Never Sort By Color builds a game out of one bad instinct
3 min read
Anyone who has ever owned a big box of bricks has sorted them by colour once, and only once. Never Sort By Color builds an entire game on top of that mistake.
The title is the tutorial
There is one rule of brick sorting, and everyone learns it the hard way. You have inherited a workshop and a Pile that swallowed it whole. The game is a first-person zen organisation sim about setting it right: sorting an impossibly huge mountain of plastic bricks into a perfectly labelled workshop, one handful at a time.
Naming the game after the rule is a genuinely elegant move. It states the lesson before you start, you ignore it anyway because sorting by colour feels productive, and then the game demonstrates why shape is the axis that matters. That is a tutorial with no tutorial in it.
The Pile does not look conquerable, and the store copy says so directly — that is the point. You start by picking out bricks one at a time, and you grow into an unstoppable sorting machine, with tools like a grappling hook to reach into it.
The arc is the appeal: from tweezers to industrial equipment, applied to the same unglamorous job.
Why the growth curve carries it
How games use feedback loops is the engine. Every handful sorted makes the Pile smaller and the workshop more legible, and both changes are visible from where you stand. That is a loop with no bookkeeping — the room is the progress bar.
This psychological trick makes rewards backfire is the trap sitting next to it. The moment sorting earns points that buy upgrades that make sorting faster, the sorting has quietly become a cost. Zen games are unusually fragile that way, because the calm is the product.
The version that works keeps the tools diegetic. A grappling hook is not a reward for sorting, it is a better way to sort, and the difference between those two framings is most of the game’s character.
What you actually get
Never Sort By Color is by Bryan Livingston, self-published, listed for 10 November 2026 on Windows and Linux, under Casual, Indie and Simulation. A solo developer, a single strong premise, and a title that does the marketing on its own.
Linux support on a small release is worth noticing. It is a small signal about who the developer expects to play this, and organisation sims have a real audience on that side. It also suggests the game is light enough to run anywhere, which matters for something people will leave open for hours.
If the appeal is a huge, countable mess and permission to take your time with it, Librarian: Tidy Up the Arcane Library! is the other one on this list — 3,072 books, and a door that stays locked until they are all shelved.
