Shelf Happens

All the AI slop and bugs ruin the game, also changing the resolution crashed my game once and the second time crashed my GPU

Gameplay stays very quiet. The store contains endless vinyl records, yet no background music exists. Using the gramophone only plays tunes for ten seconds before stopping entirely. Looking down caps at about 45 degree angle makes it hard to see held items, since objects remain too far away. Grabbing anything directly at floor level simply fails to work. This camera restriction causes major irritation. Which make skill usage somewhat useless from time to time. Sorting lacks basic genre hints. Guessing correct shelves for individual records becomes mandatory until unlock skill. Figuring out correct placements means testing individual shelves until it turns green. Red signifies incorrect placements. Missing colorblind support leaves affected players completely stranded. Relying on AI assets usually causes no issues, and the vinyl records themselves look great with high resolution visuals. However, surrounding objects appear blurred, unreadable, and awful. Fixing these assets with a graphics editor would take minimal effort, yet the mess remains untouched. The lack of care feels unacceptable. Even a screen by the record player meant to read NOW SPINNING instead displays NOW SPIINNNG. Correcting the typo would take seconds, showing that proper quality control checks never occurred before release. Store pages claim full support for multiple languages. However, changing language settings breaks the tutorial popup. Starting a new shift triggers a How to run the shift message written entirely in English, while only surrounding menus match the selected language. Finally, multiplayer descriptions promise fun times with friends, but lobbies restrict access to a single joining player. The playable room feels too tiny for larger groups anyway.

Overuse of AI, I like where they wanted to go with things, but definitely think some originality with the names would have been great, Skill tree, seems thrown together last minute, no real thought put into it, Items amount, its too much, also if you have no early game hint system, playing music for 5 seconds is a nice touch but to short again seems rushed, some things you think belong somewhere but find out they don't, If you can make the changes to make it less choppy even at low settings that would be great. At this point if finding and playing a game that is about sorting music albums, with no background music, mind you, sitting in silence confused AF on what to do, and AI slop, you thing then I suggest giving it a try but for me 1 Hours is already too much for this game.

i dont know why it gets too much hate because of AI. They have mentioned this in their steam page. For me enjoying is the main part of a game and i enjoyed playing my 30 minutes of it. I do not care if it is made by human or AI or alien. most of the fake names are very close to original names so you just need to guess a bit. I started with Pop genre and opened my skills (which i think needs to be improved).

Starting off the concept for this is obviously a winning one in my eyes, it's pretty good.... it's got music.... it's got parodies.... It just seems like it should be decent. Quite the opposite though. Now don't get me wrong, I haven't picked up all 4000 some odd albums but most of them are just really hard to figure out. It's obvious that AI, and not Weird Al, was used heavily for this. Again, I'm not against that but a lot of the titles and covers are just pure nonsense. I only shoved about 10 albums before I got completely bored with it because of mainly the lack of the background music, the skill tree seems pointless and really it's like they just forced this game out. I would say I have somewhat extensive music knowledge and I couldn't figure out who they were trying to send me to, what genre, what shelf and why couldn't they just label the shelves with the names instead of numbers it's so irritating. I also was thinking that maybe you get like a little audio snippet of these albums from the record player but it just plays about the same 10 different 20 second clips and they don't loop or anything it just stops after 20 seconds so you can't have background music going at all times. I did not try the Co-op but I can't imagine that is anything special. I don't normally leave negative reviews and I also totally still think I got what I paid for with this so I'm not really mad I just would love to see a few little improvements including controller support and even just view control where you can actually look up and down all the way because I kept running into problems where I couldn't look down enough. Bottom line, look elsewhere for a decent Record Store sorting game, while this was worth 5 bucks just to dabble, it really bites.

I was looking forward to this game, and grabbed it on the day of release, but with hindsight, this may have been a mistake. It has some issues, which I am sure will get fixed in coming updates: 1) You can't look down, or rather, you can manage about a 45-degree angle downwards. This means you can't clearly see what you are picking up, because it is too far away, and the stuff at your feet can't be looked at or picked up. This is immensely frustrating! 2) First record I picked up was by "Sum 40-won", which I expected to be a punk band, but there is no 'punk' shelf. After trying every shelf in the shop, I discovered it went on the "Phunk" shelf, which I assumed was an amusing way to spell Funk, but no, there is also a funk shelf! It is just Punk, spelled wrong! 3) AI Assets I have no problem with - the majority of these sorting type games use them, but in this game, the records are great, hi-res images. Everything else, however, is blurred, unreadable, and looks awful. Some touching up with a graphics editor is all that is required, but simple hasn't been done. This is just pure laziness by the dev! Even the screen by the record player, which should say "Now Spinning" is messed up reading "Now spiinnng" with two N's merged together - surely this is a 20-second fix, but *someone* never checked their work! Just asking for a little quality control check before release! 4) Once you have picked up a record, you cannot put it back down on the floor - it must be placed on a self, so if you have no idea which genre it belongs in, you are stuck trying every shelf until it turns green. (EDIT: OK, pressing F throws it on the floor, but the game doesn't tell you this - it took me 4 hours before the key got accidentally pressed!) 5) There is no genre hint - you simply have to guess which shelf each record belongs on. Some are obvious, but many aren't. (EDIT: So, this is a 'skill', which you acquire later, but again, would be nice to know early-on. I don't think the game tells you that you can press Tab for the skills page) 6) The gramophone is there to play music while you sort - each time you play it, you get a different song, but there is no way to choose what you want to listen to - you just have to cycle through the songs. 7) Multiplayer only allows 1 friend to join - I have 2 friends who own the game, and we can't all play together! Apart from these frustrations, the game plays well enough - when you place a record on a shelf, it shows red from a wrong shelf or green for the right one, so you know when you got it correct. If the above points were all fixed, then this would be a great addition to your library, but until then, my frustrations mean I cannot recommend it to anyone thinking of getting it - I don't think it truly deserves a negative review though, and hope it can change my mind later after updates.

The Anti-AI conspiracy theorist seem to have bought the game en masse, just to go bananas cos it's made with AI. Even though it says so on the page, so go figure. Anyways, just the AI generated food puns for the artist names, the pun titles and artwork for >4000 records is worth the low price of admission. This is arguably the best organizing, filing game because you are not meant to pick up random ♥♥♥♥ and put it on a stand, you are meant to understand WHAT you are picking up. So what makes the game original and the most interesting filing game becomes it's biggest hindrance. The musical culture of the few zoomers buying this game is rock bottom, the cool thing about shelf happens is figuring out which artist they are making fun of with the pun name, knowing which genre they belong to, it's not challenging if you have basic musical culture, but if you have no idea an artist even exists because you have no idea for instance what classical music is, cos you only know the latest trendy goofballs, then the game becomes unsurmountable alien trivia and the zoomer with the attention span of a caffeinated hamster loses focus and wanders off to leave a negative review. There are little details that should be corrected, some blurry background textures, insisting on using cassette, when the game is obviously about filing vinyl, the AI abused the gramma jokes, too many album titles are gramma jokes, there are some missed spellchecks but English is probably not the dev's first language, as you can tell from the very little interaction they've had on the forum. This is better than OG librarian and the rest of the generic filing games, because there is some actual thinking to be done and a lot of laughing when you do get the jokes. Sadly it will fail because "OMG its teh AI slopp" and the fact that most people have the musical culture of a capuchin monkey.

The update made the game so much better. The skill tree was kinda bad before, but now it actually feels useful. Finding the categories is way easier too, which makes the game a lot more fun to play. They even added a hard mode now for people who want more of a challenge lol.