Splash Sort: Tub Tidy 3D

Splash Sort: Tub Tidy 3D

Bath time is over. The toys never got the message.

They are still floating in there — dolphins, toy cars, drums, letter blocks, puzzle cubes, kites, juice cartons, tiny rubber figures — sliding over one another, sinking half out of sight and bobbing back up somewhere else entirely. One tubful at a time, you are going to get every last one of them out.

THE CRATES DECIDE, THE TUB DELIVERS

Look at the crates sitting above the water before you touch anything. They tell you exactly what this round wants: three green crocodiles, three dolphins, three red letter blocks. That is your shopping list. Now go and find them.

Tap a toy the crates are asking for and it goes towards that order. Land all three and the crate closes in a splash, water flying everywhere, and a fresh order takes its place. One finger, one tap, no dragging, no swiping, no combos to memorise.

You are never hunting blind, either. When three of a kind are showing on the surface together they glow with a soft outline. The game does not hide anything from you. It just buries it.

THE BENCH HOLDS FIVE

Here is where it gets interesting. The toy an order wants is not always reachable — it might be pinned under a drum, tucked behind a fire engine, or still somewhere below the surface and yet to float up. Meanwhile you can see other toys you know a later order will ask for.

So you bench them. Five round slots sit under the crates, and anything you lift that nothing currently wants waits there until its turn comes round. Get it right and a benched toy slots straight into a new order the moment that order appears, clearing almost for free.

Get it wrong and those five slots fill with things nobody ever asks for — and when the fifth one goes, the level is over. There is no clock anywhere on screen. Nothing ticks, nothing rushes you. Every bit of pressure in this game comes from five small circles and how carefully you spend them.

THINKING A ROUND AHEAD

The toys sit in layers, not spread out flat, and the water keeps shifting them. A pair you were saving can drift under something heavier while you are looking the other way, and clearing one order rearranges what you can reach for the next.

So the good players are not the fast ones. They are the ones holding one slot back for the crocodile they know is coming, and lifting a cube they do not need yet just to see what is underneath it. Levels are short, but most of them turn on two or three decisions.

A star meter in the corner climbs as orders close, and levels open one after another along a path that winds across the bathtub on the map. Some tubs are stacked deeper than others, some throw in more kinds of toy, and some run two orders side by side, which is when five slots starts to feel very small indeed.

TWENTY-SEVEN TOYS TO FISH OUT

Everything you pull out of the water is recorded on a display shelf in the bathroom. Toys you have not met yet sit there as grey silhouettes and pop into full colour the first time you find one — twenty-seven altogether. A tank, a rocket, a crocodile and a few others stay stubbornly grey for a good while. Each entry counts how many times you have cleared it and pays coins at ten, twenty-five and fifty.

A BATHROOM THAT BECOMES YOURS

Coins go straight back into the room. Brush icons sit on the tub, the shower curtain and the floor tiles — tap one and swap that piece for something else. A coral-blue tub with starfish round the rim, a soft pink one, a new curtain, fresh tiling underfoot. Mix them however you like; nobody is grading your taste.

Warm tiles, gold fittings, a rubber duck riding the bubbles. Change one piece at a time and the plain little bathroom you started in slowly becomes a room you designed. And it is the same room you play in: the tub on your map screen is your tub, the shelf is your shelf, and every level you clear pays for the next thing on it.

Tap. Match. Splash. Then go and pick a nicer tub.