Librarian: Tidy Up the Arcane Library!

This game is great for relaxing while watching some videos or listening to some podcast or music. My first run was without using any spells or unlocks and it took me about 14 hours. A second run using all spells took slightly more than 2 hours. Depending on how frustrated you get with seemingly teadious tasks, you can use more or less spells to naturally balance the experience for yourself. That being said, this is a game about sorting books. If you like cleaning stuff up, this is for you. If you want deep stories or heavy action, this is not the game for you.

This is the game that brought the “Tidy Up” genre to the front of all of our minds and sparked the influx of AI slop games of this nature popping up in the store quicker than chicken pox. Despite that, I personally really enjoyed this game. The actual organizing and cleaning up was satisfying and the powers/perks were balanced. Having the keys to unlock powers hidden around the room for you to find as you leveled up/explored was a great feature. I didn’t really mind the other modes needed to 100% the game, I honestly don’t care if I have to put each item back with no power (I’m insane). But the satisfaction of the special stage once you complete the game is quite satisfying to end with. Now the only real issue I have is the usage of AI in the game. I don’t mind the usage for the UI component as I can’t really comment on that. But I do think the usage of it for “three landscape paintings used as wall decorations” was a bit lame. The wall decorations really didn’t add or subtract anything from the full experience, so they honestly could have just been scrapped. Or since the whole premise was that the Library was torn up, the frames could have been empty on the wall. Then they could have either used no AI to generate paintings or they could have done really crappy/easily rendered damaged paintings to put something there if they truly insisted on having decorations. Overall, a satisfying game that I’d recommend checking out if you enjoy collectathons and cleaning.

I was finally able to do the last achievement after an 18-hour run, counting the times I went AFK. This was absolutely insane to do, yet it was so satisfying to see the blue lights on every category after using no magic at all. It had been a while since I played a game that made me stay up so late day after day without me even noticing.

As a few other reviewers have noted, the AI disclosure for this game was added later, leading people who otherwise would not have supported this game to purchase it. 1) That's trashy as hell. 2) There is no reason you needed to use AI at all in this game. I'm not gonna be like some others and assume you were lying about the extent, so assuming you were honest, you could have easily done those things without relying on generative AI. The concept was good, the gameplay was good, some of the book titles were extremely funny, and yet you decided 'just a little' genAI was fine? That's like baking brownies and thinking adding 'just a little' dog poo was fine. Do better.

I'm neurodivergent

Tremendo juegazo... GOTY

So far love it but I wish there were more or levels or dlcs. Hopefully more expansions in the future ❤️❤️❤️

I wasn't gonna write a review for this game, but the goobers giving it a negative rating all because the devs used AI for a few painting REFINEMENTS (not creation), a UI element, and grammar correction (which is literally what Grammarly is) is ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ ridiculous. Like bro, if you like the game, but don't like how they made it, don't leave a negative review. You didn't dislike the game, you disliked AI. Go leave a negative review for AI generated games, not a game that used AI for a few things. If people actually read the page, instead of just going into the discussions tab and falling for the rage bait ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ in there, they'd realize the devs didn't go to Claude and be like "oh, Claude, make us a game about organizing arcane books in a library", they just used it for part of the refinement process. Seriously, people will rate this game negative because they didn't want to spend eight thousand years going over every single book in the game to make sure grammar and spelling was proper. Like I've already said now, if you don't like that they used AI, go rate AI negative. Not a game that you actually enjoyed playing. Use your brains, people. I don't really like writing reviews in this fashion, but the stupidity of some people is immense enough to make me. For my actual review of the game: It plays suprisingly smooth for how many different assets there are. And it's extremely fun to play. Though it is a lot quicker to beat than I'd like it to be.