Cleaning Up The Puzzle Gallery Review (PC)

It seems that Librarian: Tidy Up the Arcane Library has forged its own pocket-sized platform in the cozy sphere. Although it hasn’t bottled lightning, it is fair to say that, judging by the sudden surge in like-minded cleaning-based video games, it has set something of a trend in the industry. Take Cleaning Up The Puzzle Gallery, for example. Without needing to comb over the fine details, you could easily spot the similarities between the two projects. It is so on the nose, in fact, that it begs the question: Is Cleaning Up The Puzzle Gallery a good idea, or is it merely a copycat job that is trying a little too hard to capitalize on another gig?

If not for its exclusion of arcane magic, you could quite easily chalk Cleaning Up The Puzzle Gallery up as something of a cheap, soulless iteration of a much, much better game. Conceptually, it’s the same thing: you enter a cluttered room that’s rife with leftover bits and pieces, and you spend several hours returning each item to its rightful place on the shelves. In this world, however, you don’t have a magical library full of mysterious manuscripts and enhanced novellas to archive, but a gallery that’s teeming with artwork and missing pieces of parchment. But of course, you don’t need to be a genius to connect these dots together, nor do you need to be Pablo Picasso to understand that even abstract concepts need a complete composition.

If you haven’t figured it out yet, Cleaning Up The Puzzle Gallery is essentially one giant jigsaw puzzle. The only difference between this puzzle and an actual jigsaw is that, well, there’s a lot more to deal with here. In this gallery, you don’t have the one painting to rebuild, but rather, an entire exhibit of artworks, all of which require their respective pieces of parchment. And yes, that is your one and only job. The gallery is a mess, and as the only deckhand on site, you simply need to fumble around in the haystack to help return each piece back to their original frame.

As there aren’t any magical infusions to dramatize the job, what you essentially have here is a long, long cleaning process that’s about as mundane and to the letter as a PowerWash Simulator contract. In the beginning, you have a simple task to complete: to bury your head in a studio that’s crammed to the brim with pieces of scrap paper, and to locate their rightful places in the gallery. In any case, this would be a satisfying job, as would it be soothing enough to keep your mind occupied for several hours, give or take. But in a gallery setting, it is as you would expect it to be: painfully long-winded, boring, and incredibly repetitive. Not that comes as much of a surprise, mind you.

Here’s the silver lining: as you find more of the scattered puzzle pieces, you can unlock certain sleeper agents in your brain. In other words, with enough paintings, you can tap into powers that stretch far beyond the average janitor’s capabilities. For example, you can use your newfound skills to locate the appropriate paintings, as well as decipher missing pieces that loom somewhere in the rubble. Again, like Librarian: Tidy Up the Arcane Library, only with Van Gogh artwork instead of glimmering books and wispy anthologies.

If you’re expecting a story here, then you might want to look elsewhere to scratch that itch. As a result of its monotonous nature, Cleaning Up The Puzzle Gallery doesn’t divulge much more than the absolute basics. Simply put, it puts you in the unkept shoes of a janitor who, after stumbling into work after an earthquake, decides to, well, do their job. It doesn’t dig much deeper than that, to be honest, nor does it make much of an effort to flesh out its campaign with anything particularly exciting. But then, that’s actually a fitting trait, given the context.

Despite the fact that Cleaning Up The Puzzle Gallery is all rather dull and predictable, the game does offer a lot of material. For example, alongside its two-thousand-piece puzzle and eighty-something paintings, it also features a fully customizable gallery—a place where you can import your own drawings and scatter their pieces. It might not be a revolutionary concept, though it does help to make the experience feel a little more personal.

To give credit where it’s due, Cleaning Up The Puzzle Gallery has done its homework. Given that the gallery itself isn’t padded with a plethora of AI-oriented artwork, but real paintings that attribute a wide host of prolific artists—Monet, Van Gogh, and Hokusai, to name but a few—it does feel like more of a nod to art and not a cheap imitation of it.

With all of the above said, I wouldn’t expect a flawless game here. That said, I do think that there’s an experience here that will resonate with the target demographic, i.e. the folks who happened to enjoy slaving over magical books in Librarian: Tidy Up the Arcane Library. Therefore, I’d suggest taking a moment to decide whether or not a game that traces along a lot of the same lines is worth taking a chance on. Personally, I could think of a dozen different ways to find that “cozy” fix. Though, that isn’t to say that you won’t enjoy hunkering over a haystack to assemble a Van Gogh painting. Swings and roundabouts, really.

Verdict

Cleaning Up The Puzzle Gallery samples the magical nectar of Librarian: Tidy Up the Arcane Library’s de-cluttering model in an effort to formulate its own painting-based concoction. To some extent, it works as a self-contained cleaning gig, as does it vie to accomplish almost all of the same tasks as its adversaries. That being said, it still feels like another imitation and not so much of a unique experience. But perhaps that isn’t a bad thing here. Sure enough, it’s a far cry from a masterpiece, but given that art is subjective, there’s a good chance that it might just appeal to the target demographic.