Mall: Tidy Up Together

My first entry into the world of tidy up games was Supermarket Chaos, therefore the other tidy up games I play use this game as the benchmark. If you liked that game, you'll like this one. There's 12 different stores in the mall and it's your job to pick everything up and put it in its rightful place with the other 3,000+ items. Compared to the other tidy up games I've played, the difference here is definitely in the skill tree which has its positives and negatives. Firstly, you'll get the usual skills you'd expect to find - highlight the correct shelf, highlight items of the same one you're holding and of course auto-collect. As you upgrade the skills, the more powerful they become. However the skill tree is fixed, meaning that you can't simply go straight for auto collect. I guess this depends on what type of player you are. Arguably, this skill tends to break tidy up games by making them extremely trivial. For me, I preferred the gradual progression, becoming more powerful towards the end. The skills also cool down based on items placed rather than time. For example, instead of using a skill and waiting 60 seconds to use it again, the skill refreshes after every 15 items placed on the correct shelf. While I initially thought this would be a problem, the mechanics are actually quite helpful. The skill doesn't simply refresh after 15 items placed...every item you place adds +1 to each skill's counter, so you're actually spending directly from the counter. This means that if you don't use your skill for a while, you could rack up dozens or hundreds to your counter and can simply use the skill over and over consecutively until your counter runs down. Once I'd fully upgraded all skills, I was able to auto collect over and over and just destroyed the last few hundred items. The negative side of the skill tree is that it's in a forced order. You can't unlock any skills in the next column until you've done all the ones in the current one. As I mentioned, this gives a sense of progression rather than letting you upgrade a single skill to max. But the downside of this is that you have to spend skill points on skills you may have no interest in. There's only 12 stores so I didn't need to know the shelf highlighting skill (also see the handholding comment below) and the most egregious of all is having to spend skill points to be able to open the mall map in the menu. It's not hard to remember, there's clear signage and there's already more than one map on the walls and it's not a particularly large mall! The "difficulty" of the game has its ups and downs. There is a strong element of handholding here. You literally cannot place an item on the wrong shelf. The game won't let you place the item if it's in the wrong store, on the wrong shelf or if you already have that item on another shelf. I prefer the trial and error aspect and I wanted the freedom to place items on the wrong shelves so I could rearrange similar items but if I couldn't clear the whole shelf, I couldn't place them on an adjacent shelf. The harder aspects are the sneakiness of hiding items in planters which are extremely hard to find without an auto collect/highlight skill thanks to tiny hitboxes of sunglasses and tobacco products. I'm actually stuck on my second playthrough using no skills for my final achievement because there's a single cigarette packet hiding somewhere and I'm convinced it's in a planter. One piece of developer feedback I strongly urge to be corrected in the next update is to make signage for completed shelves more obvious. On my first playthrough I was missing a single item. I had no idea which one it was so my skills were useless. I had to go through every store and run up to every sign to check which one wasn't complete. It turned out to be a pair of sunglasses hiding in a planter. A different colour sign (e.g. gold) or a star/marker on the product's sign would have been extremely helpful. Even placing something on the store's sign when it's fully complete really helps to narrow down missing items. Overall, a very enjoyable game that scratched my itch for more tidy up games, albeit with its ups and downs. With a few quality of life upgrades, it would be utterly fantastic. I also thoroughly enjoyed the game/book/cigarette parodies!