Librarian: Tidy Up the Arcane Library!
tl;dr: fun for the first few hours, but then it feels super hollow, especially when it intentionally invites you to overstay.
Librarian: Tidy Up the Arcane Library! (2026) is a first-person game about shelving thousands of books with the help of magic. Which I had to admit, I was having fun with. Basically, this resembles my past life.
But the fun only stayed for an hour or two. Because after that, design flaws surface plentifully.
Take the main mechanic of putting books onto a shelf. This is the main gameplay loop that you’ll spend dozens of hours repeating. But the game does not provide ANY reasonable quality-of-life features that make such a mechanic fun AT ALL!
To put a book onto a shelf, you have to aim your crosshair at an empty space on the shelf, then press (X) on the gamepad to place the book. To take a book? You also need to press the same button (X)! This results in the game frequently misinterpreting your intention and taking a book from the shelf instead of putting down the book in your hand (and vice versa). ESPECIALLY WHEN YOU HAVE TO AIM AT EMPTY SPACE WHICH IS IMPOSSIBLE FROM SOME CAMERA ANGLES NEAR THE WALL BECAUSE THERE ARE OTHER BOOKS ON THE SHELF ALREADY!!!!
Just… why not assign another dedicated button for placing books? (Y) on the gamepad is still unused!!
You can even tackle this issue from another angle! Take The Witness (2016), for example. It’s also a first-person puzzle game like this one. But when the player decides to “engage” with a sub-puzzle, the game pans the camera into the “front” position of that sub-puzzle, ensuring the player can aim unambiguously at any object on the screen!
The game also simplemindedly handles the shelving system. Each shelf has 10 (or 3 or 5) rigid empty spaces for books. And when you place a book in an empty space, that’s the final position of the book! You cannot “push” the book to the left/right neighboring empty space! So have fun counting the number of empty spaces if your first book on the shelf happens to be vol.6!!!
Heck, the game should even implement the bare-minimum system that’s similar to IRL book shelving: pushing multiple books to the left/right on the shelf. For example, I may have placed previously found books on the shelf as:
1,3,4,5,-,-,-,-,8,10
Then, when I find vol.2 later, I should be able to easily push vol.3-5 one step to the right and insert vol.2 in between. That’s a fun and natural way to organize the shelf.
But this is a game about shelving books using magic, you may ask? Then why the f_ck is there a “shelving books without magic” achievement???
Who cares about achievements, you may ask? Good point, actually – players have no obligation to do any achievement they don’t feel like doing.
But the existence of achievements can convey another thing: the developer thinks this path is interesting enough for players to explore. So they put an achievement there as a beacon, nudging players to give it a try. WELL, IF THEY’RE GOING TO NUDGE THE PLAYER THAT WAY, THEN AT LEAST MAKE THE F_CKING NO-MAGIC RUN NOT THIS PAINFUL TO PLAY!!!!
Sigh… Okay, so it seems that this game sells shelving with magic. Apparently, after you complete 2 shelves, you unlock a skill point which can be used to buy a magic spell to help with shelving faster/easier.
This poses another problem: the available magical spells are no-brainer designs. No skill tree. No prerequisites. Every spell costs the same amount of skill points to unlock. Out of 5 spells to choose from, one of them clearly dominates the others. Resulting in the same gameplay loop for everyone.
And even with magic, organizing 3072 books onto the shelf still ask you to play the game for 3 hours (as can be seen with the “speedrun” achievement). THREE F_CKING HOUR OF REPETIVELY USING THAT DOMINATE SPELL, WAIT FOR COOLDOWN, THE APPLY THE SPELL AGAIN AND AGAIN??????
I think the developer wrongly estimated the number of books to put into the game here. More doesn’t always mean better. Too many and it becomes tedious. Quantity means nothing without quality.
Lastly, the organized books on the shelves look majestic. But it also raises questions about why every book series comes in 10 volumes. Won’t there be a single-book series at all (one that’s so complete in itself that the author refuses to “drag on” with a 2nd volume)? Or aren’t there epic series that span half a hundred volumes, if not more? Why just 10?
Why does every book have the same page count, occupying the same slot size on the shelf? Real-world books vary a lot in size. And more than one series can occupy the same shelf just fine… In fact, there’s no need to go to such great lengths as to put all the books of the same series back-to-back. That’s neat, but that’s also OCD. If you establish some kind of categorization, like Dewey Decimal, then you can just place similar books roughly on the same bookcase; no need for them to be on exactly the same shelf. That’s enough for searching for a book you’re looking for.
Most importantly, why does a series of 10 books fit the shelves perfectly? Real-world bookshelves either have empty space left over (so you might decorate them with book stoppers, clocks, busts, etc.), or they’ll be so dense that you have to place some books horizontally on top of other books. Also, real public libraries often have lots of vacant space on the shelves anyway since people take books out of the shelves to read.
The fact that a series fits the shelves suggested that the shelves are the most important aspect of this library, not the books. Which means the library owner prefers style over substance, ruling out series that can’t be fitted onto the shelves in the first place. Consider this: if the author of a math series, which had already published 10 volumes, wrote another book to expand the boundary of knowledge, where would the new book go on the shelves???
You don’t have to trust me. But if you go see screenshots where players are doing the “deliberately disarrange all of the books” achievement, this is a letter from Merlin (the library owner, who thought himself is so wise, but actually hollow to the core) to the player, quoted verbatimly:
To Librarian,
I have the best books. Thousands of beautiful, high-quality books. People come from all over to see my collection—it’s a magnificent sight. I had a vision to build the best library in the world, maybe the greatest ever.
But I look at the shelves today, and what do I see? A TOTAL DISASTER. The books are everywhere! No order, no system, just a complete and total mess. It’s a disgrace. You were lazy, you were careless, and you were disrespectful to my best and most amazing gold-standard organization.
You had one job: “Put the books back.” Just one job! And you failed. You’re low-energy, you’re incompetent, and you’ve turned my beautiful library into a big mess of a warehouse. I don’t hire people who make messes, I hire people who win. And you? You are a loser.
I’ve decided to clean up this library. And I’m starting with you.
YOU’RE FIRED! Get out of my library!
Principal Merlin
University of Celesthall
I don’t know whether the developers intended it as a joke. But after spending nearly ten hours completing a challenge that the game itself encouraged through an achievement, receiving a letter that calls the player lazy, incompetent, and a loser doesn’t feel funny. It feels strangely hostile. Rather than rewarding curiosity or commitment, the game seems to mock the player for engaging with content that the developers themselves put there.
So, yeah, let me make it loud and clear. To the developer: F_CK YOU AND GO TO HELL!!!
Originally published on: Steam
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