// PC GAMER — GAMING
Steam Week in Review: Games about sorting 1000s of mundane objects onto shelves are the new craze sweeping PC gaming
All the interesting Steam facts for the week ending August 9.
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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.
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