The Wild World of Nut Sort

While I possess a number of personality defects, one of the worst is my ability to waste my own free time, at which I am proficient. If you were wondering, this is a particularly dangerous quality when it comes to games. Not only will I spend dozens of hours fishing and amassing every plant, potion, and rusty sword I can get my grubby little hands on in an open-world game, this also makes it easy for me to sink into the absolute worst mobile games with feverish, terrifying focus.

Enter: Nut Sort.

As ever, I wasn’t intending to download a crappy mobile game when I opened the App Store on the day I discovered Nut Sort. My purpose was far more innocent: peruse some games and put my languishing Apple Arcade subscription to work. But as I scrolled through the top free games, I was taken aback by one particular title—Nut Sort: Color Sorting Game (at the time, it was holding down the 28th position). Naturally, I downloaded it and began playing immediately.

This game is instantly recognizable if you’ve ever played any other crappy mobile game, because you’ve seen it in an ad before. In these ads, the Hand of a Foolish and Incompetent God moves colored nuts between different bolts, attempting to sort each color onto its own bolt, but badly. The Hand defies even the simplest logic and inevitably fails to solve the puzzle. Ominous text hanging over the puzzle pejoratively shows a “brain age” ticking up with every failed move, implying that the Hand is attached to a body with an old and feeble mind. Sometimes an elderly woman shakes her head in a disapproving manner. Perhaps you, who are neither old nor stupid, will be enticed to download the game and demonstrate a perfectly respectable, youthful brain controlling your hand. (Rope and water sorting are also popular choices for this type of ad—yes, water, that famously sortable substance.)

There’s a lot more to unpack there without even going near the eugenics bent of it all, but shuffling colorful rectangles around is, more or less, all there is to this type of game. Though the mechanics are intuitive (not to brag, but as a millennial, mindlessly tapping a touchscreen is something I am good at) the first three levels of Nut Sort are still tutorials. Then the training nuts come off, the ads begin, the cycle repeats. To my surprise, one of the first ads I encountered was for Nut Sort—a different one, which gave me pause. I returned to the App Store and found no less than, and in fact many more than, a dozen nut sort games that describe themselves with varying levels of appeal:

• “Fill tubes and get inspired by thousands of colors.” (Colors observed: seven.)
• “With mysterious nuts that keep you guessing…every round is packed with fun and excitement.” (Mysterious nuts! Expressing oneself through language can be so beautiful.)
• “Are you ready to prove yourself as a skilled color sorting master among the chaos of multicolored nuts?” (I can only hope.)
• “How to play – imagine a pile of nuts of different colors scattered all over the place.” (Consider my imagination tickled.)
• “Can you rise to the occasion and become the ultimate maestro of nuts and bolts?” (Future generations will refer to me as “Nut Maestro;” I shall insist.)

I downloaded seven other similar games that appeared reputable enough to not give my phone a virus and played through their tutorials, too. Initially, I thought it might be fun to play each and figure out which Nut Sort—if any—deserved the title of the One True Nut Sort, but this exercise quickly proved too irritating to continue. It’s not that I thought that I would discover some untold merit in a game called “Nut Sort,” but surely something had pushed it into the top free games? Instead, I found each of these games to be depressingly similar, from the sparkles and confetti that flutter over the screen when you complete a level down to the types and frequency of ads that appear. If there was ever an original Nut Sort, it is perfectly camouflaged amongst its imitators. They are mostly named using some configuration of the words “color,” “nut,” “bolt,” “puzzle,” and “sort.” A copy of a copy of a copy. Some have useless extras tacked on. Nut Sort-Color Puzzle Games has islands to look at. Nuts Sort Master has a friendly looking mascot named Screwman.

I have progressed the furthest in my original download, Nut Sort: Color Sorting Game, which has absolutely no features of note other than a nameless cartoon mascot with fox ears on the loading screen. I have fixated on it for no real reason other than it was first, and I cannot be bothered to progress equally in each game. For more than one hundred levels, I have diligently sorted nuts that were colorful, chaotic, and, yes, mysterious. Have I had fun? I have not had fun at all. What I have had is ample time to wonder…why? Why does this exist?

Here is an overly optimistic and generous answer: Solving puzzles is good for brain health. (This is how they get you.) The colloquialism “use it or lose it” more or less applies to our brains in the same way it applies to vacation or sick days; neuroplasticity is a remarkable quality that allows our brains to constantly adapt and reform connections based on environmental stimuli or deficits. Thus, the thinking goes, the reasoning and logic-based decision-making that enables us to successfully solve puzzles would only help reinforce those cognitive capabilities as we age. Researchers at Texas A&M found that adults who maintain a higher level of cognitively stimulating activity showed better memory, attention, and processing speed.

