A Little To The Left
The game’s ‘hint’ screen offers rather more than a gentle nudge in the right direction. You’re given a ascribbled-over pencil drawing of the solution to the puzzle, plus an eraser so that you can rub out the obstructive scrawl
The success of Unpacking was always likely to inspire a wave of games about tidying up. A Little To The Left, however, isn’t really interested in the lives of the characters to whom its items belong; rather, it simply presents a succession of stages in which you’re given a mess of objects and tasked with putting them in some semblance of order. A teetering pile of videogame cartridges soon becomes a neat stack; loose papers are arranged into concentric rectangles; an idle doodle spread across nine Post-Its is reassembled. Your goal is never made explicit – sometimes it’s a matter of pattern recognition, while at others it’s about discerning connections between objects – though within a few seconds of poking it’s usually fairly clear.