The Sorting Bureau launches August 21: piles, fewer drags, and a lot of fixes

The full version is out on August 21

Launch is this Friday.

If you only played the demo, you played a three month old build. It went up in May, and everything since then went into the full version. Here is what is different.

The hand: piles instead of hundreds of drags

The demo asked a lot of your hand: hundreds of small drags, one item at a time. That is the first thing we changed.

• Piles. Put a few items down next to each other and they settle into a pile, and from then on the pile is picked up and carried as one thing. Nothing sticks to your cursor on its own, you gather the pile yourself.
• Boxes accept a whole pile. Drop a pile over the right box and all of it goes in together, instead of one item going in and the rest scattering around it.
• No more overshooting. Throw an item towards a pile and the inertia is damped, so it lands closer to where you aimed.
• A Spread Out button in the pause menu, for when things end up lying on top of each other and the one you want is buried. One click and what is left on the table opens up.

The rule is explained now, too: the pile visibly settles in front of you, and Sayoko sends a letter that puts it in words.

It is still a game you play with your hand on the mouse, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. But the number of identical repeated drags went down a lot, and the session feels calmer for it.

The table before and after the Spread Out button.

What else the demo did not have

• Boxes can be moved. Drag a box by its label and put it where your hand prefers it. The whole row can be pulled closer to what is left on the table.
• Knolling orders. Instead of sorting into boxes, you lay everything out in neat rows, and the result is photographed for your album.
• Jigsaw orders on torn and broken things. Lay a piece down correctly and it sticks and waits for the rest of the set.
• Morning drinks that quietly shape the day: how much comes in, what the weather does outside, which kind of order shows up.
• New things on the desk: Japanese stamps, lego bricks, hair bows, cookies, pasta, seashells and more. Plus boxes that go inside other boxes.
• The room. Seasons and weather outside the window, a train that never passes at quite the same speed, a lamp you can switch on in the evening, a cat, a plant that arrives as a gift.
• An order summary screen, a replay of the order you can watch or skip, a credits screen, and 15 achievements.
• A larger text option, tuned for Steam Deck.
• 15 languages. French and Chinese were reworked from scratch after players told us they were not good enough.

Fixed since the demo

Some of what you ran into and will not run into again:

• Windows 11: letters and boxes showing up completely blank.
• Orders that could not be finished because an item had drifted off the visible table.
• Colored things landing in Everything Else instead of their color box.
• Warm and cool, which nobody could read. The labels are now printed in the color they mean, with icons of what belongs inside.
• Items poking out through the sides of a closed box.
• The client's reaction vanishing before you had time to read it.

And dozens of smaller ones: box labels that did not match what belonged in them, orders that arrived almost sorted, rusty and clean metal that looked identical, typos and clumsy English in the letters.

If the demo let you down

The demo is a May build and it is not getting updated. Everything went into the full version instead.

If the bug you ran into is not on the list above, write it in the discussions on the game page. We read them and answer there ourselves. And something will surely come up at launch, it always does. We will be around and patching.

August 21. Thank you to everyone who wrote, recorded a video or sent us an email. Almost everything above exists because somebody told us about it.