After the popularity of the librarian tidy up game, numerous clean up games have made their way to the Steam sto
re. One of these is TV Archive: Tidy Up Together. Games Together has taken the solo adventure of a tidy up game and added multiplayer elements to TV Archive so you can enjoy the clean up with your friends.
Now available on Steam, you can grab TV Archive for £4.59.
I’m pretty sure the TV Archive is just the backrooms of an old Blockbusters
Gameplay
The aim of TV Archive is really simple. Look at alllllllllll the videos on the floor, pick them up, put them on shelves. As you complete more shelves, you’ll unlock skill points that unlock character upgrades. These upgrades range from looking at the map anywhere in the room to more efficient cooldown on certain skills.
Unsurprisingly, there are a lot of videos to organise in TV Archive. Some of them are singular seasons whilst some go up to five. Depending on how organised you are, sorting the videos can be pretty annoying. There were plenty of times whilst playing where it seemed like I’d found all the seasons of one type of series only to find season four hidden under a mountain of basketball videos. Game mechanic wise, everything is really simple and easy to follow. There’s no real learning curve in TV Archive, the only thing that will slow players down is whether switching off is easy or hard.
Upgrading skills was a bit stagnant and sometimes felt like a waste. There isn’t any freedom in which upgrades you unlock. For example, one of the upgrades in the tree is to unlock a map of the archive that you can view from anywhere. However, it feels like a waste up skill points. The archive isn’t a huge map so it’s not like you’re wasting a lot of time going to look at the ones on the board. In all honesty, it feels like this is a bit of a fumble. Being able to choose your upgrade tree, I think, would be a much better option. I found I rarely use the map but often use the skill to look for missing tapes.
Graphics & Audio
TV Archive has a look and sound that is exactly what you think it would be. It doesn’t do anything special or groundbreaking but it also isn’t bad. My real issue with the graphics is that so many of the videos look exactly the same but are completely different. There’s a number of videos with groups of people on the front that are all different. When you’re rushing to find videos before your skill timer runs out it can be really confusing. Then you end up with an arm full of videos that don’t go together. Is this the end of the world? Absolutely not but it is a little infuriating.
Also, I did have a few graphical errors where I would throw the videos down, they would phase into the floor and then reappear a short distance away. This isn’t something that happens regularly but it did happen more than once so it’s worth mentioning.
Longevity
Realstically, TV Archive: Tide Up Together has very little replayability. There is an achievement for finishing the game in under 6 hours but other than that there isn’t much to make you go back. Unforunately, this is just the case for these genres of games, I think. While, yes, you can replay with friends, there isn’t enough changing to make a solo replay something that I’m desperate to do.
Final Thoughts
TV Archive: Tidy Up Together is a cute little addition to the tidy up genre that is emerging on Steam. It interests me a lot more than the fantasy games that seem to be the focus of this genre but unfortunately there were a couple of things that just let it down. Ultimately, I’m giving TV Archive the Thumb Culture Silver Award. It’s definitely a good game and I did enjoy playing it. There just isn’t much you can do with this genre to make it stand out.
Disclaimer: A code was received in order to write this review.
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