A Little to the Left, from Canadian indie developer Max Inferno, is a game all about getting organized. Its quirky puzzles — which might have you straightening pictures on a wall, peeling stickers off fruit, or even sorting shadows to the right objects — are for anyone who enjoys the frisson of satisfaction that comes with turning order into chaos. While some of the game’s harder challenges can veer on tedious or inscrutable, by and large, they are cute, relaxing, and sometimes deviously clever.
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There are more than 75 puzzles to sort and regular daily challenges, so you’ll never tire of new things to tidy. But looking back on the best of the mess, here are ten of the game’s most creative or enjoyable puzzles.
Please note that some of these appear later in the game and could loosely be considered spoilers.
10 Putting Away Cat Toys
ALttL’s first chapter, Home Sweet Home, contains simpler tasks that are more activities than puzzles. They’re still fun, though, and they’ll teach you some basic things to watch for as you approach the game’s more complicated challenges later on.
One of these stages has you putting cat toys into a basket. The game’s delightful hand-drawn art style is on full display here, foreshadowing the cat's role in many future puzzles. You may even want to play with the squeaking, jingling toys yourself for a while.
9 Arranging Game Cartridges
This stage has you moving NES-like game cartridges until they’re aligned in a neat stack. Anyone with classic games on their shelves can relate to this process, wanting to display the labels nicely while maximizing shelf space.
Another early puzzle, there isn’t much to actually solve, but it certainly feels good to get the games lined up. As an added touch, there’s even a nifty 8-bit sound cue whenever two cartridges slide into place. If only it were this easy to sort your games in real life.
8 Spider Web
After several chapters of realistic scenarios, the game’s later puzzles start to embrace more whimsicality. In this stage, you’ll have to place the correctly colored flies in the right places on a spider’s web until the final image is properly symmetrical.
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As you catch each fly, take note of where on the web the other fly of the same color is, and place your fly in the right place on the opposite side. Once they’re all positioned, place a firefly in the middle, and then bon appetit.
7 Pasta Sorting
The second chapter is all about the kitchen, and here you’ll have to sort a variety of noodles. At this point, the game has conditioned you to want to arrange objects by size and shape, so this puzzle throws a clever curveball by having you sort them by the curviness of the pasta instead. Start with the thick straight noodle and then arrange them by how much they curl or twist.
There is a subtle humor to this puzzle, having you sort something based on what is visually appealing but hardly practical in real life. It’s a joke we wish the game would try more often, but we still appreciate being put into this fusilli situation.
6 Candle Lighting
There’s an intriguing magic to this stage about candles. You’re given a match that can light the candles, causing them to burn and get shorter, but light them again, and the candles grow back. The game won’t tell you this directly, and it’s a great example of how ALttL places breadcrumbs while still letting you discover the mystery of its puzzles on your own.
As you raise and lower each candle, you’ll want to start by making them all the same height. But this puzzle has more than one solution. What other arrangements might look good?
5 Constellations
While ALttL’s relatable, everyday scenarios — sorting batteries, fixing cracked dishes, organizing a medicine cabinet, etc. — are reliably satisfying, the game becomes delightfully unpredictable in its later stages. In this puzzle, you place stars in the sky to complete a series of constellations.
Grab a star and move it across the night until it fits into place. A shimmering trail will appear, linking it to other stars when you get close; you can also use the constellation itself as a guide to see where more stars are needed to complete the picture.
4 Crystals In A Drawer
We don’t know why this puzzle made such an impression, as it’s one of the most straightforward of the later stages and not particularly difficult. Maybe because it arrived after some vague situations based on arranging shells or leaves in symmetrical formations, but it just felt good to do a puzzle that felt like, well, a puzzle.
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Fitting these crystals together to make a perfect square offered the same kind of satisfaction that tangrams or other conventional shape-based puzzles provide. It shows that the developers don’t just know how to make household chores fun, but also how to design classic spatial challenges as well.
3 Petting The Cat
After some passing glimpses of the cat in past stages, you finally encounter them in one of the game’s last puzzles. You’ll quickly realize you can pet them, but they don’t always like it. The trick is to pet them with the right timing, as indicated by the colors in the background, essentially turning ALttL into a rhythm game for one stage.
This puzzle feels almost like it could be a WarioWare microgame, taking a quirky, mundane activity and briefly gamifying it. If you play on Switch, you’ll even feel the cat purring through the console in a terrific use of the HD rumble.
2 Mysterious Pictures
This memorable puzzle presents you with a series of framed pictures. Your first instinct will probably be to straighten them, but that seems too simple for a later stage, and when you try that…nothing. The trick, instead, is to watch the animations within the pictures, guiding a ball from one photo to a hole in another.
It’s a sneaky subversion of everything the game has taught you so far, relying more on observation and lateral thinking than sorting or spatial reasoning. The fanciful tone also really stands out after so many puzzles rooted in everyday realities.
1 The Final Meal
The game reaches dazzling flights of organizational fantasy when one of its final puzzles has you assembling the ultimate compartmentalized food tray. Layers and layers of perfectly stacked tiny plates. A bento box-style arrangement with containers the exact length of a carrot or half-eaten sandwich. Even the largest bowl is fitted precisely to three stalks of asparagus.
As the music grows tense and the plating gets increasingly, preposterously complex, it’s an utter celebration of the joy of getting organized. And there’s even a joke about not being able to match a lid for it at the end. (Oh well—I guess even in A Little to the Left’s tidiness utopia, some things never change.)
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