Librarian: Tidy Up the Arcane Library! stands out as one of the best Casual/Indie titles in recent memory.
94
Verdict
95%
Steam
—
IGDB
Verdict score based on confidence-adjusted Steam reviews?
Overwhelmingly Positive on Steam (95% positive from 8.7K reviews)
Active community with 20,639 concurrent players
Limited professional critic coverage
Librarian: Tidy Up the Arcane Library! is a single-player simulation. You need return scattered books to proper places in an Arcane Library. As completed rows of bookshelves, you can learn ability to improve your efficiency. Use your skills and strategies to shelve 3,072 books as quick as you can.
Runs well on modern hardware.
Last updated 1d ago
Before you play, I want to give you one crucial piece of advice: do your first playthrough without any [u]MAJOR[/u] magic usage (minor magic and the stone that activates for the last 10 books are fine to use). This game unfortunately sabotages its own magic (no pun intended) by introducing you to skills that automatically solve the premise of the game for you, leading to a very boring gameplay loop. I don't believe this is the way to experience the game, especially on your first playthrough. If you want to fully appreciate this title, I recommend doing a 100% achievement run in this order: 1. First playthrough with no major magic - take your time, familiarize yourself with the library and relax. 2. Second playthrough with major magic - you should know the library pretty well by now, so use everything at your disposal to get a run under 3 hours. 3. Third playthrough - put books down randomly without completing a single row to get the last achievement. This is the way I played the game, and I had a blast. It is very comforting and addictive to slowly clean up the library. When I launched the game, the first 5 hours just flew by - I was surprised by how invested I was from the get-go. It is a simple but very beautiful game with eye-watering music, and I'm really going to miss it. I definitely didn't expect to finish it in 3-4 days. It's hard to occupy your mind with dark thoughts when you're focused on occupying the shelves with them books. I really hope this gets a sequel in the future.
The game is fantastic, perfect for long relaxing play sessions, and to unwind from stress. I love putting on a long podcast and tuning out the world for a bit. The titles are hilarious and some I wish were actual ones. This game fulfills my love of books, and organizing. That being said... My ONLY gripe is about the use of A.I. There is absolutely no reason you couldn't have gone over the writing and book titles, there are god-knows how many proof-writers out there that would be willing to go over things. And that same comment goes to the artwork. Because of how harmful AI is, we shouldn't be giving into its use when people have been doing these things on their own for many many years. Is that slower than a machine? Yes, but we shouldn't replace people and their jobs with machines, especially when it's completely unnecessary. I do hope the developer will move away from its use. And that is the reason I'm giving a negative review. I genuinely hope to see more by these developers as the potential is 100% there. I hope to see either more levels or another game in the same style, though hopefully without the use of AI...
I had a lot of fun with this game, it introduced me to the 'tidy up' genre and many others as well. But I cannot in good conscience recommend this game when there are much better, AI-FREE alternatives. On my part, I missed the AI disclosure and only found out after I was done with the game, that is my fault. I am not against the use of AI in videogames SPECIFICALLY if it is used to debug/fix human code or similar scenarios - AI's only use case is to make a human task that needs meticulous and repetitive attention such as this more bearable. Unfortunately, this developer decided to forgo real human creativity for a shortcut instead for the paintings in this game. Did it affect my gameplay whatsoever? No. Did it sour my liking of this game? Absolutely, because it tells me a lot about what the dev values putting real effort into. Blatantly ignoring the real issues with AI 'art' jeopardizes not only other artists, but YOU as well, developer. And the fact that this has been brought up and not patched out of the game with real artworks is incredibly disappointing. You should know better. Instead, I insist on anyone looking for a similar magic/fantasy tidying game to go check out Shelves & Sorcery, an entirely human-made and clearly inspired game with a lot more variety and content, they deserve your money rather than this.
Reviews sourced from Steam. All reviews belong to their respective authors.
Data sourced from RAWG, Steam, IGDB, CheapShark, Wikipedia, HLTB, and GX Corner. Sources: rawg, steam, cheapshark, igdb.
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