SHELVE THE POTIONS!
When LIBRARIAN came out it became obvious, and very quickly so, that it managed to scratch a titanic itch that a lot of people never knew they felt! I was one of the throngs, an instantly made addict that needed his brain tingler in form of drooling for a second over a lovely tome and then having my two neurons bang together to sizzle and give me a solution - where to put said book. This delightful core loop with over 3000 items to shelf was what I believe as someone with no tangible experience, crack cocaine must feel. I could not put the game down, and then I 100% it, eschewing food, sleep and common hygiene until it was done. It was rough.
But then my rapid-onset addiction got a harsh and strangely needed reality check. Fast Out Copycats were all over Steam already. All the Tidy Up games you could eat! Organize this, organize that. Record store, TV Archive, God-dang bunch of nails! Toys, magical items, monastery books, wine bottles… anything really, if there was a thing that can contain thousands of objects, you can bet your jumblies that someone already cook or is cooking a game to organize them!
Now you could think that’s splendid for someone like me, who loves this ascent genre, but majority of the coming games are, well… I don’t like being negative here, this is a spot for me to celebrate games and have good fun with them! But it must be said that this cargo cult’ish games are mostly just bad - with a crucial lack of understanding what makes this genre FUN engaging. But you can read all my gripes about it here… Fortunately, there are also great follow ups that get it, that know what we want from such a game. Clearly made by an actual fan of the concept, not a hustler trying to score big on the genre early adoption popularity sweep.
SHELVE THE POTIONS! got it right. The premise? You are about to organize a witches shop full of potions, which a bunch of unruly cats scattered to the floor. Because a glass bottle and a cat always mean that, at some point in time, it will hit the floor - some things are just written into the fabric of reality. Anyway, your job is to pick those bottles up and put them on the shelves! Shocking, riveting, I know. And the task is criminally simple, as they are merely color cored. Yellow on yellow shelf, blue on blue, and so on…
Or is it! Here’s the twist that made me enjoy this game. It does not rely much on visual design. The bottles are simple; they don’t give many cues. There are a few shapes of them, different sizes… but what makes this Tidy Up title stand out are the puzzles!
First lots of bottles will display a variety of very esoteric icons that make no sense on their own. Runes, musical notes, colored squares, some strange stickers with flowers, and so on. But each forms a set that is governed by a small puzzle located somewhere within the confines of the shop. The fun part is finding out all the bits and pieces of the puzzles, assembling them, solving them and having them all properly figured out! There is a whole bunch of them to enjoy, enough variety so each color of potions doesn’t just have all of them on repeat - and while there is some serious overlap, there is enough fun here for assembling and cleaning out at least a few colors of potions before you solve everything out.
The puzzles are never too demanding, but their variety is refreshing, because they come at you from very different angles. Some are simply visual - organizing bottles by size, or by the fill of their content or the number of strange components floating inside them. Others follow a code, a proper setup that you need to decipher from places around the cozy magical shop. Then there is the reveal of the order bunch, where you need to take the bottles to a proper spot to let them show their numbers.
Figuring out all the puzzles is the sheer delight of the game and a very clever way of making the whole sorting process a fun one, indeed! It is exactly that light cerebral massage that I expect from this genre, executed very well and with a fresh twist to the formula.
However, and this is a big However, lurking there behind a corner with a shiv to end our jolly mood. Once you figure all the puzzles out the game runs out of steam hard and fast, like a sudden car crash. Once the thinky part is truly over, what is left is kindergarten task ahead of you - organizing colors. Sure, you might still need to engage tiny braincell to get the visual puzzles solved, but the big ones are all done and wrapped, so the game turns from his little joys of discovery into pure tedium. I have no good idea how this could’ve been avoided. Perhaps once half the shelves are done a big spell should shake the witches’ shop and redo the puzzles for potions not shelved yet? Making you check’em out again?
That is a big problem. I struggled with finishing up a game, because the motivation rapidly depletes. What didn’t help was the Spells scaling didn’t go high up enough. With no auto-sorting skill so prevalent in this fresh genre, once you get to the tedious part of it, it gets really stretched in time because your skills are too lackluster to really speed the process up. It would be great if we could keep pumping up levels into the skills or find new ones to make the process faster, once the, hah, magic is gone.
Despite this big issue of running out of steam a bit too early, I cannot be too miffed with this title. There are bunch of cats to pet - always a big bonus. The art style is nice, no AI was used to cook this puppy up. The tunes are gentle and the whole atmosphere just… feels properly cozy, just like the doctors ordered.
And so, if you’re an enjoyer of Tidy Up genre, this one is definitely a better one in the massive deluge of endless copy-cats. It has a proper fresh ideas behind it, a lovely execution and is a project made with obvious desire to make a GOOD game in the genre, not merely shamelessly copy the formula with no grasp of what makes it tingle the right way. So yeah, if you’re okay with the game showing its cards a bit too early, SHELVES THE POTION! should scratch your organizing itch well enough.
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