Sort Them Ducks Review

Another Shelf, Another 4,000 Rubber Ducks

Sort Them Ducks is the latest entry in the small but suddenly crowded genre of first-person tidy-up games kicked off by titles like Librarian: Tidy Up the Arcane Library! and Supermarket Chaos: pick up scattered objects, work out which of several near-identical shelves they belong on, and repeat until the mess resolves into order. Solo developer Mr.Duck's spin swaps books or groceries for over 4,000 individually designed rubber ducks, split into themed categories from superheroes to weather patterns to national costumes, and at $5.99 with 1,019 English reviews landing "Very Positive" at 92%, it's clearly found an audience that can't get enough of the format.

A Genuinely Satisfying Loop, Once You're Past the Learning Curve

The reviewers who recommend the game are consistent about why: the ducks themselves are the draw. Reviewers repeatedly praise how distinct and recognizable each design is, making the actual sorting logic clear rather than a guessing game, and several call out specific favorites (a bat duck, a milkshake duck, a giraffe duck) as evidence of real care in the asset variety. The unlockable movement and carrying abilities get consistent praise for easing the early grind, several reviewers explicitly compare their completion times (commonly four to ten hours) favorably against other genre entries, and more than one reviewer says the ending sequence provided a genuinely satisfying capstone rather than just stopping. For an audience that has clearly already played several of these tidy-up games this year, "one of the better recent entries in the genre" is a phrase that shows up more than once.

Camera Bob, Frame Drops, and a Save Bug That Erases Hours

The negative side of the review pool is dominated by two specific, heavily corroborated technical complaints rather than a dislike of the core concept. A large cluster of reviewers describe severe motion sickness caused by the character's camera bob while walking, with several saying they had to stop playing entirely or requested refunds specifically because of it, and a few noting the sickness affected friends who don't normally get motion sick watching others play. A separate, equally large cluster reports serious performance problems once enough ducks are visible on screen at once: frame drops, camera stutter, and in several cases the mouse view actually snapping or "teleporting" to a random direction when the game hitches, making precise sorting difficult regardless of settings. A third, smaller but still repeated complaint involves a save bug: several reviewers report returning to the game after multiple hours of progress only to find their sorted ducks reset to the floor with only purchased upgrades intact, an issue at least one reviewer says persisted even after the developer claimed to have patched it.

A Design Choice Several Reviewers Call Out as Genuinely Insensitive

A distinct and repeated complaint, separate from the performance issues, concerns some of the duck costume designs themselves. Multiple reviewers specifically object to a cluster of ducks depicting cultural and ethnic caricatures, naming examples like a feathered "Chief Feather" duck, a turbaned "Snake Charmer" duck, and a generically-labeled "African Warrior" duck, arguing the designs traffic in outdated, flattening stereotypes of real cultures rather than the more general costume categories (superheroes, weather, professions) that make up the bulk of the roster. Several of these reviewers are explicit that they otherwise enjoyed the game and its concept, but felt they couldn't recommend it while those specific assets remained unaddressed, and at least one reviewer who did recommend the game still flagged the same handful of duck designs as needing a rework.

Verdict

Sort Them Ducks earns its strong reception the way most successful tidy-up games do: a clear, well-designed core loop with enough visual variety in its central gimmick to stay engaging across a multi-hour playthrough, sold at a price that matches its scope. What keeps it from being an easy blanket recommendation is a specific, corroborated cluster of complaints that go beyond ordinary jank: camera-bob motion sickness severe enough to end sessions outright for a meaningful slice of the audience, performance problems that get worse the more the game asks you to look at, a save bug that can erase hours of progress without warning, and a handful of costume designs that a genuine cross-section of reviewers, including some who otherwise liked the game, find genuinely uncomfortable rather than merely a matter of taste.

None of these issues are fatal on their own, and the developer's visible post-launch patching suggests at least some of them are being addressed, but taken together they're common and specific enough that this isn't simply a case of a vocal minority griping about a beloved game. Anyone prone to motion sickness in first-person games should treat that risk as a near-certainty rather than a possibility going in, and anyone sensitive to the costume-design complaints should look at what's actually being described before buying. For everyone else, particularly anyone who has already enjoyed Librarian or Supermarket Chaos and wants more of the same formula with a different theme, Sort Them Ducks delivers a genuinely satisfying few hours of sorting for very little money, provided the specific rough edges here don't happen to be the ones that bother you personally.

What separates this review pool from a simple pile-on is how narrowly targeted its two biggest complaint clusters actually are. The motion-sickness and performance reports describe the same specific triggers, camera bob while walking and frame drops once a screen fills with ducks, rather than a vague sense that the game "feels bad," and the costume-design objections point at the same handful of named designs rather than a blanket complaint about the whole roster. That specificity is exactly what makes both threads worth taking seriously rather than dismissing as noise, and it's also what makes the fix, at least in principle, tractable: neither problem requires rebuilding the core loop that the positive majority of this review pool is clearly enjoying, just addressing the particular assets and settings reviewers keep pointing back to by name.