TV Archive: Tidy Up Together Review (PC)

As it turns out, a video tape isn’t all that different than a book, a bottle, or a cabbage. TV Archive: Tidy Up Together, in an effort to lean into that notion, builds its archival chasm in a similar fashion, with a plethora of cassettes that, true to the spirit of a de-cluttering game, are inconveniently sprawled out across multiple sections of a once-pristine storefront. Librarian: Tidy Up the Arcane Library might have been the first to inconvenience us with its jumbled collection of books, but TV Archive looks to stoke the fire a little more with its own stories. And when I say stories, what I really mean to say is, video tapes — and a lot of them.

Of course, it’s becoming more and more difficult to slip into the cozy sphere and not coincidentally find an organizing sim that looks like Librarian, plays like Librarian, and, to an extent, is Librarian. The point is, while TV Archive is with its own idea of what chaos looks like, it also shares a similar concept. The archive is in tatters, with over three-thousand video tapes left to the wolves, and it’s your job to pick them all up and return them in a chronological order. It’s busy work that doesn’t leave a lot to the imagination, but it’s also gratifying work that, honestly, feels pretty good to subject yourself to for all the while the horror tapes mesh with the romcoms.

Think of every genre under the sun, bundle them all onto an open floor, and you should have a vague idea of how TV Archive’s storefront looks. From your comedy to your drama, your romance to your fantasy, and just about every possible genre between — TV Archive, without giving you much to go on, fills its every nook and cranny with movies and box sets, and then simply hands you the opportunity to return them to their rightful places on the shelves. Every once in a blue moon, it gives you a little something to put the spring in your step—an upgrade, if you will, that allows you to speed up the process, locate aisles a lot quicker, and chronicle tapes by the boatload. Again, like Librarian — but with tapes and, well, popcorn-laced floors.

As the title implies, TV Archive: Tidy Up Together is both a single-player game and a co-op experience. Either alone or with a friend, you have the ability to restore each piece of the archive, using your bare hands or a knack for collaborating with a colleague to unlock new areas, collect upgrades, and essentially compile the archive. For the most part, that’s all that you’re doing: sifting through tapes from the clutter and arranging each one so that it aligns in a numerical order. As you complete a section, you earn fresh nodes on the skill tree, which you can lean into to further improve your sorting skills. A thousand or so tapes later, and you have a clean, compressive, and above all, clean archive.

The whole point of TV Archive: Tidy Up Together is to get lost in the labor. The idea (and the thing that drives it through, really) is that each complete area in the building will bring you a sense of satisfaction and happiness. Unsurprisingly, it is a satisfying, albeit a long and strenuous process. Again, there isn’t much of a point to any of it, as there are no endgame rewards to unlock or special scenes to unravel after the final piece of the puzzle has been archived. In fact, it pours all of its heart and soul into one reward, and that’s the one that you yourself create after several hours of hard work. And so, while it doesn’t offer its own sense of purpose, it does give you something to chase.

Of course, the upgrade system, and not to mention the general process is more or less the same as Librarian: Tidy Up the Arcane Library, Cellar Keeper, or Cleaning Up The Puzzle Gallery. In the beginning, you have almost too much to work with. As time advances, however, the job becomes a little easier to juggle, and the abilities make it so that you have less to worry about. It’s a simple setup, and judging from the recent surge in similar projects, it isn’t an original concept. That being said, it is satisfying work that feels surprisingly great to sink your knuckles into for a couple of hours.

The addition of a multiplayer mode does add an extra layer to the experience — and that’s great, given that it can be a pretty dull and lonely chore for the most part.  Moreover, as it adopts a couple of curveballs—a mode that disables abilities, for example—there are multiple ways to experience it. Regardless of how you choose to approach it, TV Archive is a relatively straightforward game that doesn’t do a lot to push the boat out or alter the traditional Librarian schematic. Still, if you do enjoy organization sims that don’t require a lot of effort to complete, then there’s a strong chance that you’ll love sifting through the video tapes in this old Blockbuster-inspired world.

Verdict

TV Archive: Tidy Up Together takes us back to the golden age of Blockbuster with a self-contained archive of multi-genre flicks and box office movies that each share a common conundrum: homelessness. Similar to the likes of Librarian: Tidy Up the Arcane Library, it builds its world around deeply rooted and satisfying chores, with a simple yet elegant design that, although without an original bone in its body, delivers a thoroughly enjoyable experience. It might not do a lot more than the average organization sim, but to tell you the truth, it doesn’t need to. It knows the niche, as does it know the audience and precisely what it wants.

While there’s no telling which product will be picked up next to receive the bombshell treatment, it’s fair to say that TV Archive: Tidy Up Together is a good step in the right direction for the genre. Is that enough to spur countless other projects to take the same path? Probably not, but it’ll happen regardless. Blame the “cozy” sphere, I guess.