Too Many Toys!

On a scale from 0 to Arcane Library, this one's a conflicted 7. The dev seems very active in the forums and updates have been pushed out to address mechanical and bug concerns, which is nice. Pros: - Sprawling shop level instead of the often flat and simplistic designs these kind of sorting games tend to have. - No AI declared or that I could spot in the game. - Clean controllers, functional zoom, ease of picking up the item you're pointing at even if there's a lot of clutter. - No performance issues for me (frame drops, visual glitches). - Cute innovation with drones and robots that help you sort things -- drones will place the toy you're holding in the right shelf, robots will pick up toys and drop them close to their specific shelf. It's a nice kind of upgrade that I haven't seen before in this kinda game (usually it's in the "magically sort things automatically" range instead). - Cute toy designs, particularly with the plushies. The red and blue "bears" leave much to be desired, but other than that the designs are very cute, - Scratches the cozy sortslop (non derogaroty) itch just fine. - Fairly priced. Cons: - Color choices/aesthetic. I've seen this mentioned before and there was a tweak recently by the dev to address this, but for this being set in a toy shop, the shader and aesthetic choices make the place feel very dark and a little drab. I can't figure out if it's just the way the shadows generate, because standing right beneath a bright light brings out more color of the assets, for sure. But the pools of light are small and very focused, making for very dark unlit corners, in particular in the first floor. Mind you, this takes place at night, so it might not be a huge issue for some players, but it does feel like the shop ought to have a more whimsy and cozy air, specially to match the music. - Organization logic. This really started messing with me something fierce when I went into the electronics and board game sections. There are items where it makes sense to stack one per shelf and side-by-side: plushes, instruments, vehicles, dinosaurs. Trying to stack them would look crowded and silly. But even more silly is the concept of not stacking flat boardgame boxes, so you get three thin items per shelf, making the area look sparse and alien. Wooden cubes also don't stack, and their shelf design is strange to say the least. It makes for poor use of space, which means a lot more shelves for poorly-stacked items, which doesn't give you much satisfaction when looking at the complete shelf. It's easy to underestimate the cozy importance of satisfying organizational design, and in games where you sort things that are book-shaped you have it a bit easier: just design the spines so they'll look cool when the shelf is fulll. I feel like this is an aspect that the devs didn't consider enough when deciding how their items would be distributed on the store. - Item amounts. Goes hand-in-hand with the previous point. Because of the weird stacking choices on some of the larger items, you'll see less of them overall because otherwise you'd have 30 shelves just to hold a row of 3 boxes of boardgames. But the same consideration wasn't given to really small items. There's a seemingly endless amount of tiny candy pieces, because there's a large amount of boxes for them, boxes where the small items do stack. It feels like there could've been less of these small items, and a better design of the shelves and sorting that might allow for more of the larger items. - The game gives you the help of a train that runs on a track to help you move more toys than you can hold. This is a good idea, but putting toys ON the train, and then having them NOT fall off the train anytime it turns on the tracks and does a physics check, can be very challenging. This isn't a problem if you're just tossing a couple onto the bed of the train, like in the trailer, but given your max carry amount is 16, it would certainly be faster to max that out and carry them yourself than wait for the train to move around. - No crouch, no run. You do get an upgrade to your moving speed, though. All in all, my low-ish score leans heavily on design choices, but mechanically this game does fine at what it aims to be. It just leaves something to be desired in the cozy aesthetic side.