Librarian: Tidy Up the Arcane Library!

I have zero interest in trying to complete this game quickly or using any of the spells to help in my task. Leave me to my books. It took me 25 meditative hours to sort them all one by one and I have never been more satisfied. 11/10.

This game had my full attention for over 13 hours (completed without using magic). I really hope Dev's expand this game, perhaps new maps or things to tidy because I absolutely enjoyed every minute of organising books to their correct shelves. For around a fiver, this is worth every penny! 10/10 Now if only my love of tidying the library could translate to tidying my room.

I had a good time with [i]Librarian[/i]. It is the kind of game you play when you want to play [i]something[/i], but you don't want to play [i]anything[/i]. Every gamer gets that kind of feeling sometimes when you're looking at your backlog and you just don't want to crack any of it right now. Or maybe the choices you have are just too sweaty after you've had a long day and you're just not in the mood. Or this is just your kinda thing to begin with. As far as jobsims go, this one is pretty straightforward and unfortunately has a definitive endpoint which puts it more in line with [i]Unpacking[/i] or [i]Power Wash Simulator[/i] rather than something like a mechanic sim or a farming sim that can just go on endlessly. It's a wonderful idea nevertheless and I don't think it would be fun to go to multiple libraries or have everything randomized to force replayability though a potential sequel could go [i]bigger[/i]. In any case, there is no mystery here - books have been scattered all over the place and need to be put back into their rightful spots and in the right order. Thankfully there are no single-volume books here to be sorted. While Unreal Engine seems like an odd choice for this game, it works perfectly and I did not encounter any bugs, though there are some oddities here and there like some invisible walls (more like poles) that need to be circumvented in some areas of the map. The library itself is beautiful and defaults to dynamic lighting to simulate a day/night cycle which can be disabled if you wish. When the lamps come on, it gives some corners a nice cozy feel. Books can be "force pulled" to your hands from a pretty generous distance and will snap into place when you shelve them. While in your hands, they can sort of be rearranged by scrolling the stack, but the order still remains FIFO. The music selection is appropriately ambient and does not grate on you, though one of them has an opening refrain that oddly makes me think of that ridiculous tune from King's Quest called [i]Girl in the Tower[/i], but it goes away immediately. Of course, you can mute it and just play your own tunes instead if you feel like it. Moreover, the book covers are fantastic and some have hilarious titles; they look like they could easily exist in the real world and some of the spine and cover designs are just gorgeous. It's a real shame that you can't actually open these books and flip through them. There are some things available to help you out in the form of major and minor magics. Major magics are gained by completing shelves and allow you to "cheat" the system and work really fast. Minor magics are simple abilities like jumping and sprinting to allow you to navigate the library easier which is especially handy since there's stairs at only one end of the room. The latter are pemitted (and a godsend) if you're chasing the "do it manually" achievement. It took me approximately 16.5 hours to reorganize the entire library manually, just under 3 hours using the major magics (which can be shaved in half if you don't make stupid decisions like I did) and about an hour to just put everything onto shelves willy-nilly (another achievement; protip: when shelving randoms, aim at the shelf plank instead of the space above to avoid picking books back up and improve your pace). Any other time was just me idling in pause because life doesn't care if I want to shelve fake books. I probably could have shaved some time off the manual run, but I was having fun "staging" the shelves so that the prettiest books were in the front - this serves absolutely no purpose and I've already deleted that save, so there's that. Some nice-to-haves would be the ability to examine a book while it's in your hand (if you want to see it from all angles, you'll just have to toss it and hope it falls the right way), to simply put down a book instead of heaving it across the room, to use left click to pick stuff up and put it down, and of course, be able to read some of them (obviously not ten full volumes, but a dustjacket write-up would have been great). Small thing that would have a big impact on improving the experience, but nothing worth getting riled up about. With my backlog, I shouldn't have spent the time playing this, but I enjoyed myself nevertheless. It occupies that perfect spot where I can play something without thinking too hard and just go zen and while I'm a little sad that it's over, I don't really want to do it again. At least not for a while. I'll go power wash some stuff in the mean time.