I don’t think I’ve seen a developer video as charming as the original preview for A Little to the Left, a puzzle game developed by Max Inferno. In the video the two developers of the game showcase their game and the household objects that inspired it. Of course,it also features their cat who has a prominent role in the game. The premise and trailer was absolutely excellent, which made it all the more disappointing that A Little to the Left left me feeling with very little by the end of its short runtime.

Little to the Left is designed around household objects that form little puzzles. For people that are obsessed with stuff like symmetrical shapes or fitting stuff neatly into boxes you will feel right at home. The puzzles don’t have a clear explanation or even a title to let you know what you need to do to find the solution. Sometimes it's a stack of books that you can move around until they are all neatly aligned, other times you have to fit all kinds of cutlery into a drawer by figuring out in which tray they are supposed to go. It makes for some incredibly creative puzzles that all have their roots in household objects, which makes them far more relatable than most puzzles in video games. I especially enjoyed that some puzzles can have multiple solutions. For example you can sort those books by their size and shape or you can arrange them by color. The game only rates you at the end of a puzzle by showing how many possible solutions there actually are, which makes going back and figuring out other solutions a lot of fun.

The big twist that A Little to the Left presents the player with is the cat that lives in the home where you are solving the puzzles. Sometimes when trying to solve certain puzzles the cat comes in and attempts to play with your puzzle objects. Whether it's grabbing a piece of the puzzle and dragging it away, or swiping its tail across the screen and messing up your attempted solution. This ‘hurdle’ is incredibly charming as well as frustrating. Seeing all your hard work being knocked over by a curious cat can be a little disheartening. Thankfully the effect is never too bothersome and random enough to not block every single puzzle.

As puzzles progress A Little to the Left becomes more and more abstract in its solutions and questions. The space of household objects changes to moving around planets and other high-concept materials. As much fun as this can be, this is kind of where my interest in the game started to wane. This also in part because the Nintendo Switch version of the game, especially in docked mode, controls rather awkwardly. You have to use a cursor or buttons to select objects before being able to move them around. It feels surprisingly cumbersome to drag and drop objects around, even when increasing the movement speed of the cursor. In handheld mode some of these problems are fixed due to the use of the touch screen, but any control that is tied to a gamepad just makes the game less fun to play. And while the puzzles are very creative, I was often relying a bit too much on the hint system to figure out what I was supposed to be doing. Some difficulty spikes are unexpected and the order of puzzles can feel a bit unbalanced. You’d think the harder puzzles would’ve been saved for later but they appear frequently early on in new chapters and formed some pretty hefty roadblocks until I decided to use the hint system.

Overall I found A Little to the Left to be enjoyable in the moment, but after playing I rarely have thought about the game since. The puzzles are very clever and the way they are seemingly integrated into real life objects and locations makes A Little to the Left stand out from many other puzzle games. It should be very accessible to people who do not play a lot of games, even though I felt that by the end that the game had run out of steam and felt a bit too abstract for its own good. While the Switch version performs fine enough, the controls did feel like a drag when using a gamepad, which caused me to play the game in handheld mode with touch screen controls. A Little to the Left has a clear and unique identity among other puzzle games and while it won’t last you an entire weekend there is enough here for those looking for a new type of puzzling challenge.