Rise of Tidy-Up Genre

It would be oh so easy for me to be a grouch. To proclaim with bitter satisfaction yet another proof for the death of creativity. To see a veritable cornucopia of terrible copycats suckle onto a successful concept and try to milk it dry before the jig is up. But no, I’ll rather turn the frown upside down and look at it at what it is - a birth of a new genre.

It is a privilege to see something like that happen. To see that there are always going to be unchecked frontiers of human entertainment that game developers can dig into, finding that rare vein of precious ore of ideas and hammer out something great out of it. Of course like always within birth of a genre there is a bit of a wonkiness behind the widely adopted naming, but I see Tidy Up being used left and right and it feels spot on… So I will cling to it.

The name sells the core loop well. You get a room full of scattered items and the whole experience is about putting them in their proper places. It’s not exactly new, games like this existed for a long time, but never so… crystalized into an essence of itself. It’s a very pure experience, hyperfocused on that one thing - organizing. And of course the peer of this new genre, the big successful one that spawned the endless copies is Librarian: Tidy Up the Arcane Library.

Look at that beautiful mess. It just BEGS to be cleaned up and neatly organized.

And like with Cargo Cults of distant islanders tribes, it is often the case that the devs looking for a quick buck copy the formula without any understanding of what makes it work. They go to their agentic AI and ask it to generate a game about putting thousands of objects on shelves and then call it a day. This is why we are getting a new tidy up game it seems every day and yet only very few of them manages to catch some of the original glorious light in them.

Because what the devs making these games need to grasp is that putting things in proper places is not the fun part. This is the loop, yes, the thing we will be doing for hours, but the FUN behind putting stuff on shelves should be before placing the items. In a bit of, ah, cerebral massage. A tiny puzzle. A little conundrum. A bit that makes the neurons sizzle with a singular activation. We aren’t talking here about robust, mind-burning logical feats or mind-boggling riddles. But there must be SOME act of recollection. If everything is perfectly labelled, if I have no need to think, the act of cleaning up is hollow and lacking in entertainment - I am looking at you, CELLAR KEEPER. You might copy the idea of LIBRARIAN, but since each bottle just have its category directly written on it, the entire experience feels unexciting.

It tries so hard to catch the original spark, but misses the point with lack of any conundrums to solve.

This is what LIBRARIAN absolutely nailed. There is a teensy bit of intrigue behind the books. They very rarely directly inform you of their category. Sure, they can be obvious here and there, but nearly every category will have a few that might toss a tiny log under your slowly pacing legs. Language of Monsters… should it be a Monsterology book or Linguistics? Or how about that Mimicry book from Transmogrification that looks uncannily like a Tome of Alchemy? Or how each math book is easy to spot, once you figure out that despite great variety of colors, they all share same universal design - big, thick book with 3 bands on colors on the spine. In short, there is a dedicated design behind them, a thought out bit that aims to make you ponder, even if only for a short moment. They are never meant to be frustrating or overwhelming; merely made to make sure you need to keep your brain chugging along as you clean up.

Then you can maybe understand my loathing towards TV ARCHIVE: TIDY UP TOGETHER - a vile little copycat with no soul and no thought put behind it. With thousand of fully AI generated slop it has zero reasoning or cohesion between its VHS boxes. You can have 3 seasons of Spinach Sailor cartoon and they share nothing in common - no color, no design, not even damn character as it seems it was too much work for lazy dev to at least ensure they use same character for the series. With horrible lack of any coherent thought behind the designs, the game isn’t a relaxing, zen experience with tiny twinkles of brain teasing, but a boring, tedious grind with zero satisfaction and all the frustration. It is, in my opinion, a perfect example of how to not copy a game.

This is what grinds my gears. AI so sloppy, design so careless that I doubt a single artist of any kind did any work for this shite game to begin with.

There are other examples, of course. As I mentioned, it feels like a new Tidy Up game comes out every day right now. Most feel… passable, perfectly fine to scratch an addict itch for more of these kind of entertainment. Very few manage to reach the heights of the original, but there are some. SHELVE THE POTIONS, for example, is already a pretty nice twist on the newborn genre, where the flasks of potions are very rudimentary and would be extremely boring to put in correct places, if not for the fact that each set has a puzzle to solve behind it. Musical notes to figure out, potions to weigh using scales, labels that show their order under candles light… It’s a great idea and a superbly fun take! More of this, please.

As a burgeoning fan of this genre I felt compelled to use my little blog to write down my notions as they kept bothering me while I am religiously trying out new games in this field. I doubt it will reach many possible developers, but I would consider it a smashing success if even one will see this tirade and reconsider what makes a Tidy Up game a fun experience. Remember - putting stuff on shelves is the outcome, the final step. It is what comes before it that decided if the game is going to be an exciting few hours of tranquil delight… or a frustrating flop with no soul.