I swear, when I heard of Noah’s Ark, it was two of each animal. Not 20! But I guess higher numbers have never been an issue. So, in Tidy up the Ark, you are meant to get all of the different animals to their specific pens, so that they are ready for the great flood. It’s a simple game, one of those sort of cozy, clean-up style things, where you can watch the world transform as you clean up areas and put everything in the right spot.
The game itself is simple, almost mindless. There is a massive ark, with three floors. One houses the herbivores, one the omnivores and one the carnivores. Luckily for you, most of the animals on the floor you find them on are in the right area. They just need sorting so that you can put them in the right pen. Each pen holds 20 animals, so you will need to start gathering quickly! Once you have assigned an animal a pen, picking up a new one and trying to put it in an empty pen will let you know they already have a home, which is pretty helpful. You also don’t need to know if an animal is a herbivore, for example, as bringing them to the wrong pen type will give you a message as well.
It’s then as easy as picking up handfuls of animals and placing them into the right area. There are a lot of different strategies to Tidy Up the Ark – I started off one one floor and was just putting everything snake like on one side. On another floor, I started organising animals by color. A lot of the game is remembering where animals were placed so that you can come back to them with new ones. You do have a pocket limit, which starts off as five, but you can find a Donkey and pay it in stars (earned from putting the animals away) to increase the number you can hold.
There are some other ghost animals dotted around as well which can give you the ability to jump or to phase forward, which can be helpful in moving around and speeding up the game. Tidy up the Ark has a lot of animals; inside the boat, on the roof of the boat, outside the boat. It’s a slow burn, as you slowly get everything into it’s place, especially as the animals themselves move around. Tidy Up the Ark feels like a fun game that you can lose time into. As the ark becomes less full of animals roaming around, it feels freeing to move around. The animals themselves are cute too!
You can play a new demo of Tidy Up the Ark on Steam and wishlist the game ahead of it’s release.