Games about cleaning are the rage. The recent success of House Flipper, Power Wash Simulator and Unpacking demonstrates there’s a mainstream-sized appetite among PC gamers for making messy places neat and tidy.
But the micro-genre goes back way further than that. The 1982 arcade game Bubbles was about using a bubble to clean a filthy sink. Cosy foundational text Harvest Moon—like its descendant Stardew Valley—has you gradually transforming a forgotten ruin into a quaint and personalised space. Then there’s stuff like Chibi-Robo and Katamari Damacy.
Not all cleaning games are cosy or sim-oriented. Viscera Cleanup Detail is about cleaning blood ‘n’ guts and The Gunk is a 3D platformer about eliminating space gunk in order to, I’m not sure, probably save the world. And the recent wave of retail simulators have lots of cleaning and sorting.
But the cleaning or tidying game has evolved once again. Its newest manifestation may clock as either a living nightmare or the height of blissful stimulation, depending on your temperament.
To demonstrate, here’s the trailer for Toy Shop Tidy Up, which launched on August 7:
With all due respect to both the creators Shiftmoon and those enthusiastic about this new virtual-tidying frontier, this trailer gives me a panic attack. But it’s far from the only recent PC game focused entirely on sorting through a massive pile of objects all the better to place them on shelves.
Toy Shop Tidy Up has only been a very modest success so far, but the Steam user reviews so far offer some insight into the appeal of this microgenre.
“Great base game, but the one thing I wish it had, would be that the toys had their own spot to put them in, rather than just being able to place them anywhere in the area,” writes Sosich. Another user, Joker, agrees. “Great base game, but the one thing I wish it had, would be that the toys had their own spot to put them in, rather than just being able to place them anywhere in the area.”
For a more demanding experience, these users have a number of games to choose from, all released in 2026. Cellar Keeper, also released on August 7, plonks the player in a wine cellar and tasks them with returning exactly 2,448 wine bottles to their “proper” shelf. In other words, critics of Toy Shop Tidy Up will be pleased, because every bottle must be sorted by their variety and stacked exactly where it belongs.
“Watching disorder disappear is its own reward,” promises the store description.
Many user reviews of Cellar Keeper refer back to what is clearly considered the high watermark of this burgeoning orthodoxy: Released in April, Librarian: Tidy Up the Arcane Library! has players inhabit a cosy oaken library strewn with 3,072 books. These must all go back on shelves, and in the right order. Among the key features of Librarian are listed “visual satisfaction” and “strategic efficiency”.
Librarian is by far the most successful sorting game thus far: its peak all-time concurrent players figure is 29,469. Over 3,200 people are playing it as I write. It has over 17,000 “very positive” reviews.
Taking a more arch approach is Supermarket Chaos, which crash landed onto Steam on June 30. Thanks to an errant robot shelf-stacker with a sudden distaste for order, groceries have been left in a big messy pile on the floor. It is your job, of course, to put everything back where it belongs. This outing offers three maps, with the most challenging containing 9999 objects. Thankfully, online cooperative play is supported.
The most terrifying entry in this genre isn’t out yet, but it does make me thirst for whisky: Never Sort By Color, which dares release in November, takes the same tack as all the previously listed games except you’re sorting Lego in a room littered with 100,000 bricks. Thankfully you’ve got a grappling hook, a sieve tray and other tools to help.
And that’s not all! Arriving next week is TV Archive: Tidy Up Together, which is the inevitable retro videostore take on the genre. Last week’s Cleaning Up The Puzzle Gallery is about finding puzzle pieces in a whitewalled gallery space, all the better to re-apply them to art works. And also coming next week is Tidy Up Together. I think by now you get the idea.
And like the now-ubiquitous retail sims, sorting simulators are being turned out at a rapid pace to capitalise on the actual commercial success of Librarian. In August alone, and not including those listed above, all of these are listed as forthcoming: Sort Them Ducks, Shelve the Potions!, Shelves & Sorcery, Mall Tidy Up Together, Konbini Cleanup, Storehand, Old Market Restored, Tidy Mart, Game Shop Panic, Big Bad Pharma, Package Chaos and Megastore Tidy Up Together.
There are heaps more “scheduled” for September 2026 and “Q3” as well. Will all of these come out? I severely doubt it. But you’re going to start seeing a lot more of these on Steam in the coming months.
Top Steam games by revenue (July 28 – August 4)
Steam releases its top sellers charts on Wednesdays, so the chart below doesn’t account for the 1.0 launch of Fields of Mistria, the QuakeCon-themed Bethesda sale, or the recent surprise update and deep discount on Ghost Recon Wildlands.
|
Rank |
Game |
|---|---|
|
1 |
Counter-Strike 2 |
|
2 |
Dota 2 |
|
3 |
Mistfall Hunter |
|
4 |
Cyberpunk 2077 |
|
5 |
Halo: Campaign Evolved |
|
6 |
Palword |
|
7 |
Apex Legends |
|
8 |
Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 |
|
9 |
Baldur’s Gate 3 |
|
10 |
Zenless Zone Zero |
Mistfall Hunter is inevitably quite high on the list, though we are in a major release slump. The Soulslike extraction RPG only has around 4,700 “mixed” reviews right now, though its player count is consistently much higher than that would normally imply. Its current 24-hour peak concurrents in 37,123 (the record is 44,472).
Studio Bellring Games wrote on August 7 that over a million players had signed in to Mistfall Hunter. That includes both PS5 and Xbox users. It’s doing well but—and this still feels surprising to me—not as well as recent hits like Meccha Chameleon.
Three games on the list are there because of major sales: Cyberpunk 2077, Baldur’s Gate 3 and Spider-Man 2.
Last week’s Steam deep cuts
ReStory | August 7
Here’s a neat little puzzler about running an electronics repair shop. Set in the 2000s, a lot of the gear you’ll be fixing is based on tech from that era, so expect a lot of quaint handheld gaming consoles, some spectacularly of-their-time cellphones, and even some gear considered retro back then (like officially licensed Ataris!).
Grain Rot | August 8
Here’s another friendsloppy cooperative horror in the vein of REPO, though Grain Rot looks like an unusually polished take on the gere. As weird-looking robots you’ll plunge in the procedurally-generated dungeons beneath a ruined abode, all the better to retrieve objects to decorate the home above. It’s cheap, it’s not in early access, and you can dropkick enemies.
The Skin Stapler | August 7
More rank and mouldy PS1-skewed horror, this time with a flagrantly gory take on the neon-daubed ’80s. Set in Carrion City, a detective and his sidekick hunt the titular The Skin Stapler who, as the name suggests, is a real piece of work. Expect something akin to the Puppet Combo fare.
Connie and the Essence of Chaos | August 6
My first thought seeing Connie was: has someone finally made a Zool clone? This determinedly old school 2D platformer has the same fixation on foods beloved by kids and teenagers, but in practice it wends closer to the original Rayman. The main character is even limbless. Def one to wishlist for the next time you’re craving Apogee-style run ‘n’ jump.
Steam review of the week
“Worst game I have ever played. I got this game in a random Steam key bundle for about €5 along with five other games because it was on sale, and I still regret buying it. I think I would enjoy being electrocuted more.”
Qube37, on the joys of electrocution compared to the drudgery that is Cyberpunk SFX.