Steam's tidying game trend is about to get the haunted meat it's been missing

7MMO

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What happened:​

  • I Am Your Beast and Clickolding developer Strange Scaffold has announced Something is Wrong with the Library, a tidying game set in "a library haunted by blood and meat."
  • Players will both reshelve the library's scattered books with a real Dewey Decimal System implementation while facing the accursed energies emanating from the corpses its billionaire patron entombed in the walls.
  • A "Modular Chaos System" ensures each playthrough has its own set of books to reorganize.
  • There's at least one terrifying, inscrutable obelisk.
  • Something is Wrong with the Library is set to launch before the end of 2026.

It's nice to see some aura in the tidying space​


In recent months, Steam has been awash in organize-em-ups and haystack searchers—games capitalizing on the simple pleasure of arranging a chaotic melange into an orderly assemblage. But while I'd never think to deny the meditative appeal of putting a thing in a place, I'm not going to pretend that the emergent craze isn't undergoing the same gold rush of low-effort iteration that we saw during the rash of retail sims. Visit the page for the "Organizing" tag, and you'll find as many generic variations on "Tidy up the [X]" with AI logos as the Unity and Unreal asset stores can sustain.

With Strange Scaffold at the helm, however, I feel safe betting that Something is Wrong with the Library's haunted meat labyrinth will be able to offer a sense of identity and direction that's been hard to find among the available tidying sims. After all, this is a developer that was able to use clicking as a medium for a harrowing test of psychosexual fortitude. And then made a match-three metroidvania-slash-survival-sim-parody set in a weirdo dinosaur mansion. And then an isekai-enabling driving sim.

If nothing else, we can trust the studio to commit to the bit. It seems incapable—possibly pathologically—of doing otherwise.


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