At this point, I’m starting to feel like the universe has decided I personally need to clean up every disorganized business on Steam.
I’ve sorted thousands of wine bottles. I’ve put away thousands of rubber ducks. Now TV Archive: Tidy Up Together has dumped 3,180 VHS tapes all over the floor and informed me that somebody needs to get this place back in order.
Fine.
As someone who remembers when wandering through aisles of VHS tapes was an actual way to spend a Friday night, I’ll admit this particular version of the increasingly popular sorting-game formula immediately had some appeal. There is something inherently nostalgic about shelves lined with chunky tapes, washed-out colors, and cover art trying desperately to convince you that whatever is inside is worth taking home.
TV Archive captures at least some of that feeling.
Unfortunately, once I got past the nostalgia, I found an incredibly basic archive waiting underneath it.
Welcome Back to the Video Store
TV Archive: Tidy Up Together doesn’t complicate the formula.
Thousands of tapes have been scattered around the archive, divided between categories including action, horror, comedy, cartoons, documentaries, various sports, TV shows, and more. Pick them up, determine where they belong, place them back on the appropriate shelf, repeat until you’ve somehow restored order to the entire place.
It’s a gameplay loop we’ve seen repeatedly since Librarian: Tidy Up the Arcane Library! helped kick this particular trend into gear, and TV Archive doesn’t really attempt to reinvent it.
The VHS setting at least gives the process some immediate personality.
Everything has that deliberately dull, slightly washed-out look associated with the era, and walking past rows of tapes does a decent job of invoking an old rental store even though none of the films themselves are real.
The actual covers are considerably more inconsistent.
Some collections feature genuinely cool artwork that made me stop and look at what I was carrying. Others are considerably less interesting and quickly became little more than another rectangle I needed to put on a shelf.
Steam discloses that AI was used as a supporting tool in designing the fictional imagery featured on the videotapes. Regardless of how any individual cover was produced, the end result varies noticeably in quality. For a game in which you’re going to spend several hours staring at VHS boxes, stronger consistency across those designs could have gone a long way toward giving each collection its own identity.
The Archive Isn’t Much to Look At
The larger disappointment is the archive itself.
One of the things I enjoyed about Sort Them Ducks was learning an environment that had enough variety to make moving through it part of the experience. Different areas felt distinct, which gave me landmarks to remember and routes to optimize as I figured out where everything belonged.
TV Archive doesn’t really have that.
The store is essentially a large mirrored rectangle.
You have rows of shelving, tapes scattered everywhere, and not much else to break things up. The retro color palette helps establish the era, but the actual layout doesn’t do much with it.
That matters more than you might expect.
These sorting games inherently involve an enormous amount of traveling back and forth through the same environment. When that location has personality, learning it becomes part of the satisfaction. I start remembering where particular collections are, finding shortcuts between sections, and developing my own routine for clearing things out.
Here, I was mostly memorizing which part of the rectangle I needed to visit next.
It works. It’s just not particularly interesting.
Skills Once Again Make Sorting Less Important
Like several other games in this growing genre, TV Archive includes a skill system designed to gradually make the enormous workload more manageable.
Abilities can numerically organize the tapes you’re carrying, highlight the shelf you need, reveal matching tapes, automatically place tapes correctly, and eventually automatically collect matching tapes as well.
And once again, I find myself in the strange position of appreciating these abilities while questioning what they ultimately do to the game.
Early upgrades are welcome.
When you’re staring at more than 3,000 misplaced objects, anything that makes navigation or organization slightly more efficient feels like a worthwhile reward. You’re still sorting tapes; you’re simply getting better tools for doing it.
Eventually, though, the abilities become powerful enough that significant portions of the normal gameplay loop start disappearing.
This has become the recurring progression problem with these games. The primary activity is identifying an object, figuring out where it belongs, finding the appropriate location, and putting it away. The most powerful rewards inevitably automate identifying the object, finding the location, putting it away, or some combination of the three.
You essentially become better at the game by needing to play less of it.
That certainly made clearing the archive faster. Using skills, I finished my playthrough in roughly five hours, which felt like a reasonable length for what TV Archive offers.
It just didn’t leave much room for the mechanics to develop into anything beyond increasingly efficient tape disposal.
There is a No-Skill mode for anyone who wants the completely manual experience, along with a Sandbox mode that heads in the opposite direction and gives you access to everything immediately. I appreciate having those options, but neither changes my larger issue with how progression works during a standard playthrough.
Sometimes the Tapes Fight Back
I also encountered some physics weirdness along the way.
Tapes would occasionally clip through things or behave strangely when interacting with the environment, including moments where they would suddenly bounce in ways I absolutely wasn’t expecting.
None of this ruined my playthrough, but it adds another layer of roughness to a game built around repeatedly manipulating thousands of individual objects.
When virtually the entire experience revolves around picking something up and placing it somewhere else, those interactions need to feel dependable. For the most part they do, but the occasional tape apparently deciding it had somewhere better to be made the whole thing feel less polished than I’d like.
TV Archive also supports online co-op and PvP alongside its single-player mode.
I played entirely solo because I didn’t have anyone else with the game, so I’m not going to pretend I can meaningfully evaluate the multiplayer experience. I do like that it’s there, though.
Sorting several thousand VHS tapes certainly seems like the kind of monotonous job that could benefit from having someone else around to split up the work—or at least somebody to blame when you can’t find the tape you need.
I don’t think co-op would fundamentally change my opinion of the mechanics or environment, but having the option unquestionably gives TV Archive something that many of these otherwise solitary organization games don’t offer.
TV Archive: Tidy Up Together Review Verdict
There’s nothing particularly wrong with TV Archive: Tidy Up Together.
That’s also part of the problem.
It provides exactly the relaxing, repetitive satisfaction that has made this new wave of sorting games popular. Watching piles disappear and shelves gradually fill remains weirdly effective, and the VHS aesthetic gives the whole thing enough retro flavor to make those first few hours pleasant.
But compared to the better examples of this increasingly crowded genre, TV Archive feels remarkably basic.
The archive itself is little more than a mirrored rectangular room filled with shelving. The tape artwork ranges from genuinely fun to immediately forgettable. The familiar skill progression eventually starts circumventing the very sorting mechanics you’re there to enjoy, and occasional clipping and physics problems add some unnecessary rough edges.
I finished the archive in around five hours using skills, and by that point I felt like I’d gotten everything the game had to offer.
If the thought of restoring several thousand VHS tapes to their proper shelves already sounds relaxing, TV Archive will absolutely scratch that itch. The addition of co-op makes it easier to recommend to anyone looking to tackle the job alongside a friend, too.
Just don’t expect the trip back to the video store to be quite as memorable as you remember it.