Cellar Keeper

I liked arcane library, so of course I'm going to play and enjoy this game. But needs improvement. -Game absolutely needs different bottle shapes (or even just colors!) to differentiate. Why is white wine in a dark bottle? -In that vein, all the labels look the same and really need some work. -Some common wine types are weirdly missing (moscato, rose..) -I would love some in-game "lore" about the different wine types. I have never heard of many of them, so a poster in the corner or text describing the wine would really elevate the game. Overall, I would say this game does not feel made by someone who is really passionate about wine, it feels like a dev wanted to cash in on arcane libraries' success and chose a topic at random. I don't particularly care its a rip-off, but I would hope the dev would do a little bit more research on the subject.

Like everyone says, a clear rip-off of Librarian. I was curious and tried it with a mate for about an hour. And yes it's calm, you sort at your own pace. But the bottles are a bit too alike, and I get a notion that the labels are AI. Even if that's not true, they could have put more effort into differentiating for each other. So after a lackluster hour, I refunded it and sort some more books instead

Видишь вино? Грузи в шкафы. Закончишь, получишь вино. Потеряешь вино, получишь шкаф. Разобьешь вино, получишь шиш. Сломаешь шкаф, получишь десятку. Сломаешь десятку, получишь шиш. Сломаешь шиш, получишь десятку. Видишь попугая? Освободи попугая . И не возись весь день!

The game follows the latest indie trend of turning a huge mess into something perfectly organized. This time, you're faced with hundreds of wine bottles scattered throughout a massive wine cellar. I found the whole experience surprisingly relaxing, and the default cozy mode is easily the best way to enjoy it. If you want more of a challenge, though, there is a Speedrunning mode, as well as a Hardcore mode where bottles can break, and a single shattered bottle means an instant game over. While Hardcore mode can be safely ignored, you'll have to play Speedrunning mode if you want to unlock the final achievement. Unfortunately, it's an incredibly frustrating experience that takes all of the enjoyment out of the game. Although the timer only matters for the leaderboards, the mode disables all of the quality-of-life features that make these games fun to play in the first place. The cellar is filled with cabinets marked by unique symbols, each representing a different type of wine. A map in the center of the cellar explains what every symbol stands for. The bottles themselves don't display these symbols, but hovering the cursor over one or picking it up reveals the wine type, so memorizing at least a few cabinet locations makes life much easier. Each wine type includes several different brands, and every brand must be placed on its own shelf within the correct cabinet. This information also appears when you examine a bottle. To make things simpler, it's better to focus on the wine type, which is listed second, rather than the brand, which appears first. For example, if you pick up a bottle labeled Thornback - Malbec, it's much easier to remember that it belongs with the Malbec cabinet than to memorize every individual brand. The last piece of information, and the most important one, is the series number. Every bottle displays two numbers. If you see 4/9, it means you're holding the fourth bottle in a series of nine. Bottles have to be arranged in numerical order, starting with 1 and ending with the final number in the series. Series also come in different sizes, such as three or five bottles, so they cannot be placed on shelves intended for longer collections. Each cabinet contains several shelves, but none of them are assigned to a specific brand until you place the very first bottle on one. From that point on, the shelf belongs to that brand. You can always remove everything and reorganize it later, but once you've committed, it's usually easier to stick with your decision unless you really enjoy making extra work for yourself. Despite the overwhelming amount of bottles, the game includes plenty of quality of life features that make the whole process much more enjoyable. Whenever you place a bottle incorrectly, it briefly flashes gray. A correct placement flashes yellow instead. Once I saw that satisfying yellow flash, I treated it as a sign to never touch that bottle again. Another welcome feature is the ability to carry up to ten bottles at once, regardless of their type or brand. On top of that, a list on the left side of the screen keeps track of every bottle you're carrying, along with all the information you need. The progression system is where the game really starts to shine. Completing a shelf rewards you with skill points, so it's worth focusing on the smaller shelves first to unlock upgrades more quickly. These points can be spent on seven different skills. Some of them, such as Sprint and Jump, can safely wait until much later. You can also manage without Quick Order, which automatically sorts the bottles you're carrying, Target Hint, which highlights the correct shelf for the bottle in your hand, and Auto Place, which inserts a bottle into the correct position when you're looking at the appropriate shelf. Two skills stand out as absolutely essential. Spot Matches highlights every bottle that matches the one you're holding, even through walls, while Batch Grab instantly pulls matching bottles from anywhere in the cellar into your hands. Once I unlocked these two abilities, the pace picked up dramatically. Small collections became much easier to finish, and the skill points started coming in much faster. With the exception of Sprint and Jump, every skill has a cooldown and must be activated manually. Some cooldowns are surprisingly long, lasting close to two minutes. Thankfully, every skill can be upgraded five times. Each upgrade reduces the cooldown while also improving the skill itself. Batch Grab, for example, starts by retrieving only a single bottle, but each upgrade increases the number it can pull at once. The only downside is that every upgrade costs significantly more skill points than the previous one. Even so, it never felt like a major problem as long as I prioritized Spot Matches and Batch Grab before everything else. What’s missing, unfortunately, is a way to highlight bottles that have been placed in the wrong location. I finished organizing my entire cellar, only to discover that two bottles were misplaced. The only way to find them was to manually check every shelf and count the bottles one by one. The opening hour can feel overwhelming because there are bottles everywhere and it's hard to know where to begin. Thankfully, things become much more manageable with every completed shelf and cabinet. If you're impatient, there's even a small shortcut - quitting and relaunching the game instantly refreshes every skill cooldown. It's faster than waiting at the beginning, although whether it's worth the extra hassle is up to you.

This is such a chill organizer. It's the most like the library one out of any of them out so far, but that is a good thing in my eyes. I can't wait to sink hours into playing this.

lazily made they couldn't even put in the effort to have different names for the bottles they made 1 shelving area and copy pasted the rest it seems the only cool idea was the symbols they used atop the shelves instead of a numbering system or letters

Bottles do not have randomised placement

As this genre begins to take shape, it's really going to be the small things that start to set them apart from each other. In this case, there's a few too many for me to play this more than once, contrasted with my 36 hours in Librarian. Librarian had you puzzling as to where a book would belong, because sometimes the colour scheme and title means the book could feasibly fit in more than one category. Cellar Keeper by its nature cannot do that, because you need to know what type of wine it is from the label. So there's less of a puzzle element from the start. There's also far less creativity in the products you are sorting, using the same ~20-40 brand names across all the types of wine, with none of them being especially noteworthy, creative, funny, or satirical in any way. The labels on the bottles are nicely designed, but absolutely [i]pale[/i] in comparison to Librarian's wide selection of books of various shapes, sizes, sleeves, and 3D decorative elements. In Cellar Keeper, every bottle is the same size and shape, every label the same amount of coverage, and there are no 3D decorative elements to any bottle. It's also worth noting that Librarian's book designs did not use generative AI at all, whereas some of Cellar Keeper's wines did. While I empathise with the two-man team having to create so many designs, it's a massive strength of Librarian's visual design. But as I say, this burgeoning genre of over 30 games already will be judged by the finer details, and I think a decline in quality of the base gameplay and design elements is inevitable for the genre at large. So it's worth highlighting that this game has no feeling of cheapness to it - the UI and controls are completely serviceable (and comfortably familiar to Librarian players), the movement and upgrades work how you'd want them to, and the animations are perfect. Commendations to the EgoTrampoline team on a very solid game overall, even if I won't be the last person unfavourably comparing it to its predecessor.