Difficulty: Easy-Medium
Overall Playtime: ~5 hours
100% Completion with DLC (100% star collection)

I came across a gameplay video of ‘A Little to the Left’ on social media & it ignited the OCD inside me to check the game out myself.

As someone who loves organizing and tidying things in an orderly manner, this game was heavenly and gave me such a fulfilling experience for the most part. The cosy art style and music makes the game so much more charming and relaxing, making it a very enjoyable game to play when you want to declutter your mind. The difficulty of the game was quite simple but some levels did have its challenges, especially the levels that had multiple solutions to them. It develops your ability to recognize different patterns and sequences & being able to tackle the puzzle from different perspectives.

The game did feel a bit awkward to play using the joy cons on a Nintendo Switch console so I had to resort to playing it with the touch screen. It did not ruin any aspect of the gameplay but it did sometimes make me feel like I was playing a mobile game (Not a bad thing, I just prefer using controllers to play my games).

Towards the midpoint of the game, I felt like the game/puzzles did not know which direction to go & felt quite uninspiring. This made the game lack any sort of personality and have an overall confusing idea on what it wants to be.

Overall a must play if you like any sort of organisation games. Personally, I do not find any replayability value as the puzzles get quite similar to each other and the patterns to solve them are usually the same.

Gameplay: 4/5
Narrative: N/A
Art Direction/Graphics: 3/5
Music: 3/5
Creativity: 3/5

Overall: 3.5/5

A well-made organization game, it made me spend a good amount of time and it's simple at the beginning, which allows understanding several concepts with just a few tries or even on the first try.

It has good sound effects, which made me relax and enjoy various interactions.

Something interesting to point out is how there are certain difficulty jumps between some levels, some are too easy, then in the next level, I spent more than twice the time just to find one of the answers, and that's not necessarily bad overall, but in some cases, I must admit it made me somewhat frustrated.

The DLC I played along with is also very interesting; it introduces more levels with a significant amount of additional items to be organized, which I found very good because having that extra density and complexity for post-base game gameplay was well done.

The most negative aspect is that in some cases, everything was in place but the game didn't recognize it perfectly, so I had to click on some objects again for them to go where they were supposed to be so the game could register it as correct. Apart from that, nothing too significant.

Overall, it's very enjoyable, and I liked the experience of thinking until finding the ways to organize everything.

I ended up rage quitting! Who'd have thought it! Some puzzles are headscratchers, some are random and some are just a grind. Chapter three in particular is horribly grindy. But that's ok, the problem is the controls. This was presumably designed for mouse so the Xbox build is horrible. Precision control is needed and the snapping isn't forgiving enough. Menu navigation is horrible, which is why I quit (I had nearly finished a level, a very grindy level, and went to the menu and accidentally clicked the reset option). It has potential to be a fun little puzzler but was marred by being horrible to control.

A Little to the Left has a very cute and relaxing aesthetic which is then betrayed by the rigid solutions required for each of the little puzzles. Some of the solutions are fun to puzzle out but, for the most part, I quickly found myself referencing a guide if I was spending more than a few minutes thinking it through. While I was hoping for a more free form path to organizing, seeing each level and the rare glimpses of the cat were enough to make me want to keep going. Unfortunately, that's not enough to make me want to continue progressing to finish up the remaining achievements or grab the DLC (which is a bit surprising because, going in, I had planned to finish the achievements and pick up the DLC lol.)

==At the time of writing this, I've finished the main story, but haven't finish all of the achievements, something I would like to go back and do.==

This is just a cute little puzzle game, delightfully designed, really really intriguing, and quite frankly an amazing concept, just assorting random objects to fit the "theme" of each prompt, like matching colours, patterns, sizes, shapes, really I enjoyed my time with this game, some puzzles stumped me, but I didn't press it any further, which brings me to another strong positive, is that none of these have to be done in order, there is no new mechanic introduced if you skip levels, there isn't anything you miss out on bar the level itself, you can just tackle the game in any order you want, an amazing puzzle game for certain.