Vinyl Freak: Unsorted

Gameplay Genre: Cleanup/sorting sim Story Genre: N/A Story/Gameplay Ratio: N/A **Gameplay** Ideas: 5/10 | Standard cleanup sim with vinyl record flavoring. Execution: 8/10 | Still simple, but fun and with good implementation. **Visuals & Sounds** Ideas: 7/10 | Good but not particularly unique visual and musical style. Execution: 8/10 | Looks and sound good but not outstanding. Cohesiveness: 10/10 | The day a cleanup sim is inconsistent is the day a cleanup sim is actually revolutionary. Personal Favor: 7/10 | Pretty good. **OVERALL RATING:** 7/10

As someone who frequently plays games of this genre, this is definitely one of the cooler ones I've played. It has a unique art style (and major kudos to the team for not using generative AI for this game) that honestly caught my eye. It also has a variety of unique mechanics that other similar games don't have, like being able to move around the shelving, searching through containers (instead of everything being in huge piles), and the vinyl sleeving stuff. Overall makes for a much more interactive and customizable experience compared to other sorting games. It isn't the perfect game, as I have had a few issues and bugs in the gameplay. But the developers seem genuinely responsive towards its community, which a gamer can always admire. Great find and super underrated game of its genre. Definitely a diamond in the rough.

I adore this game! 💕 Firstly: [b]NO GEN-AI[/b]! 🎉 Considering this is a game with hundreds of unique music albums, including front and back covers, artists, album titles, song titles, and record labels, that is absolutely amazing work by the dev/s and deserves huge kudos. I'm yet to find a single other organising game that has a media theme like this (whether it's movie/TV show/music/game covers) that can say the same. The game offers you two ways to play. Either you can have the full experience of fixing the mess inside the store (putting the racks and shelves back in order and/or arranging every single one of them to your liking, as well as cleaning the trash and cobwebs) as well as putting all the albums back in place, or you can just go straight to the organising. I opted for the full experience since I'm fussy like that. I must've spent hours getting my store layout perfect. I'm sure a store planner would vomit if they saw it, but we ball. 😂 Now I'm well and truly stuck into the organising, but I'm getting sadder and sadder as the floor gets clearer and the shelves get fuller, because it means I'm getting closer to the end of the game, and I don't want it to be finished! The store could be three times bigger with corresponding amount of albums and I'd be a happy little tidier. 😊 Also, there's a store cat! You can pet it! All of these games are improved by an interactive cat. You can even bodyswap with the cat and run around messing up the piles of records, which is very handy when you want to shuffle things around a bit without having to pick everything up and toss it back on the floor somewhere else. On the technical side, my (not amazing-)computer doesn't handle the game at epic settings, but it's happy enough on High with only a little drag when moving around the store. The in-game lighting could use work, as it's unfortunately a bit too realistic, and the overhead lights cause a glare when looking down at the albums that can make it hard to see what they actually are without hovering over them with the mouse. I've also had issues with the hover and in-hand text readability due to the small, fine font style and colours, but the dev has been very responsive in the feedback thread and has said they'll be looking at improving this shortly. It also would've been great to have controller support, but I was invested enough in playing this game that I finally cleared a proper space in my house to set my laptop on a surface with a proper mouse so that I could really enjoy it. That might be the best endorsement I could give it. 🤭 I would strongly recommend this to others.