About this game
Freshfold is a food sorting game, and the sorting is the hard part. Not because the boxes are heavy or the clock is fast, but because you have to decide what each thing actually is.
You are on a shift in a small supermarket. The delivery is in, it is on four cages, and there are ten aisles to put it away in. Pick something up, walk it to the aisle you think it belongs in, and press one key. The shift lasts two minutes. Your score is how much you got away.
Most sorting games ask you to match a colour to a colour, or teach a small child that an apple is a fruit. This one asks you where Six Butter Crescents go — with the bread, or with the cakes. There is a real answer, the shop will tell you what it is, and you are allowed to think the shop is wrong.
How to play
- Read the board by the door. There is one at each end of the shop. It lists every aisle and which way to walk to reach it. You can start without it. You will come back to it.
- Load your arms at a cage. You can carry four things at a time.
- Remember that you can only put down the thing on top. The pile in your arms works like a real pile: last one on, first one off. So the order you pick things up in is the order you have to put them away in.
- Walk to a shelf and press E. If it belongs there, it goes on. If it does not, nothing happens and the shop tells you where it keeps that one, and why.
- Do four for the same aisle in a row. Things for one aisle, one after another, are worth more than four things for four different aisles — and you only walk the once. That is the whole reason to think at the cage instead of at the shelf.
There is nothing to buy, no lives, and no way to lose. When the clock runs out the shift is over and you get your receipt.
Controls
| Input | What it does |
|---|---|
| Mouse | look around |
| W A S D or ← ↑ → ↓ | walk |
| Shift | slow down — useful in a tight aisle |
| E or left click | the one verb: pick up, put down, read a board |
| Esc or the pause button | pause, and the way back to Playpit |
| Fullscreen | hides the browser so the game has the whole screen. Press it again to bring the browser back |
How the shop is laid out
The shop is laid out the way a real one is: long runs of shelving with walkways between them, and a shelf faces the walkway it is on.
That matters more than it sounds. When you are holding something, the shelves that will take it light up — but you can only see the shelves on the walkway you are standing on. The back of the run beside you is solid. So every argument in this shop is a walk: you cannot stand in one place and compare two aisles.
The colour on a label helps, and only so far. Warm stripes are the five aisles in the left half of the shop and cool ones are the five in the right half, so the stripe tells you which way to set off. It never tells you which shelf.
Where we did not agree
This is the bit that is Freshfold's. When the shift ends you get a receipt, and printed on it are the three things you and the shop did not agree about — what you said, what it says, and how many other shoppers put it where you did.
Nineteen of the forty-eight things are arguable on purpose. Six Butter Crescents are filed with the cakes and biscuits, because it is butter folded into pastry — and plenty of people will tell you a croissant is bread. Chocolate Milk is in Drinks while a bottle of milk is on the Cold shelf. Baking Soda is in Cleaning, even though it says baking on the tub. Dog Biscuits are in Pet food, and they are still biscuits. Every one of those is defensible and none of them is obvious, which is the point.
Getting told no costs you nothing at all. It stays in your arms, the clock keeps going, and the shop gives you its reason in one line. Then you take it where it asked, or you try somewhere else.
Tips for a bigger shift
- Take four things for one aisle. One trip instead of four is worth more than anything else in the game, and the run pays on top.
- Load in reverse. You can only put down the thing on top, so pick up the one you want to shelve last first.
- Do not carry one thing across the shop. If it lives in the far aisle, wait until you have a few going the same way.
- The cage at the back is worth a trip. A whole quarter of the delivery is up there, and most of the shop's best arguments are on it.
- When you are not sure, guess and keep moving. A wrong guess costs nothing and it tells you where the thing really lives — and it is what ends up on your receipt.
Good to know
- Nothing in this shop is a real brand. Every label is a kind of thing you can buy anywhere, written in this game's own words.
- The receipt counts real answers and never rounds them into a percentage. It starts from the four answers of the one shopper we asked, and it grows every time you play or open somebody else's link — their answers come with the link.
- Nothing is sent anywhere. Your shifts and the answers you have seen are kept in this browser only, so a different device starts you fresh.
- Nothing to buy, nothing to unlock, no coins, no lives and no sign-up. No chat, and no way for players to contact each other.
- This one needs a mouse and a keyboard. You look with the mouse, so it does not work on a phone or a tablet.
Hushrow is the same job in a library, and it will not shelve a joke book about animals with the animals. If you came here for the other kind of sorting — the one with the tubes — Glasswort is that, and there is a guide to water sort puzzles and a solver that finishes the ones that will not come out. For a different sort of tidy job, Stackpark is about fitting things together. And if you would rather be outside, Fetchmead is a meadow where you catch birds with a net and fill a field guide.
