Librarian: Tidy Up the Arcane Library!
Hands down the best game of this year. It's so rare for me to stay up late playing a game these days and I was totally hooked on this. Although it sounds like a simple (if daunting) concept, it's actually very well designed; there are all kinds of small details that make it great. Your job is to tidy up 3072 magic books, sorting them by title onto shelves sorted by category. The book titles are great, the mechanics are polished, and it's totally absorbing.
Pros
- Runs incredibly smoothly even on a Steam Deck. Looks like this is done by freezing objects in place once they've been stationary for a few seconds rather than calculating physics for all 3000 books at once.
- Beautiful music
- Very clever book design. Mostly, books from one subject area are a single colour (all psychology books are red, for example) but there are some examples where they're not the same colour but are a universal style instead (destruction magic books are various bright colours but mostly have gems). Then there are also some books which share styles but are in completely different subjects, like the ones with wire wrapped around them. They're designed such that most books can be sorted at a glance, but there are also clever titles that are ambiguous as to which subject they belong.
- I did the whole game without using any major magic (used for quicker sorting) and got a letter from the principle at the end saying I was interesting.
- Fun book titles
- There are major spells which you level up by completing rows of books. These make it easier to find and shelve books. At time of writing, I've never used these and I think they make the game rather trivial. Sorting all the books manually was a lot of fun.
Cons
- I would love to be able to read the books