LIBRARIAN: TIDY UP THE ARCANE LIBRARY!
- Hubert Spala
- Jun 22
- 4 min read
I am nearly 40 years old. This means a lot of things! First, my bones are aching, spine always complains and I need to watch what I eat hours before bed if I want to have a solid sleep session. And second, cleaning is not as big of a tiresome chore as it used to be! I mean, it still sucks, don’t get me wrong – but at the very least now, once completed, it feeds my brain that delicious cocktail of happy chemicals that make me feel accomplished in a day. Magic, really.
And so, it wasn’t as big of a surprise when I discovered how much I actually enjoy the act of cleaning in itself. Especially when it is in a game. The filter of entertainment somehow can transform the most mundane task into sweet delight. With LIBRARIAN: TIDY UP THE ARCANE LIBRARY! the task of organizing over 3000 books did not look daunting at all – it looked like enormous pile of fun just waiting to be tackled. I can’t tell why it worked on me so well. It is, likely, a complex mix of reasons. Bringing order into chaos? Seeing the slow but visible decluttering of this once pristine space? The pleasure of watching the shelves filling up? The challenge to get the achievement for doing the sorting the hard way? Yeah. Many things contributed to my satisfaction here.
It is a rough deal to review a game like this because there aren’t really any complexities here to dig into. No narrative to investigate, no mechanical depths to dismantle, no grand discoveries of clever game designs to shine a light onto. It’s just… It’s exactly as written on the tin. Tidy up the arcane library. Magical mishap with a nasty cute critter let all the magical tomes all scattered around and you have the lovely task to put them in correct spots and order. You can use magic to aid you, sure, but it is optional. The degree of “challenge” – and the quotation marks here are as heavy as I can make them – is entirely up to you.
But despite the simplicity of the core premise there are things I can praise here. As I sit with a cup of coffee on this sweltering, summer day, I can ponder as to why this game works so well. First, the design language. The darn books. They are fantastically coded. See, each category has its own visual flair. Books about Psychology will always be deeply red, whole books focusing on hexes are always black with shining red font. But it is not all just simple coloring – that would be too basic, too straightforward. And so, white books can be either about philosophy, healing or holy magic. It is in the details where you can differentiate between them! Healing tomes would have red woven into them here and there. Holy magic has that bright gold front and center. Philosophy books, meanwhile, will be more austere. Serious.
This kind of design language is crafted into every book family with love. I could list them all, really! Mystery and Romance books having more modern design aesthetics. Law books, deep green, all look oh so very stern, with minimal designs. Spellbooks, on the other hand, follow the same unique cover and spine design with big shiny gemstone circles in bright colors, you can’t miss them. Math books might be plenty, but they all share the double banded covers on top and bottom. Bah, even size matters! You can always expect an alchemy book to be a hefty one, while tomes for the art of Stealth will be usually on the smaller side. It’s a brilliantly made system, that makes the whole process extremely intuitive.
I think the best compliment to this visual fidelity lays in the fact, that there are plenty of players who disable the entire interface to play the game raw, relying entirely on their gods given ability to look at the covers, the book spines, read the titles and organize them properly without any contextual aid from the game. And it works, like a charm, too!
And so, I can give this game my highest praise. I cannot call it a masterpiece, because, well… It’s not a game that even tries to be one. I wouldn’t feel right calling it that, even though I could play this kind of formula till dawn of time. Gosh, give me new libraries with new layouts, new books to sort, and I would gladly pay a monthly subscription to get a new stage to clean up every month! But it is still a very simple concept, without any grand ideas to call it a masterwork of any kind. It is, however, perfect in what it wants to be. And an intensely pleasurable experience to anyone who finds tranquility in sorting things out.
With LIBRARIAN: TIDY UP THE ARCANE LIBRARY! is exactly what the title sells. There are no gimmicks here, no subversions, no twists. It’s a little over 3000 books in a scattered pile, rows of empty shelves and you, with hours to burn cleaning that mess up. And what can I say… I will do it again. I would do it at infinitum, if I only were given such an option. Feed me, dear devs. Make more stages. More books. Never stop. This is your moneymaker, if you let it become one!
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