The Sorting Bureau

About this game

Every Item Has Its Place

A desk covered in someone's life. Vintage buttons, foreign coins, delicate stamps, old gears, and forgotten sweets. Pick up each item and find its place.

Every Material Has Its Sound

Metal clinks. Fabric rustles. Wood thuds. Each item snaps into its container with a satisfying click. The kind of sound you want to hear over and over.

Stories Told Through Objects

Every request comes from someone real. A watchmaker and his gears. A pastry chef and her molds. A manga artist buried in brushes and sketches. They bring their boxes and ask for help. Sort through their things and you'll get to know them a little.

Your Evening Ritual

New boxes show up every morning. New clients, new items, new sorting rules. Some evenings you sort a whole desk. Some evenings you just sit with the cat.

Features

• Sort hundreds of tactile items across dozens of themed desks
  
• No timers, no penalties, no scores. Play at your own pace
  
• ASMR sound design: every material sounds different
  
• Charming clients, each with their own personality and story
  
• A quiet room that's still there when you come back
  
• A cozy workshop tucked away in a quiet Tokyo neighborhood

Latest news

• Patch Notes·27 Aug 2026Official

  Update 1.0.6: Order balance

  Orders used to arrive with a good part of the work already done. This one is about fixing that, plus two other things that decide what lands on your desk. What changed - An order doesn't show up half sorted anymore. It could happen that more than half the things were already sitting in tidy piles by the right boxes, sometimes almost the whole desk came like that, and there was nothing left for you to do. Now a much smaller part arrives ready. - Orders repeat less. Two in a row could hold pretty much the same things. A familiar mix gets turned down more often now, even when it's a different client and you're sorting by something else. - Photo orders come out even. When a row was short, the extra things piled onto one kind, five of these and one of that. Now they're spread evenly and there's a cap on how many show up, so the rows are the same length and the edge of the sheet isn't ragged. We're still working on this one. And one more thing One more fix went out last night. Some players were getting stuck. If you went through the letters in an unusual order, the shelf could end up empty afterwards, with no clear way to go on, and it looked like the game had ended or broken. That shouldn't happen anymore. If you run into anything like it, please write, we'll fix it fast. Dmitry
  Read full article on Community Announcements (Dmitrii Zaitsev)

• Patch Notes·26 Aug 2026Official

  Update 1.0.5: Controls, and settings for them

  Sorry about the controls in 1.0.4. We changed the way things stick together, and building piles got harder instead of easier. Most of that is rolled back now, and the parts people disagree about have moved into the settings, so you can set them the way your hands like. From here on we'll be more careful with control changes, and when there's a call to make, it goes into the settings rather than getting decided for you. Fixed Things you put down next to each other stick together again the way they did before 1.0.4. Short flicks count too, not only slow drags. Throwing a handful at a box no longer scatters half of it into the corner. A pile in the path takes the item in properly now, and items land with a bit of spread instead of stacking on one spot. Setting values kept the previous language after a mid-game language switch. Added A Controls tab in the settings, with three things you can now choose yourself. Pick things up by the handful, on or off. Throw strength, gentle or normal or strong. Add buried things to the handful, if you liked reaching under the pile. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/46062643/1fbbba2508d7b9508a38d7ab9ad02a0fb0170b50.png If something still feels wrong, or you want an option that isn't there yet, write it in the comments. Getting controls to suit everyone at once is the hardest part of this game for us, and hearing what bothers you beats deciding on our own. If Steam hasn't picked the update up yet, restart it, or switch it to offline mode and back.
  Read full article on Community Announcements (Dmitrii Zaitsev)

• Patch Notes·25 Aug 2026Official

  Update 1.0.4: Piles and fixes

  Added - A Recommended settings button in the graphics tab. It matches vertical sync to your monitor and clears the manual frame cap. Fixed - Piles formed when you didn't ask for them. Putting an item back where you took it no longer makes one, and a pile won't swallow things buried under other stuff. - The game ran as many frames as your monitor could take, and laptops ran hot for a game about sorting buttons. On fast displays it syncs to every other frame now. - All Four Windows and Click didn't show up when you earned them. - English wrote the temperature as "+30°". Each language sets its own form now. - The day screen kept the font of whatever language it loaded first. Changed - Piles no longer catch things you throw past them. A pile used to slow down anything flying over it, and in practice it swallowed throws meant for a box. Throws go where you aim them now. If Steam hasn't picked the update up yet, restart it, or switch it to offline mode and back. Dmitry
  Read full article on Community Announcements (Dmitrii Zaitsev)

• Patch Notes·24 Aug 2026Official

  Update 1.0.3: FPS limit and fixes

  Added - An FPS Limit in the graphics settings. Unlimited, 30, 60 or 120. A player wrote that their laptop was overheating and there was nothing in the game to turn the load down, so now there is. Picking a limit switches vertical sync off, the two don't work together. Fixed - Picking up a big handful played the sound of every item in it at once. It's quieter now and it doesn't drop out. - The pause menu opened underneath the memory book and the order card. Escape was pressed, the menu was open, and nothing in it could be clicked. - The client's note sat over the boxes, and nothing told you a click puts it away. Now it slides into the corner on its own after you put three things in a box. The clip stays there, click it and the note comes back. - If you play with "Spread Out the Pile Automatically" on, the replay started from the original piles instead of the desk you actually worked on. Now it starts from the one you had. If Steam hasn't picked the update up yet, restart it, or switch it to offline mode and back. Dmitry
  Read full article on Community Announcements (Dmitrii Zaitsev)

• Patch Notes·23 Aug 2026Official

  Update 1.0.2: More fixes

  Fixed - Throwing things went stiff in the last patch. Items barely moved and landed short of where you threw them. That's back to how it was, sorry, that one was on us. - The game ignored your system language and always started in English. It now picks up your language on the first launch, the way it was supposed to from the start. - Progress could stall if you finished an order before reading the letter that came with it. The next order wouldn't unlock and you had to leave the slot and come back in. - Some cases where clicking a puzzle piece twice left you with a duplicate of it, and the order wouldn't finish. This came up on Steam Deck too, with two pieces sitting on top of each other. - Some cases where pieces from an interrupted assembly got stuck instead of going back into the box. - "The Bureau Waited for You" didn't unlock if you played every day. It was waiting a full 24 hours instead of simply the next day. - The camera for the window photos arrived a day after spring was already over, so you'd wait another year for that last shot. - We went through the text and the way client notes are put together, so they hold up better. If you run into something like those two and it still happens, please tell us on the forums with the details. That's how we find them. Getting the update If Steam hasn't picked it up yet, restart Steam, or switch it to offline mode and back online. You can also open the game's properties, go to Installed Files and hit Verify integrity of game files, and Steam will light up the update button. p.s. We're still reading everything, the forums, the reviews, Discord. The stiff throw was found by a player who noticed it the same day, and that's how most of this list happened. There are two of us here, and we keep fixing things as they turn up. Dmitry
  Read full article on Community Announcements (Dmitrii Zaitsev)