We’re well past the point where Librarian: Tidy Up the Arcane Library! feels like an isolated success. Steam has quickly filled up with games built around essentially the same concept: walk into an impossibly messy place, figure out where thousands of objects belong, and slowly restore order one shelf at a time.
The latest thing I’m apparently responsible for organizing?
Rubber ducks.
Sort Them Ducks scatters more than 4,000 of them throughout a store and tasks you with putting every last one back where it belongs. That’s a ridiculous number of ducks, but the important part is that they aren’t just 4,000 variations of the same object.
There are superhero ducks, beach-themed ducks, food ducks, fantasy ducks, and seemingly every other variation someone could think of. Combined with a store that’s considerably more interesting to navigate than some of the flatter environments I’ve seen from this growing genre, it gives Sort Them Ducks enough personality to make another several hours of organizational busywork surprisingly enjoyable.
It doesn’t reinvent anything. It doesn’t really try to.
It just does this particular thing pretty well.
A Duck Shop With Actual Personality
The biggest thing working in Sort Them Ducks’ favor is immediately obvious: the ducks are fun.
That might sound like a painfully simple observation, but it matters in a game asking you to spend around five hours staring at thousands of objects and deciding where they belong.
Different areas of the shop are dedicated to different collections, and the ducks themselves tend to communicate their themes clearly enough that figuring out where something belongs doesn’t become a constant guessing game. If I picked up something obviously superhero-themed or dressed for the beach, I generally had a pretty good idea of where I needed to take it.
That’s a substantial improvement over a sorting game where identifying objects becomes more cumbersome than satisfying.
It also means filling a shelf actually has some visual payoff. You’re not just watching another row of nearly identical objects slowly become complete. Seeing all the themed ducks come together gives each section a little more character, and I regularly found myself actually looking at what I was sorting instead of treating everything like another piece of inventory.
The shop itself helps, too. Its layout gives you different areas to learn and routes to optimize as you start remembering where different collections belong.
None of this fundamentally changes the genre’s formula, but it makes that formula more enjoyable to interact with.
Sorting 4,000 Ducks Goes Surprisingly Quickly
Despite the enormous number of ducks involved, Sort Them Ducks doesn’t overstay its welcome nearly as much as I expected.
I finished the entire thing in roughly four and a half hours while making use of the game’s upgrade system.
There’s a familiar rhythm to it. Grab whatever you can carry, identify where everything belongs, drop it off, and repeat. As shelves fill and the giant piles scattered around the store start disappearing, navigating the environment becomes easier and the mess slowly turns into something that resembles an actual duck shop.
It’s the same satisfaction that makes these sorting games work in the first place.
There’s something inherently pleasant about looking back at an area that was previously complete chaos and seeing everything precisely where it’s supposed to be. Sort Them Ducks understands that simple payoff, and its colorful collections make the transformation particularly noticeable.
The sheer number of ducks also means there’s almost always something nearby that you can accomplish. Especially once you’ve learned the shop, I rarely felt like I was wandering around completely unsure of what to do next.
For a game based almost entirely around repetition, maintaining that momentum is important.
The Upgrades Eventually Sort the Fun Out of It
The upgrade system is where Sort Them Ducks runs into the same strange problem that seems to follow this entire genre.
Initially, upgrades feel great.
Sorting ducks earns money that can be invested into abilities that increase your carrying capacity, improve movement, help locate ducks, reveal destinations, and eventually automate parts of collecting them. Early on, these upgrades remove some of the tedious friction without removing the actual satisfaction of organizing the shop.
Then you keep upgrading.
By the later portions of the game, the systems designed to reward you for sorting ducks start making it increasingly unnecessary to actually engage with the process that made sorting them enjoyable.
It’s an odd progression problem.
The core gameplay loop is picking things up, figuring out where they belong, and transporting them there. Naturally, upgrades need to make you more efficient at doing those things. But once you’ve substantially increased carrying capacity and gained abilities that help locate and collect what you need, you’re gradually eliminating the decision-making and exploration that comprise most of the game.
Sort Them Ducks isn’t uniquely guilty of this. In fact, it’s becoming something of a staple for this style of organizational game.
But it still creates a weird situation where becoming more powerful means interacting less with the parts of the game I was actually enjoying.
There’s probably a better middle ground somewhere between making players manually haul thousands of objects around and eventually giving them tools that trivialize the process. Sort Them Ducks hasn’t quite found it.
That’s a Lot of Ducks for One Store
Having thousands of physical objects scattered around an environment also creates some predictable technical problems.
Early in my playthrough, I ran into noticeable performance issues when large numbers of ducks had accumulated in the same area. There were points where huge piles seemed to stack on top of themselves, and having that many objects packed together clearly wasn’t doing performance any favors.
The developer has already made performance-related changes, including adding LOD behavior to the ducks and smoothing movement over piles, so this is an area that has received some attention since launch.
Still, during my playthrough, those giant duck piles occasionally made the experience rougher than it needed to be.
Thankfully, it wasn’t something that consistently defined my time with the game. As I sorted more of the store and started clearing out those huge concentrations, things naturally became more manageable.
Sort Them Ducks Review Verdict
Sort Them Ducks doesn’t solve the larger problem facing this suddenly crowded little genre.
It still follows an extremely familiar structure. Its progression system eventually undermines some of the gameplay it’s supposed to enhance. And sorting several thousand objects is still sorting several thousand objects regardless of how adorable they are.
But it turns out adorable ducks help quite a bit.
The varied themes make identifying and organizing objects more intuitive, the shop itself is enjoyable to learn, and watching its shelves gradually fill with increasingly ridiculous collections gives the entire process more personality than simply moving thousands of interchangeable objects from one location to another.
My complete run took around four and a half hours, which felt about right. By the time the upgrades had begun trivializing more of the process, I was already approaching the end rather than staring down another several hours of the same loop.
If you’ve already grown tired of this style of organizational game, Sort Them Ducks isn’t going to change your mind. It’s another entry built around the same basic appeal.
But if you’re still looking for another giant mess to clean up, this is one of the more enjoyable piles I’ve had to sort through.
Sometimes, ducks really do make everything better.