I am usually being very generous to these cheap slop-clones but this one is kinda peak evidence of how those silly devs have NO CLUE what they are making a clone off. This feels like the devs asked Claude "make a game about putting ♥♥♥♥ on shelves" and considerd the job done.

I need to write a TidyUp manifesto. DESIGN CUES matter. Why Librarian is so good is because there's intuitive understanding behind the books. Math books can have diffferent colors, but same universal design. Illusion books are always purple'ish. Magic books are varied colors, but always with same narrow design and big gem in the middle.

Here the "families" of VHS are utterly pointlessly designed. No color coding, no universal design, no font parity. Nothing to help you. Just random AI-Slop. And the slop is horrible, too, because the dev was lazy enough to not even gen with same characters. So you have 3 Seasons of Spinach Sailor and every VHS box has different color AND different character. What, ran out of tokens to keep same chara but in different poses? Yuck.

I first played *Librarian: Tidy Up the Arcane Library!*, so comparing this game to Librarian is something I simply can't avoid.

Honestly, this game was awful.

The animations are terrible. When you lower the camera to pick up more tapes, the tapes in your hands end up floating right in front of your face, blocking your vision.

The multiplayer synchronization also has serious problems. Several times, my friend would drop some tapes and they would disappear for him. I would have to walk over, pick them up, and drop them again just so he could see them. On top of that, my friend's game froze and crashed multiple times, forcing him to rejoin.

The character movement is another problem. It's either way too fast or way too slow, and you will almost certainly get motion sickness. After only 10 minutes, I already had a headache and felt sick.

But the biggest problem for me is the skill progression. The skills are locked behind a strict chain. You can't simply buy the skill you actually want. You have to buy **EVERY SINGLE PREVIOUS SKILL FIRST**, even when those skills are completely useless to you.

This makes progression **EXTREMELY SLOW**. It took me around 5 hours to finish a run, largely because I was constantly forced to spend my progression on useless skills before I could finally unlock the ones I actually wanted. This is completely different from *Librarian*, where the progression feels much more natural and rewarding.

Playing this game made me feel like a worker trapped in a miserable job. It wasn't fun, it wasn't relaxing, and it wasn't satisfying. It was depressing, frustrating, and stressful.

By comparison, *Librarian* was the complete opposite. I felt relaxed, I had fun, and I genuinely lost track of time while playing it.

This game feels like someone saw *Librarian: Tidy Up the Arcane Library!* and thought:

*"I'm going to make the same thing, but with VHS tapes."*

Except they didn't seem to care about the animations, balance, gameplay, multiplayer synchronization, or overall experience. It feels like the only goal was to make a copy with a different theme and put it on Steam.

If you enjoy this type of game, **go play Librarian instead**.

Here, you're just going to get frustrated, stressed, and motion sick.

It aint it chief, play the librarian, supermarket chaos, cleaning up the puzzle gallery and much more, anything other than that, its just plain bad but a great reason why you shouldnt prompt an IA for art