Another overly optimistic and generous answer is that puzzle games provide a moment of solace, reprieve, or distraction. Sorting and match-three games have levels that are momentarily challenging—not so easy as to be boring, but usually not so difficult that you delete the app forever and chuck your phone or tablet into the nearest body of water. In this way, they facilitate a sense of “flow” wherein a player can maintain a high level of attention on the task at hand and a low level of stressful or self-referential thinking. You feel less stressed because you’re paying close attention to something other than your own spiraling thoughts. Scientific studies have also found the dopaminergic reward systems in our brains are more active during a flow state. In short, crushing levels feels satisfying because they’re easy to focus on and rewarding to complete.

These mental benefits are a common throughline in ads. Many of them advertise these games as a way to improve cognitive function. But whether a game like Nut Sort really embodies the full measure of a cognitively simulating flow state activity, is, perhaps, a different question. Brain training games aren’t a new concept; Brain Age: Train Your Brain in Minutes a Day! first debuted on the Nintendo DS in 2005. Since then, and especially with the rise of smartphones, brain training has evolved into an entire industry based on the idea that playing brain training games can improve a person’s real-world cognitive function and performance of day-to-day tasks. In 2023, the market for brain training software was valued at $8 billion. However, the science behind the software is much less clear-cut than the marketing implies.

Whether a person can truly improve cognitive function through training games has been a topic of debate since the industry’s inception. The Stanford Institute on Longevity and the Berlin Max Planck Institute for Human Development released a statement in 2014, signed by more than 70 neuroscientists and psychologists, that attested to a lack of evidence that “playing brain games improves underlying broad cognitive abilities, or that it enables one to better navigate a complex realm of everyday life.” Shortly after, more than 100 scientists signed a response published through Cognitive Training Data that vehemently disagreed with the assertion that there is no evidence supporting the efficacy of brain training games. Later research used these conflicting statements as a basis for further study. In a 2016 literature review by Simons et al., researchers found that brain training offers little to no lasting benefit for real-world cognition. While training a specific task may improve the ability to perform the trained task, it is ultimately better to simply take the time to engage in targeted practice of a task.

As much as we might wish it so, there is no magic bullet that will ensure perfect cognitive health throughout our time on Earth, despite what the ads might have us believe. Activities that challenge and engage our brains are only one small piece of the puzzle. Eating a healthy diet, exercising, socializing, and getting enough sleep are also important, but less good at selling mobile games.

Now follows the realistic and pessimistic answer to the question, “why does a game like Nut Sort exist?” It is, perhaps obviously and more cynically, “money.” Lack of features aside, ads make these games nearly unplayable. Win a level? Ad. Restart a level? Ad. Put your phone down to complete a task relevant to your actual life before opening the game again? Ad. Forgot you were playing the free version of the game? Don’t worry, there are banner ads at the bottom of each level.

Consequently, I often do not feel like I am playing a game. Rather, I feel like I am giving my fingers a pointless little exercise between opportunities to generate ad revenue. The cost for a premium ad-free experience varies, if it is available at all, for an App Store charge of $5.99 to $9.99. In this regard, Nut Sort: Color Sorting Game is especially egregious compared with other games—after a 3-day free trial, it costs $2.99 per week (over $155 per year!) for “VIP access.” Anyone who has played a game like Candy Crush, Project Makeover, or Two Dots is already accustomed to season passes or watching an ad in exchange for extra moves or lives, but games in the Nut Sort genre offer so little in the way of meaningful entertainment that I am acutely aware that minutes spent playing are minutes of my life I will never get back. On principle, I refuse to also pay in dollars for the privilege.

Still, the ads become especially grating once the games have introduced mechanics that create an additional challenge, which might include restrictions like locking a bolt until a certain number of nuts are sorted or only revealing the color of the top nut on a bolt. Often, this means I will lock myself out of progress on a level by inadvertently exhausting all of the moves I can make without creating an additional bolt (which you can do by watching an extra-long ad) or restarting the level (after watching an ad). At this point, Nut Sort: Color Sorting Game becomes a frustrating trial of memory where I have to remember what worked and avoid the moves that locked up my nuts. Failing a level feels unfair in a way that an unlucky cascade of gems or candy does not.

