It's interesting when trends happen in the gaming industry, and the most recent one is tidy-up games. Sortslop, if you will. It started with Librarian: Tidy Up the Arcane Library, and now there are similar games across mobile, Roblox, and PC with any and every type of item available for you to sort through and put on the right shelves.
I like keeping a clean house, but I wouldn't want to sort all my groceries and food items if they fell onto the kitchen floor. But put that in a game, and I'll apparently spend ten hours doing exactly that. At least ten, in fact. I've logged 45 hours in Librarian, 55 hours in Supermarket Chaos, somehow, and about ten hours in three other games. I can't stop.
Librarian: Tidy Up the Arcane Library was released at the end of April, and in the few months since, there's been a huge wave of similar games coming out, with plenty more on the way. My wishlist is absolutely stuffed with them. There's one about a cigar shop, a record shop, a dinosaur bones museum, a wand shop, LEGO bricks, a garage, video games, parcels - there are so many, and I'm nowhere near bored of them all.
So, working off my own experience, here's a tier list of what I've played.
Hol's sortslop tier list (so far)
| The best | Librarian: Tidy Up the Arcane Library, Supermarket Chaos |
| Good | Shelves and Sorcery, Cleaning Up the Puzzle Gallery, Game Shop Panic, Sort Them Ducks |
| Average | Konbini Cleanup, TV Archive, Mall: Tidy Up Together, Big Bad Pharma, Cellar Keeper |
| Not worth your valuable time | Re:Store the Record Store, Toy Shop Tidy Up |
I've also got honorable mentions for previous organization-based games that aren't quite so intense: Unpacking, Thrifty Business, Hozy, Organized Inside, Memento, and Whisper of the House are all very much worth your time, and some are available on Nintendo Switch.
As for other platforms, some are popping up on mobile. They're mostly copies of Librarian, but I'm sure other themes will appear soon. It's a similar story on Roblox. There are a few Librarian clones, but I've also seen a Cleaning Up the Puzzle Gallery clone, a supermarket-based game, and one Gallery
On the Steam Deck, you can take Librarian on the go as it's verified, but there are some options listed as 'playable', including Big Bad Pharma, Supermarket Chaos, Shelves and Sorcery, among others.
The question, in this sudden trend of games, is what makes a tidy-up game good? For me, it's whether it performs well, looks nice, and has good skills you can unlock, like the ability to hold more than ten items, especially on the bigger levels with 5-10k items to sort through.
Intuitive controls are also a plus. I prefer the ones that use mouse buttons to pick up and put down items, rather than Q/E/A/D keys. It's also a lot nicer when the games don't use the same layouts or the same assets. For instance, Konbini Cleanup's third level has the exact same layout as a Supermarket Chaos level, and a lot of the products are the same design.
I'm an anxious being, even when nothing's happening, so sitting down and just going into a flow state of sorting things into a pile, then putting them on a shelf, and then finding a new load of items to categorize and then take to their home… It's simply excellent, easy entertainment. I don't even use the power-ups beyond being able to hold more things to speed it up; I just want to pick it up, put it down, and repeat five thousand times.
So, with more games coming out, I'm going to be even more content. I do hope some come to the Nintendo Switch, but releasing games takes a bit longer on the handheld. What's your stance on sortslop tidying organization games? Are you a fan of shelving 3,000 videotapes, or 30 different kinds of chips, or not?