A Little To The Left Is A Cozy Puzzle Game That Has Helped My Anxiety

I’m going to start out this review by saying that if you have a Nintendo Switch, do yourself a favour and play A Little To The Left. 

Yes, that is very high praise to give a game but I really have a hard time faulting this cozy little puzzle game, as you will soon find out.

Firstly, for those of you who don’t know, A Little To The Left was one of the games Nintendo shadow-dropped at their Indie World Showcase. It’s a puzzle game created by Canadian indie developer Max Inferno, where you can sort, stack and organise household items into arrangements. You also have to keep an eye out for a cheeky cat who wants to mess up your order.

There are over 75 levels of mess to tidy up with a random daily puzzle you can complete. And yes, before you ask, you can pet the cat.

When you’re playing A Little To The Left, there is a general sense of sweetness and wholesomeness that oozes out of every aspect of the game. From the music to the art style, everything just felt satisfying. When I found out that the game was based on the developers’ (a married couple) real-life home and cat, it all made sense. It truly felt like I had entered their cozy world and it welcomed me with a warm hug.

The puzzles in A Little To The Left range in various levels of difficulty. Some see you rearranging a kitchen drawer or trying to get the stickers off of fruit and others see you trying to correctly hang tools on a wall. My favourite type of puzzles in the game are the letter-stacking ones. They bring an unexplained level of calm to my brain.

Speaking of calm, my main source of praise for A Little To The Left was how much it eased my anxious mind.

For as long as I can remember of my short time on this Earth thus far, I’ve been an anxious person and always in a state of panic. In 2016, I was diagnosed with Generalised Anxiety Disorder when I was still in high school (yes, I am a child).

My anxiety is always with me, even when I think I am fine and in a state of calmness, I can still feel anxiety coursing through my veins and I struggle to stop the constant flood of negative thoughts, doubt and worry. In saying that, I’ve always managed to live with it. It’s something that is always with me, so it’s become part of my everyday life.

In the past few months, however, I have found my anxiety to become almost debilitating in a way I hadn’t experienced since I left high school. As a result, I’ve struggled at finding ways to ease the intense anxiety.

I’m not someone who finds many benefits from meditation or mindfulness practices. I know they can be super helpful for other people with anxiety but without stimulation, I find my anxious thoughts become more present, even if I’m actively trying to calm myself down.

I think that’s why I’ve always been drawn to video games because they always provided me stimulation in the form of escapism. When I was playing A Little To The Left, I wasn’t so much escaping, but I was finding myself to be preoccupied with the cleaning task at hand. Because of this, I could feel my body ease up and my mind wasn’t as loud as it usually is.

Listen, I’m not saying this puzzle game is the silver bullet to my anxiety or to anyone’s mental health struggles, but A Little To The Left at least made things feel calm, even if that was only for a few hours.

A feature that I greatly appreciate in the game is that you can decide to leave the puzzle as is if you are struggling with completing it.

I struggled with many puzzles that left me confused but the second I started feeling agitated or overwhelmed, I just moved on to the next puzzle and let bygones be bygones.

You can also use hints if you feel like you don’t want to give up. The completed puzzle is on a little piece of paper that is scribbled out with a pencil. You can use a rubber to erase the scribble and see the completed puzzle underneath. Depending on how much of the puzzle you want to see you can erase different areas.

The warm atmosphere created in A Little To The Left from the illustrations, the tasks, music and cat-loving energy is not easy to pull off and yet, Max Inferno have done a brilliant job at it. It’s not every day that a game helps with your real-life issues and it was a treat to play this one.

You can purchase A Little To The Left for $22.95 on the Nintendo eShop.