Most of the interstitial video ads are for other mobile games. In Nut Sort: Color Sorting Game, many ads showcase the developer’s other games—Tripledot Studios is also behind Woodoku – Wood Block Puzzles, Solitaire Classic Now, Car Out! Parking Spot Games, and a handful of other SEO-friendly titles. Other ads are for games like Royal Match (Dream Games), Township (Playrix), and Vita Mahjong (Vita Studio). The ads range from irritating (Hand of Idiot God) to cringeworthy and downright predatory (pregnant mother in grocery store caught shoplifting is saved by the generosity of a stranger who earned a fortune playing solitaire for Real Cash Prizes, and you could too). When I encountered an ad alerting me that Nut Sort was out of date and needed updating, which I could do by going to the App Store and downloading a different Nut Sort (sneaky!), I suddenly understood how my grandfather once ended up with half a dozen same-but-different solitaire apps installed on his tablet.

In this context, the endless ad loop feels all the more predatory. While most gaming websites focus on console releases, mobile games have a much bigger reach. Nearly three billion people play mobile games and roughly 63% of people who regularly play games worldwide are “casual” gamers, a category which encapsulates puzzle games like Nut Sort as well as match-three games and endless runners. Not only are these ads generating a significant amount of revenue for the companies who make the games, they are also reaching a significant number of people. Nut Sort: Color Sorting Game is bright, enticing, and easy to learn. The things that are beneficial about a flow state—momentary relaxation with little self-referential thinking—also feed into the addictive nature of mobile games. Casual mobile games like Nut Sort are designed to keep as many people playing as possible for as long as possible. Tripledot boasts 25 million daily active users across its suite of games; for comparison, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, one of the most lauded video games of 2025, peaked at 145,063 concurrent players on Steam.

In my search for an answer to the question of why Nut Sort: Color Sorting Game was sitting so high in the App Store when this descent into unreality began, I went down such rabbit holes I could not have anticipated. At the bottom of one, I found Swagbucks, a self-described loyalty program that rewards consumers for “the everyday activities they’re already completing online like searching the web, playing games, watching videos, or shopping online where you’ll make money through cash back rebates.” Several months ago, Swagbucks was offering an opportunity to earn money for progressing levels in Nut Sort. I barely made it through the hundred levels I did play; I could not have completed five hundred levels in two days even if you did pay me twelve dollars.

I believe it is fair to assume that more people have encountered a Nut Sort-like in the wild than any game Geoff Keighley has dubbed a Game of the Year contender. This experiment has, if nothing else, demonstrated to me that when people argue every six months on the Twitter replacement du jour about why games are or are not art, the types of games they are talking about are a mere drop in the bucket of interactive entertainment. There is a deluge of slop available to anyone with a handheld device, internet access, and a dream.

I would call sorting nuts a Sisyphean task, but I think even Sisyphus could find purpose in his work. I believe it is more apt to say that it is a Promethean experience, in which I, having discovered fire (a crappy mobile game) am therefore punished for my knowledge in learning that thousands of games like this exist, tricking people into playing them under the closest you can get to false pretenses without getting fined by the FTC (and sometimes you actually do get fined by the FTC). My liver has been psychically pecked into oblivion by the realization that the industry exists in this way, making money off of self-referential ads and preying on people who so cannot afford to fall prey to the American medical system that they would attempt to ward off cognitive decline with naught but an app for defense. My liver eaten again by the knowledge that people would play a game so miserable as Nut Sort to earn a small amount of cash. Daily I am tormented by the righteous eagle of capitalism, that spectacular herald of violence, always making me aware of what it will take given the slightest opportunity.

Outside of the Nut Sort experiment, I typically spend my lunch break reading or knitting, two activities that, anecdotally, allow me to experience a much greater and more satisfying sense of mental stimulation and flow. Thinking, processing, and problem solving are skills I already practice in these hobbies, which also provide me a sense of fulfillment. Every time I opened the app, I felt a void of fulfillment settle heavily into my chest. Every time, I thought to myself that surely there is no benefit an app called Nut Sort could offer me that would be greater than the satisfaction I feel in understanding a knitting project well enough to fix a mistake, or reading a book that elicits any kind of genuine emotion. This is correct. When I received a notification that my phone storage was nearly full, I knew it was time, and made my peace. As I am Prometheus, so too do I become Heracles, releasing myself from the hold of Nut Sort (deleting the wretched apps from my phone).