Still Sorting

Still Sorting is a first-person sorting and shelving game set in a small comic shop. On the day the shop moved premises, the truck carrying its stock overturned. Nobody was injured, but all 4,344 books were thrown together, and with rain falling, anything that did not fit back into a box was carried inside and heaped in front of the counter. The owner is left to deal with the mess, and the player takes on the shift, guided by a manual that was written in a hurry and is revealed a page at a time.

The shop has twenty-six rows labelled A through Z, containing 182 slots in total. A chart indicates where each book belongs. The core loop involves opening a box, filling a bag with books, walking to the appropriate row and placing the books on the shelf in the correct order. Slots that are not completely filled must be finished with a bookend. The Z-row is an exception to the rest of the shop: rather than comics, it holds the shop’s ledgers and member files, which are arranged by date instead of by volume number.

The game covers one long shift. Once the final book has been shelved, the player clocks out and walks home through the rain, bringing the game to a close.