A Little to the Left’s Tidy Puzzles Are a Soothing Brain Balm
Every cat owner knows the feeling: you’re tidying your desk, everything is in order, and then suddenly in a floof of fur, the cat flounces in to wreck your neatness paradise.
In A Little to the Left, Annie Macmillan and Lukas Steinman have wonderfully encapsulated the elation of tidying a space to a level of aggressive order, contrasted with the occasional dose of cat chaos. It’s a delightful puzzle game encompassing numerous little neatness challenges, where you adjust picture frames, stack books, and sort colored pencils into perfect position to continue. Playing it feels like bathing your brain with a gentle, warm sponge.
Macmillan and Steinman’s organizational puzzle game has its roots in their relationship: their studio, Max Inferno, is named after a corner they used to meet at when they were first dating. The corner had a garage with a flame mural on it; hence the name. “It’s just a really sincere, sweet thing, but I just love how tough it sounds,” Macmillan says.
But before they thought of becoming game developers, they were art students. They met in school, where they signed up for a game jam together with the theme “out of control.” And A Little to the Left was born.
“We immediately thought of somebody who was coping with the feeling of being out of control by trying to have extreme control over minute details in their environment,” Macmillan says.
Steinman adds: “And it was something that we had noticed in our own behavior as well. It was relatively early on in the lockdown from the pandemic. And so we were stuck at home and we were dealing with our anxieties by reorganizing furniture and stuff and just being really aware of what was around us.”
The prototype had around ten puzzles, but the two had no lack of
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