How to play

The rule

Every bottle wears a printed label with three things on it: a vessel word, a potion name and a number between 1 and 2080. Those three things name exactly one slot in the shop.

• The theme picks the shelf. Each of the 26 shelves has a theme — Sleep & Dreams, Goblin Economics, Dramatic Exits. The name tells you which one it belongs to.
• The name picks the column. A shelf holds ten names, one per column.
• The vessel word picks the row. The eight vessel types — Ambrosia, Brew, Concoction, Elixir, Potion, Remedy, Serum, Tonic — run alphabetically down the eight rows of every column. The drop cap at the start of the label is the row number in disguise.

Set the bottle in the right slot and it locks in with a soft green swell. That bottle is done forever. Set it in the wrong slot and nothing happens at all: no buzzer, no penalty, no score. Pick it up and carry on. The full grid is laid out on the shelf reference.

Carrying

You start able to carry 5 bottles and end able to carry 15, across ten upgrades earned by tidying. The efficient game is a route-planning game: fill your arms with bottles that share a corner of the shop, walk once, shelve five, walk back.

The four charms

Charms are assists, and they unlock as you sort — at 25, 200, 500 and 1,000 correct bottles:

Shelf Locator

Unlocks at 25 correct bottles. Points you at the shelf a held bottle belongs to.

Auto-Sort Hand

Unlocks at 200 correct bottles. Orders what you are carrying so the next bottle out is the next one you need.

Insight

Unlocks at 500 correct bottles. Reads a bottle for you when the label is face-down in the pile.

Magnetize

Unlocks at 1,000 correct bottles. Draws a correct bottle the last few inches into its slot.

Purist mode turns all four off. If you want the shop to stay a reading puzzle rather than becoming a logistics puzzle, that is the switch.

Three difficulty modes

The easiest shows the slot numbers on the shelves, which turns the game into a gentle matching exercise and is the mode to hand somebody who does not play games. The middle mode is the intended reading game. The hardest hides the shelf colours until you have earned them, so early on you are navigating by theme and memory alone. All three save the same way and none of them can be lost.

What counts as finished

Completion is tiered, so there is always a small win in reach:

• A colour row — one vessel type across a shelf
• A half shelf
• A whole shelf, which also unlocks a soundtrack track
• The whole shop — all 2,080 bottles

Finishing shelves is what opens the rest of the music: half of the 20-track soundtrack starts locked. There are also 25 Steam achievements, 2 of them hidden.

Stopping and starting

The shop autosaves every ten seconds while you tidy, and flushes again when you quit — misfiled bottles included. There are no manual save slots because there is nothing to protect yourself from: one shop, one account, always exactly where you left it. Where those files live is on the support page.

Playing with other people

Everything above is true in co-op too, with up to four pairs of hands in one shop. The exception is Sun vs Moon versus, which is the one mode with a clock and a score.