Funny* Fire** Man***

About a month ago, a tiny little game called Librarian: Tidy Up the Arcane Library! released on Steam. It’s a silly little game where you’re stuck in a wizard’s library that’s been tossed around by a fairy, and you have to use all the magical and organizational tools at your disposal to put all the books back on all the shelves, sorted by category, shelved with the rest of their series, in order.

I got this game 3 days ago. In that time, I have played through the game’s experience twice.

The first time was an exercise in discovery. Learning all the sections, all the spell abilities, realizing 10 minutes from the end that there’s a whole slew of minor abilities that would have saved me hours of trekking to the one staircase over and over again…

That first run took me nearly 5 hours, split over 2 nights. It was kinda fun, it scratched my brain a little. A lot, actually. It scratched my brain a lot, and I couldn’t explain it.

I also couldn’t explain why I couldn’t stop thinking about how much faster I could go. Well, besides the achievement daring me to do it in less than 3 hours.

During my exploratory run, I’d been learning which abilities were most useful. There was a spell, Assemble, that would bring matching books straight to my hand that I hadn’t invested enough levels (yes, there’s a level-up mechanic) into to realize how essential it was until I was a decent way through. Once I had that, I had been flying.

So I decided to prioritize that. I would go into my completed library, and research the 3-book series, the smallest ones, but the hardest to find. The thought was that if I could rush these in the beginning, when I had no abilities, it would be easier to level, to dump all my points into strengthening Assemble, use it to fill out larger and larger book sets until it was fully leveled, go on to max out Auto-Shelve (you can imagine what that does), and fly through it at lightning speed.

The strategy didn’t go perfectly, I hadn’t researched the 3-sets well enough, and it was hard to use them to start me off because they were so rare, but I would put books from incomplete 3-sets in a little pile, and once I had the levels I needed to do even the most basic casts of Assemble, it was just enough to take 2 books I’d already found and complete the set, which would get me more levels, an so on, and so forth…

…And so the engine ran. I was all over the library. I was weaving manual collection of small sets in during the cooldown after using Assemble for one of the larger 10-book series. Once I had my setup, I whittled away at the challenge with all the efficiency I could muster.

I didn’t make it in 3 hours. I blew past it, and finished with a time of 1:54:55.

And I know I could have been faster.

I’m not a speedrunner; This isn’t how I usually think about games, but somehow, the combination of quick play time, low skill floor, room for improvement, incentive to succeed, and just overall game vibe made something click.