Tidy Mart Review
Clean up trashed shops in Tidy Mart, a weak clone of better games in the organization sim micro-genre.
Tidy Mart. Credit: ShiningStarsTeam
Tidy Mart is one of the many, many clones of smash hit Librarian: Tidy Up the Arcane Library to pop out of the woodwork since its release in April. As you’d expect, more of these clones are misses than hits. Tidy Mart is one of the misses.
Librarian kicked off a new simulator micro-genre about organization. Players enter a space such as the original’s library only to find it looks like it was hit by a tornado. Every book is on the floor, and it’s your job to find each volume in a set and shelve them in order in the correct section. After some prodding from my partner, I played the game. She was raving about it, and she was right. I was hooked and have gone on to play a couple of others, including one of my favorites, the absurd and addictive Cleaning Up the Puzzle Gallery.
The best of these games create a zen-like level of relaxing concentration. Tidy Mart generates stress instead by stripping away some of the structure that makes these games satisfying. Typically, you have to place objects on a specific set of shelves, grouped together next to like items. Tidy Mart has no labels on its shelves and doesn’t care where or how you shelve things as long as they fit. Put everything up, and you beat the level. The “tidy” in the title is, in fact, a lie. If you’ve still been trying to organize everything like I did, you’ll probably end up with extra free shelves. There’s no satisfaction in ending up with empty spaces. I can imagine getting even more frustrated if I ran out of room, as some Steam users have described in forum posts. The game doesn’t give you any guidance on this when you start, either.
Tidy Mart. Credit: ShiningStarsTeam
If the intent was to make organizing more of a puzzle, the least the game could do is make moving things around less tedious. You can hold two to six items at once depending on their size, so reorganizing essentially means moving one thing at a time. I should be able to select a whole group of objects and swap positions with one click. If this is actually about self-expression and creating a store layout however you like, moving everything one item at a time is even more frustrating. The one design choice I will praise is that you can throw things onto a shelf from across the room. It’s not just convenient; it’s genuinely fun to do.
It may have been my own fault, but at one point I had one item left to put up, and for the life of me I couldn’t find it. I spent way too long looking for it. This should never have been an issue, especially in shop levels that are relatively small.
Visually, the game is pleasant enough. It features cartoony environments and products mostly in pastel hues. When you place an object on a shelf, it has a pleasant squishing animation as it pops into place. My main complaint about the art is that the product labels have zero personality. They’re too plain and generic. Still, this is the game’s most minor offense.
Tidy Mart. Credit: ShiningStarsTeam
I’ve fallen in love with this silly but deeply satisfying genre of games. Unfortunately, Tidy Mart is the worst one I’ve played so far. For the same price, you can play the amazing Cleaning Up the Puzzle Gallery instead. For just one more dollar, you can play the original Librarian or the similarly fun Shelves and Sorcery. With this newly crowded genre already full of good options, you have no reason to waste your time on a clone executed this poorly.
Tidy Mart
Tidy Mart strips away the structure that makes organizing games satisfying, replacing relaxing concentration with tedious busywork. Play one of the games it clones instead.
Clean up trashed shops in Tidy Mart, a weak clone of better games in the organization sim micro-genre.