Shhh! No magic in the library

Magical librarians arrive neither early nor late, but precisely when they mean to. In my case, that is just as my partner and I have had a baby. If all videogames are fundamentally about cleaning up, Librarian: Tidy Up The Arcane Library is an exemplar of the form. Soothing, distracting, and only as demanding as washing up some dishes or emptying the nappy bin for the third time in a week. This is the perfect level of cosy semi-commitment my brain can handle at the moment. 

Before I bore you with all the details about my beautiful newborn and how she is the most perfect thing ever to have shit itself on planet earth, I will explain this sim that has been helping to keep me calm the last few days. You wake up in a single-room library of magical tomes, but every book has been catapulted from the shelves and lies strewn across the floor. A tricksy fairy is to blame (aren't they always). The books are now sprinkled on steps, scattered into crannies, and piled up on tables. You've been locked in this room by Merlin, who demands that you clean up the place. You must put every single volume back in its correct spot. I urge you to use as little magic as possible.

Two floorplans on the walls guide you to the right shelf. A book titled "Behavioural Patterns Of Monsters Vol. 4" will go to Monsterology, clearly. "The Arcane Black Market And Price Manipulation" will go to Economics. One of the first shelves I made sure to complete was Romance, which contains bewitching bestsellers such as "Fill The Solitude Of My Millennium With Your 90 Years", "Cursed To Love You", and "My Massive Golden Balls".

As you can tell, a lot of simple humour and imagination has gone into these titles. One shelf is dedicated to a mysterious "otherworld" and holds books like "Otherworld Chronicles: A World Ruled By Data" and "The Cursed Workplaces Of A Magicless World", hinting at grim knowledge of our own deeply hexed realm. But my favourite book title goes to an unassuming title in the Art section: "Techniques For Returning A Drawing To A Previous Step".

Some books have hard stony covers, others are shut with leather straps. One book destined for the Curses section is called "The Dark Pact: The Birth Of A Curse" and you can tell it apart from other books on account of the fearsome skull and frightening red glow of its title. Much of the game is spent identifying visual giveaways like this, seeking out covers that stand out in some way and forcing yourself to look around with the tunnel vision of a jigsaw champion. Head down, overtaken by internal muttering: white with gold diamond, white with gold diamond, white with gold diamond.

But this is an arcane library, so of course there are magical abilities to unlock, awarded as you fill more rows of bookshelves. One gives you "insightful" vision. Hold one volume and focus to make other volumes from that series glow. Another skill auto-sorts the stack of volumes you're holding into the correct order. 

There's a danger in these abilities eliminating the point of the game. One power lets you hoover up books from across the entire room - you don't even have to locate them. Another automagically stacks them into the shelf for you, a perfect wizardly wave of Dewey Decimal floating your task to completion. 

These are here to encourage pacy players to see how fast they can clean up the chronicles (you get a score after sorting the 3000+ volumes). But in broadening the audience to speedsters, it almost dilutes the design. The opening moments of Tidy Up strongly present a game about the meditative acceptance of a simple but time-consuming task. As soon as it caters to the speedrunner - by allowing the player to slurp up books without engaging with the titles or covers - it risks becoming just another job sim about efficiency, productivity, and optimisation. Libraries are places of structure and organisation, but I do not think of them as "fast-paced environments". 

For that reason, I've been consciously neglecting most of these powers. I'm not playing to finish the library neatly off and say "game done". I'm playing because my brain needs to do something mundane and manageable such that it is fooled into a state of temporary tranquility. Having a child has basically installed a second, smaller heart inside my body. (I didn't know how to even name the emotion until my own mum explained it matter-of-factly in the elevator on the way up to meet her freshly baked grand-infant. "It's called overwhelming joy, Brendan".) But the following days have also brought the obvious tensions, stresses, sleeplessness, anxieties, and annoyances that are inevitable when somebody is projectile shitting on you while screaming like a small fleshy fire alarm. For ten minutes at a time, a messy library is a chill place to be. 

When I told Graham and Jonty this baby was inbound, they joked I'd finally get to write the obligatory article on how becoming a parent has unlocked new emotions that allow me to enjoy God Of War and The Last Of Us in whole new ways, not just as a murderer, but as a murderer dad. These are, by now, the games journalism equivalent of a US newspaper columnist doing a piece titled: "Why I'm leaving New York City". I'll not add to that particular slush pile, but in Jank's bloggy fashion I must nonetheless slurp up the events of my life for nourishing material.

So I'll capitalise on my adorable new wailer's arrival to recommend this relaxing five-quid book sorter that has done exactly as advertised. It has cosied me. It has simulated for me a magical touch of order in the piss-covered chaos of the last ten days, even if my playtime only stacks up to three hours so far. If you are a library lover and have enjoyed something like Wilmot's Warehouse through to its wonderful punchline, your brain is primed to be dosed by this. It costs less than a bag of nappies.