Strange Scaffold has announced Something is Wrong with the Library, a haunted book-sorting simulator launching for PC via Steam this fall.
Set during a single night inside the Alex Dieter Public Library and Center for Reflection, the game tasks players with shelving hundreds of real books while dealing with supernatural activity and a much darker secret hidden inside the building.
Something Is Very Wrong With This Library
The game takes place in Sweet Elm, a small mountain town billionaire Alex Dieter reshaped into a technology-focused community.
There is one fairly significant problem: Dieter has also been murdering unhoused people and hiding their bodies inside the library walls.
Unsurprisingly, the building is now haunted.
Players work alongside former library administrator Phillip Shed to clean and organize the building while piecing together a story involving civic complicity, supernatural violence, and the people affected by Dieter’s actions.
Actually Sort Hundreds of Books
Something is Wrong with the Library combines its horror story with detailed library organization.
The building contains thousands of real book titles, and players must return fallen and misplaced books by Dewey Decimal System classification, author, and title.
A Modular Chaos System changes which books need attention during each playthrough, giving players a different shelving workload each time.
Studio head Xalavier Nelson Jr., a former librarian, described the game as drawing from the strange atmosphere of being inside a library after dark.
The Haunting Changes as You Play
The game features a fully voiced story and numerous supernatural manifestations that players can trigger throughout the night.
Strange Scaffold is keeping some of those events vague for now, though the announcement specifically highlights one ominously named location: The Drowning Room.
The mundane process of sorting books sits alongside the escalating horror, with players gradually confronting what happened inside the library and what it will take to put the building at peace.
Launching on Steam This Fall
Something is Wrong with the Library comes from Strange Scaffold, the studio behind I Am Your Beast, Clickholding, El Paso, Elsewhere, and Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator.
Something is Wrong with the Library will launch for PC via Steam sometime this fall. An exact release date has not been announced.
