Tidy Mart

Tidy Mart is a cozy organization game where you restore order to various retail environments, ranging from tiny corner shops to massive supermarkets. Your task is to take products that are spawned in a massive pile at the center of the room at the start of the level and neatly arrange them on shelves. You can carry multiple items in a basket, and each level introduces a new helpful ability, such as highlighting all unplaced products matching the item you are currently holding or a magnet ability that pulls all items of that type as long as they fit into your basket.

At launch, the game was designed with the idea of “free placement” in mind, meaning that you could theoretically place products anywhere, as long as each shelf contained only one type of item. In practice, though, this was a frustrating design flaw that prevented levels from being completed even when everything was perfectly organized. The game secretly expected a specific placement configuration (certain products on specific shelves, for example, bigger cans on bottom shelves) but offered zero hints on how to achieve that, plus this placement was inconsistent across levels. Players were left guessing how to fit items onto shelves of varying sizes. Imagine meticulously spending hours placing thousands of products, only to find the level won’t complete, with no easy way to swap shelf contents and no clue what the game actually wants from you.

Unsurprisingly, this led to massive, well-justified backlash from the community, but fortunately, the developers listened. An update released on August 24 completely overhauled this mechanic by adding clear labels to the shelves, showing you exactly where items belong. For those who still prefer the old, trial-and-error approach, the original “free placement” mode remains accessible from the levels map. Additionally, a frustrating bug that caused products to spawn outside the level boundaries, essentially blocking level completion and further game progress for many players, also appears to have been resolved in this same update.

Despite its rough launch, Tidy Mart is now in a fairly stable state, though some noticeable issues linger. For one, placing two different products of the same type on one shelf often bugs out, since the game fails to recognize edge or middle spots as valid placement points. The only current workaround is removing all products and placing them once again, in order, from one side to the other, which becomes tedious when dealing with dozens of items already placed on that shelf. Even after the labels update, there are still many other issues to fix, such as incorrect labels or wrong quantities. Furthermore, some products are almost identical, with only their brand being slightly different, making it difficult to know exactly which product goes where, despite the new labeling system.

The game currently features 5 levels, ranging from 500 to 15000 products, which makes the latter levels extremely tedious and unnecessarily long. The basket size makes the gameplay in these levels even worse, as its capacity is not only extremely small but also highly inconsistent. For example, you might be able to pick up 16 bottles of oil or wine, but only 5 small packages of chips or 2 little cans of biscuits. Some products, like fruits, veggies, or meat, are often limited to just 1 per basket. This means you have to run back and forth through the whole store dozens of times just to place these items on their corresponding racks. While these new abilities are very useful outside of these cases, their cooldown is pretty horrendous (around 1 minute), which makes you wait a long time until you can use them again.

This back-and-forth becomes especially frustrating in the last level in particular. It features a rather messy arrangement where the same product is spread over several different racks in different corners of the shop. Other racks contain shelves with mixed products that don’t necessarily fit together, or at least it’s not something you would ever see in a real supermarket. To make matters worse in this fifth level, not all products even have dedicated space on the shelves. You are forced to use really wacky workarounds, such as stacking meat over the designed amount just to make some space to fit in 2 boxes of cheese, which is necessary so that you can fit some extra wine bottles (that seem to be erroneously spawned and do not have a designated shelf) where the cheese was supposed to be placed.

The developers’ swift updates moved the game much closer to the relaxing experience it was meant to be. However, the remaining number of issues (both technical and design-related) prevent me from recommending the game in its current state. Given time, I expect these to be ironed out, finally delivering that satisfying tidy-up feeling. On the plus side, the game is fairly affordable.