake puzzle took a little longer for me to complete in the campaign or part of a daily tidy so I always hoped that I would not get it on a day when I was working.
This is totally stereotypical for me to say as a woman, but I enjoyed the puzzles in the second chapter the most that were all kitchen-based items, probably because I know how my mom likes to organize things and if it were my own kitchen, I would have done it the same way.
My least favourite puzzles in the game were only two which involved arranging boxes so that either the arrows or the tape aligned on them and in some cases, depending on which box you were moving, they would not always stack if one was larger than the other. Then there were two different varieties of this other puzzle, either a potted plant or hanging vines where I had to trim some of the leaves off make it symmetrical, but if I clipped the wrong leaves, all of the ones I clipped previously would grow back, forcing me to start over.
Eventually, I did figure out how to do it correctly so that made me dislike it less after that!
The devs are very active in the Steam forums to interact with players on what can be done to improve the game like they made the daily tidy numbers less from the max going from 365 to 100 and then they decided to remove the special event achievements as they recognized not everyone is able to do those tidies affiliated with it.
I did complete those by the way and they were super cute, like putting a gingerbread man back together. There are still some things that need fixing like one achievement to complete 30 consecutive daily tidies doesn’t appear to be adding up so I hope that is resolved soon. But, other than a few bugs, the game is lovely and wholesome and if you enjoy games like these, then I recommend but wait for a sale because it does seem quite overpriced right now for a game that’s really basic.
👽Emily
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