I've been waiting for another good sorting game since Tidy Up The Arcane Library. This is the first one that is actually polished and nice, and I love how it puts it's own spin on the genre! Having to figure out where pieces go on every figure adds a fun new challenge (that can be really hard on some of the statues with 30+ pieces, but fear not, powers can help with this).

I've been playing a lot of these sort and tidy games over the last couple months, and I'm overall, just not enjoying this one.

Some of the rooms were enjoyable, like the T-Rex and mammoth fossils, along with the aquatics room, and I didn't mind make a few of the big statues.

But it just feels like there are too many statues with too many pieces each, and then you get to the medieval room. The instruments, tools and special display are okay, but there are 238 items in that room, most of which are in between 3-6 pieces, and the name of the item your holding only tells you it's name and what type it is. There are 48 polearms in that room. I have to either use the locate skill to have an arrow point me at the other pieces that I've put in there, have memorized where I put the previous pieces, or go through all of the polearms one-by-one to see which one goes with the piece I have.

That is only one type of weapon. Instead of a nice cozy chill game, I'm having to actually put in effort to try and finish. And I don't plan to.

No other game in this genre that I have played has taken me longer than 12 hours to complete, and that game had over 30,000 items. I'm 14 hours into this game, and only about 2/3rds done putting items in their final place. While I did spend 3 hours getting everything to their final rooms to clean up the hallways, previous experience has showed that should have been the longest part of the game, but for this one, it takes so much longer to get the items put together.

The dev has been good at releasing quick updates to the big issues people have had, but I'm wondering if they actually had a few people playtest this game from beginning to end before release, because it really feels like they just tested how the game plays, but not the full experience of it.

Interesting game, good artwork, quick updates to issues brought up, but the underlying game is just not worth it.

I've been a mythology / history nerd since I was a child, and this game very much scratches that itch. The ambiance is perfect, the exhibits are a joy to put together, and you can tell that the developers put all their love and care into this.

I think my biggest gripe is trying to place down very small pieces, where I either can't locate where they need to go, or other pieces end up in the way and I end up stacking them on top of each other in the wrong spots. But beyond some minor issues, this game is awesome. Looking forward to playing more!

edit: Devs are extremely responsive to feedback! Multiple patches day one of release. Very happy with my purchase :)