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

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

Lincoln Carpenter

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.