So I blame Dave2 for this! When I saw just his comments on it (I didn't even watch the video) I thought that looked like something I might enjoy. I didn't buy it straight away but when I saw there was a special on Steam games a little while ago and this game was 20% off so I grabbed it.
I played for about an hour the first time I played it. Although, first things first, I needed a map. I mean sure there's a map on the wall, but it's a pain to go and check it for every book. So found one on Reddit.
I really had no idea what I was doing to begin with. I managed to get a few books put away but not many. One of the biggest problems was the fact I don't have a fancy graphic card, so it really chugged on my machine and caused massive CPU spikes and the fans to go crazy. So after the first couple of sessions I tweaked the settings - made it a much smaller window and reduced all the graphics options to bare minimum. That worked a lot better.
The hardest part was figuring out what shelves the books should go on. Some of them were a lot more obvious, like healing and holy magic, and they had the added advantage of being white so they stood out, so I started with them. Daily magic was another category with lighter coloured books. Then I did a lot of the bottom floor black stuff, so curses, necromancy and stealth.
Then I started to look at the magic options. I didn't quite grasp their significance to start with. I mean sure a summoning spell is useful to pick up another book of the same thing you're holding. But it took me a while to figure out that if you maxed out the level ups on it you could summon an entire shelf of books with one key stroke!! Similarly you could save a lot of time loading all those books onto a shelf by another key stroke. Once I started doing this the pace of the game accelerated rapidly. I never bothered with the numerical sorting spell and only used the book glow spell once. Once I really got going I then used the spell that showed you which shelf a book would go on. I used this *a lot* because a lot of things I had no idea where they'd go.
Then there's the "minor" magic. You're meant to find keys for four chests. One is pretty obvious and gives you the ability to jump, but I found jumping up annoying and didn't work very well, so really only used it to jump over the railing to the floor below. Two of the other keys could only be found by jumping up, but I found none of the three other powers any real use and didn't use them at all.
Right near the end I noticed a little glowing thing on the intro stand. I clicked on it and it allows you to summon all the remaining books into a pile right there. Funny.
My two favourite categories were Daily Magic, with titles such as "What Kind of Magic Works Best for Job Hunting?", "Handy Kitchen Magic Recipes", "Three Seconds to Office: Magic for Last-Minute Commuters", "Magic to Mute a Specific Person's Voice", "How to Commute with Magic", "Compendium Magic for the Lazy", "Everyday Magic for Deep and Restful Sleep";
and The Travels of the Otherworld with things like "The Cursed Workplaces of a Magicless World", "A People Enchanted by Glowing Slabs", "The Ultimate Guide to Otherworldly Swear Words", "They Worship an Invisible Entity Known as Wi-Fi", "The Otherworld: Demanding Fresh Graduates with 10 Years of Experience", "Strange Technology from Another World! The Ultimate Language: C++".
But this one in Psychology also cracked me up - "The Psychology of Prioritizing Gaming Over Tidying Your Room".
Once you completely fill all the shelves you can leave the library... and your reward is.. a pizza!!!! hahaha
Another fun thing you can do after you're done is click on a link in the main menu to take you to a special level where you just stand in the room and watch all the books fly into place while listening to the Blue Danube. Fun stuff.
So apparently this all took me 10 hours 21 minutes. Totally worth the $6.80 I paid for it :)
