About this game
Hushrow is a sorting game, and the sorting is the hard part. Not because the books are heavy or the clock is fast, but because you have to decide what each book actually is.
You are on a shift in a library. There are four trolleys of books and ten shelves to put them on. Pick up a book, walk it to the shelf you think it belongs on, and press one key. The shift lasts two and a half minutes. Your score is how many books you got away.
There are three shifts and you open them one at a time. The story room is one room and five shelves — clear every trolley before the clock and the whole library opens. Clear that, and you get the long hall: three rooms, twenty ranges and sixty-four books, where the far end is a proper walk.
Most sorting games ask you to match a colour to a colour. This one asks you where Jokes About Animals goes — with the funny stories, or with the animals. There is a real answer, the library will tell you what it is, and you are allowed to think the library is wrong.
How to play
- Read the board by the door. There is one at each way in. It lists every shelf and which way to walk to reach it. You can start without it. You will come back to it.
- Load your arms at a trolley. You can carry four books at a time.
- Remember that you can only put down the book on top. The pile in your arms works like a pile of books really works: last one on, first one off. So the order you pick them up in is the order you have to shelve them in.
- Walk to a shelf and press E. If the book belongs there, it goes on. If it does not, nothing happens and the library tells you where it keeps that one, and why.
- Do four for the same shelf in a row. Books for the same shelf, one after another, are worth more than four books for four different shelves. That is the whole reason to think at the trolley 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 card. Clearing every trolley before the clock is what opens the next shift — running out of time is not a loss, it just is not a pass.
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 |
The two rooms
The library is in two halves, and the shelves in the middle are the wall between them.
The room you start in holds the stories: picture books, funny ones, spooky ones, comics, and one shelf that keeps a whole series together whatever each book in it happens to be. Walk through the gap in the middle and the room behind it holds the true things: animals, space and science, long ago, how to make things, and sport.
The shelves in the wall face away from you until you walk through, so from the story room you are looking at the backs of them. That is on purpose. You have to pick a room before the library will help you at all.
Where we disagreed
This is the bit that is Hushrow's. When the shift ends you get a card, and on it are the three books you and the library did not agree about — what you said, what it says, and how many other readers put it where you did.
Sixteen of the forty-eight books are arguable on purpose. Dinosaur Days is filed under Long ago, because nothing in it is alive now. Plenty of people think a dinosaur is an animal and the animal shelf is where a child would look. How to Draw Comics is filed under How to make things, with the paper planes and the den building, and not with the comics. Both of those are defensible and neither of them is obvious, which is the point.
Getting told no costs you nothing at all. The book stays in your arms, the clock keeps going, and the library gives you its reason in one line. Then you take it where it asked, or you try somewhere else.
Tips for a bigger shift
- Pick four books for one shelf. Four in a row for the same shelf pay much more than one of each. Walking past three trolleys to get a set of four is usually still worth it.
- Load in reverse. You can only put down the book on top, so pick up the one you want to shelve last first.
- Do not carry one book across the building. If a book belongs in the other room, wait until you have a few going the same way.
- Read a board once. Ten shelves is more than anyone remembers on the first go, and thirty seconds spent in front of the map is cheaper than one wrong walk.
- When you are not sure, guess and keep moving. A wrong guess costs nothing and it tells you where the book really lives — and it is the thing that ends up on your card.
Good to know
- Every book, shelf and series in this library is made up. None of them is a real book.
- The card counts real answers and never rounds them into a percentage. It starts from the five answers of the one reader 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.
Freshfold is the same job in a supermarket, and it will not put a croissant with the bread. 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 Tuckbay is one car and one parking bay. And if you would rather be outside, Fetchmead is a meadow where you catch birds with a net and fill a field guide.
