Cleaning Up The Puzzle Gallery

Most entries in the sudden wave of "pick things up off the floor" tidying sims borrow their whole skeleton from whichever one got there first, and Cleaning Up The Puzzle Gallery doesn't pretend otherwise. You play a gallery janitor after an earthquake has knocked 2,071 jigsaw pieces loose from 87 paintings, and the job is exactly what it sounds like: walk around picking pieces up, figure out which painting each one belongs to, and slot it into place while classical music plays in the background. Multiple reviewers name the genre's current biggest hit, Librarian: Tidy Up the Arcane Library!, in the same sentence as this game — some as a compliment ("scratches the itch"), a few as an accusation. Both readings are fair, and the honest version of the review sits between them.

What's actually in the box

The core content is 2,071 pieces across 87 paintings pulled from 13 named historical artists — Monet, Van Gogh and Hokusai among the ones Steam's own description calls out — sourced from public domain museum scans rather than generated or licensed stock art. Several reviewers who finished the base campaign in one sitting clock it at roughly three to four hours, which by itself is a short package for the price, but the base campaign is not the whole game. Beating it unlocks Black & White Mode and "The Big White," a single 1024-piece puzzle made entirely of white pieces with no colour to sort by, alongside a no-powers challenge run that strips out every skill upgrade you've earned. One reviewer who tried the no-powers run first, before finishing a normal playthrough, posted a specific warning about it in their review — it is meant to be brutal, not a victory lap.

On top of that sits "My Puzzles," a mode that lets you upload up to 83 of your own PNG or JPG images and turn each one into a jigsaw puzzle of whatever size you choose, from a 50-piece easy solve up to a 1,000-piece landscape, and either work through them one at a time or fill the entire gallery with your own curated set. That mode is uncapped by design, so the honest ceiling on playtime isn't the 87 paintings the developer chose — it's however many images you're willing to feed it. Set against a base price of €5.19 (currently €4.67 with a 10% launch discount), and against Librarian's own €9.59 asking price for a bigger, more established package, several reviewers independently describe the price as fair for what's here, and one calls it "a good step-in for the cleanup sim genre" precisely because it's smaller and cheaper than its rivals.

A hand-curated gallery, not a generic asset pack

The originality question the genre invites is really two separate questions: is the structure copied, and is the content copied. On structure, the answer is close to yes — pick up scattered pieces, sort them into slots, spend earned points on a skill tree that speeds up finding and placing pieces, exactly the loop Librarian popularised. The single most upvoted negative review in the sample says it plainly: "if you're going to copy and paste a game so blatantly it at least needs to be better than the original." That reviewer found it too easy and too tedious by comparison, and they are not alone — a second negative and one Chinese-language negative echo the "cheap knockoff" framing directly.

On content, though, the picture is different. The paintings are a real, named, curated selection rather than a placeholder set stretched to fill a shelf, and the skill system is built around a distinct conceit — upgrades named after regions of the brain (an ability called Occipital handles visual highlighting, one called Frontal Lobe automates piece-flipping) that ties the "using your puzzling skills" pitch to something more specific than a generic ability list. The achievement names lean the same way: The Thinker, The Venus, The Skull, The Bracelet — titles that read as a wink at famous sculptures and artworks rather than arbitrary trophy names. None of that erases the structural resemblance to Librarian, and the review shouldn't pretend it does, but "derivative structure, original content" is a meaningfully different verdict from "asset flip," and the evidence here points at the former. The custom-image mode is the clearest single differentiator: it turns the game from a fixed, curated gallery into a tool a player can point at anything they own.

Whether there's anywhere to go

There is real, if shallow, progression here. Completing puzzles earns skill points that upgrade brain-themed abilities, one achievement is specifically tied to spending 50 of them, and a Day 1 patch note confirms those upgrades apply across both the base game and challenge modes (though not the custom "My Puzzles" mode, which stays deliberately unranked). A more consequential change shipped in the second patch: challenge modes, originally gated behind finishing the base campaign, are now all unlocked as soon as you finish it once — a small but telling adjustment that suggests the developer watched how quickly people were burning through the main content and responded by loosening the gate rather than padding it.

Steam's global achievement data gives a concrete shape to how far most players actually get: the easiest achievement sits at 18.3% of tracked players, and it falls steeply from there — 14.2%, 13.3%, then a cluster in the low-to-mid single digits, bottoming out at 0.2% for the hardest. That's a normal curve for a game two days old rather than evidence of a design failure, but it does confirm what the reviews already suggest: most buyers are here for one relaxed campaign run, and the harder challenge content is a niche pursuit even among people who liked the base game enough to keep playing.

The rough edges

The most consistent structural complaint is about the default hint system: placed pieces are marked correct or incorrect the instant you set them down, which several reviewers say removes any real puzzle-solving in favour of trial-and-error placement, and more than one specifically asks for a toggle to turn it off outside of the dedicated challenge modes. That's a fair complaint about difficulty tuning for the default experience, distinct from the "it's a clone" argument — it's possible to like the concept and still want the training wheels to be optional rather than load-bearing.

On the technical side, one reviewer reported a movement bug — the character periodically jolting or "porting" forward while walking — serious enough that they withheld a recommendation until it's fixed. No one else in the sample mentions anything similar, and it doesn't appear in either patch's notes, so it reads as an isolated report rather than a widespread issue, but it's also not confirmed fixed. Separately, Steam's own store page discloses that AI tools were used in writing the game's code, while stating plainly that no AI-generated images, music, audio or models are present — the art is public-domain, not generated — which is worth knowing rather than assuming either way.

Accessibility is a genuine strength for a debut this size: full controller support with native DualShock and DualSense button prompts, a Day 1 fix for Switch Pro controller trigger registration, camera comfort settings, custom volume controls, an invert-look toggle added within a day of launch requests, and a store-listed "playable without timed input" design that keeps the puzzle-solving untimed by default. For a solo or two-person studio's first release, that's a more complete accessibility pass than many bigger launches manage.

Final verdict

Cleaning Up The Puzzle Gallery earns a 7.2 for delivering exactly what it promises at a fair price: a short, relaxing tidying sim built on real, hand-curated public-domain art rather than a generic asset pack, backed by an uncapped custom-puzzle mode that extends its value well past the base campaign's three-to-four hours. It doesn't score higher because the core loop is an unmistakable, openly-acknowledged descendant of Librarian: Tidy Up the Arcane Library, and the default difficulty — thanks to an always-on correctness hint with no toggle — leaves the base game feeling closer to sorting than to puzzling for anyone who doesn't opt into the harder modes. Two days and 109 reviews is a small sample, but it's an honestly positive one, comparable in shape to the genre's biggest name, and the developer's two rapid post-launch patches suggest a studio that's still actively listening. If you've already played Librarian and want more of the same idea for half the price with a real art-history hook and the option to feed it your own photos, this delivers; if you're hoping for the genre reinvented, it isn't that.