Pill & Chill is surprisingly relaxing, even when you're causing absolute chaos

If you've spent any time doom scrolling on YouTube Shorts or TikTok in the last few months, you've probably stumbled across a live stream of someone sorting rice by color one grain at a time. With the recent rise in popularity of sorting games, I've been waiting for someone to turn it into a game, and now it's finally happened with Pill & Chill.

Okay, so it's not grains of rice, but I think all can be forgiven on that front. Pill & Chill is a pill sorting game that gives you a knife, a bunch of differently colored pills, and corresponding colored boxes to push them into. For some, this probably sounds like the worst thing imaginable. For me… For me, this touches all the parts in my brain that make happy signals. 

A choice between calm and chaos

The majority of sorting games share near-identical mechanics: pick up an item, find the right spot for it, put it back, earn points or currency or merely the satisfaction that order is incoming. Pill & Chill takes that familiar gameplay loop in a direction that completely threw me for a loop. 

Okay, in all honesty, the developers of Pill & Chill probably created the game to be played much like those live streams. I'm sure you're supposed to painstakingly shuffle the pills around and get them into their designated spots, slowly reducing the number of pills that need sorting. And that's exactly how I started out, but I made a realization during the third level of the demo that changed the game entirely. 

It turns out that you can fully embrace chaos mode and furiously swipe your mouse left and right, up and down, and the pills will fling themselves into the right spots. Once they're where they're supposed to be, there is no way to make them come back out again, and nothing that shouldn't be there will stay either. You can complete entire levels this way if you have the proper dedication and patience. 

There's a happy middle ground between calm sorting and chaotic blind hope, too. You can just push all of the pills towards a color, get all of the right ones firmly locked in place, then reset the board and move on to the next color. Pressing reset gathers any unsorted pills in the middle of the board, and it's incredibly satisfying to see the different colors disappearing from the pile. 

Going back for more

When I opened Pill & Chill, I was expecting to find a frustrating but annoyingly addictive sorting experience that would lose its appeal after a few levels. But there's something almost therapeutic about the act of violently shaking the mouse, a fairly universal sign of technological frustration, and actually seeing results. 

I ended up playing the demo for over two hours and completing it, then going back for more later because it was just plain fun. I even got my daughter involved and narrowly avoided losing my laptop for the evening while she took the calm route and painstakingly organized the pills one by one. On the plus side, this is good evidence that she secretly has a lot of patience, something that you'd never believe if you saw her in real life. 

And now here I am, three hours after shutting down my PC, and still wanting to play the demo again. You might think I've played too many demos recently (I have) and lost my mind (I haven't… But then I would say that, wouldn't I?) There's just something alarmingly fun about sorting pills, and suddenly those YouTube videos don't seem so ridiculous. 

Honestly, I kind of get it now. 

Pill & Chill is being developed by Quantum Vial Games and is set to release on November 17, 2026. Until then, I have a feeling I’ll keep going back to the demo if I need a little controlled chaos in my life.