Sort Them Ducks Review (PC)

Being a stone’s throw from a complete tourist trap, I know all too well that, if you do cross the threshold between the London Eye and Big Ben, then you’ll find one of the most pointless, albeit unnecessarily popular stores in the city: the rubber duck store. Against the odds, such shops do exist in the most desirable parts of the country. Personally, I’ve never once bought into the hype surrounding bath toys and rubber sunglasses — but I know that there’s a huge market for them. It’s either rubber ducks, or it’s wizard gear—yet another niche that London and most of Britain is known for. Thanks, Potter.

Experiencing Sort Them Ducks is a bit like walking into London’s duck emporium after a riot has broken out and left the high street in tatters. The store looks as you would expect it to, but there’s a whole lot of mess that just makes it seem a little less inviting and more likely to attract the wrong crowd. The ducks are all over the place, and the tourists couldn’t care less about the chaos. But you, on the other hand — you don’t get a say in the matter. The ducks need sorting out, and you are the only person who can get the job done, apparently. And, if you are beginning to wonder whether or not Sort Them Ducks is like Librarian — it is. Go figure — another sort-‘em-up game.

As it turns out, ducks aren’t bound by colors, shapes and sizes. If anything, they’re known for having a thousand different patterns, combinations and styles, none of which make sense. In Sort Them Ducks, you don’t just have shelves of blue, green, and pink bath toys, but 4,000 rubber ducks, each of which have their own “special” characteristics. Take any time period or culture you want, and the chances are that there’ll be at least one duck that aligns with it somewhere in this particular store. Cowboys, knights, and Roman gladiators, for example. Sure enough, the game makes a habit of feeding you thousands of ducks — and it doesn’t leave anything out, either. Why? Well because rubber ducks are the world’s spirit animal, apparently. Don’t ask.

Having only recently rearranged the final shelf in Tidy Up Together, it felt as if my fingers were on autopilot for Sort Them Ducks. Without even needing to look at the floor, the shelves, or the surrounding walls, I knew that the job would be a painfully grueling one, and one that would likely take me a lot longer than the average organizing sim à la Tidy Up the Arcane Library or, for good measure, Cleaning Up The Puzzle Gallery. In any other case, I wouldn’t have minded bundling a hundred products into the same cache for hours. But, I knew that there wouldn’t be much for me in a duck-studded store. It wasn’t as if I was rebuilding Rome. I was, quite simply, figuring out where to put ducks in a store that I had no intention of buying anything from. But that was the job, and I jumped into it without asking questions, not out of excitement, but out of habit.

Rubber ducks are a niche product, that much is true. And so, you sort of have to understand the market in order to enjoy a game like Sort Them Ducks. Say, to the common outsider, it’s a futile item that doesn’t make a lot of sense. But, to those who either collect them or treat them as zodiac signs, it’s a good way to wax your interests and satisfy your curiosity for an hour or four. Of course, you don’t need to love ducks to pile a thousand of them into a box and rebuild the world. Heck, if you simply enjoy the act of organizing sections of a store and reaping the blue moon rewards of your labor, then you will more than likely get a kick out of bulking out a duck-fueled emporium. Bottles, books, swords — it doesn’t really matter, given that each product orbits the same basic infrastructure. If there’s a mess that needs cleaning, and if there’s an individual who happens to find brief spells of joy in sorting through it, then there’s a perfect pairing.

It didn’t come as a major surprise to see that Sort Them Ducks, as the underling of a greater sphere of organization sims, was also in possession of a lot of the same skill trees and upgrade systems as made famous by Librarian. Similar in its design, it gave me the opportunity to unlock upgrades—abilities that I could lean into to boost my stacking power and speed, for example—and a simple by-the-numbers objective. If I was able to organize enough ducks, then I could earn a few more notches on the belt, become slightly more efficient in my position, and generally organize the mess a lot faster. It was all generic stuff — to the point where I frequently had to remind myself that I wasn’t playing Librarian, Tidy Up Together, or one of the other thirty-seven clean-‘em-up sims.

The last thing I want to do is give Sort Them Ducks the cold shoulder. Although it is painfully obvious that it bears almost all of the same birthmarks as its kin, it is still a pleasantly entertaining game that checks a lot of the right boxes. It isn’t the least bit original, but it is a lot of fun to gradually work through. Is it the next best thing to Librarian? No. Does it fulfill its promise to satisfy you with its incremental charm? Honestly, yes, and that’s precisely what I’m willing to take away from it.

Verdict

Sort Them Ducks adds its own rubber band to a niche category that is, in all probability, already suffocating due to the pressure of countless other products that wish to milk that Librarian-littered cash cow for all it’s worth. Still, I can’t complain, as it does make good on its promise to deliver a deeply satisfying, stress-reducing experience that can (and probably will) keep you busy for a lot longer than your average puzzle. It might not be a unique game, but it is one that checks all of the right boxes to provide a thoroughly bashful, albeit long-winded chore core simulation gig. Ducks, eh — who’d have thought?