First Impressions: Librarian: Tidy Up the Arcane Library!

Librarian: Tidy Up the Arcane Library
Systems: Windows, Steam OS, Linux
Release Date: April 30, 2026
Publisher: ArtRising
Developer: ArtRising
Time Currently Spent: 2 Hours 30 Minutes
Playthrough Videos on YouTube

So you're telling me that there's a game where you're stuck in a library by yourself, and you have to put away over 3,000 books on the correct shelf?  And that's it?

This game is 100% my jam.

I'm two and a half hours in, and I've only put away 4.88% of the books.  I've put away 150 books.  There's an achievement where you have to put away all 3,072 books in fewer than 3 hours.  That achievement is not for me.  

Because this is an arcane library, and you are presumably a student at this arcane institution, you do know some spells from the beginning that you can use to help you organize books to a certain extent.  I wouldn't actually know because I didn't know spells existed in the game until I had already played for a literal hour.  Not that I'll be using magic at all, because that's not why I'm playing this game.  I'm not playing to see how fast I can put away books, or to build out my spell tree to maximize the number of books I can put away in 60 seconds.  I'm playing this game because I love organizing books.

About five years ago, when Conklederp and I reorganized our house, we moved our two bookshelves into the basement. I was excited because it meant I got to take down all the books from the shelf and then put them back in a slightly more efficient way.  About six months ago, I did the same thing because I wanted to make room on the bottom shelves of the bookshelf for some of our board games.  At the same time, I reorganized the two bookshelves I have full of DVDs and Blu-ray discs.

I know I'm not playing this game very efficiently.  I'm not taking notes on which shelf each genre of book is kept so that I don't have to run back to the stairs at the front (back?) of the library that has a visual diagram.  I also don't organize the stack of up to 10 books I can carry by where they are supposed to go in the library to minimize the time I'm spending putting books away.  I'm going to take my time with this game and enjoy every hour of it, because once I got mentally past the sheer number of books in the game (albeit a bit sad that you can't actually open any of the books), I fell into my kind of satisfying zen game.  This is a game I play to mentally decompress while on my lunch break at work.

There's plenty more that I haven't gone into yet, but I will save that for the eventual Game EXP article.  So I'll see y'all in about 50 hours.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian

Just Let Me Be A Freak