I think the game is bugged. When I read “helpful” books, I get the pips, but it doesn’t make the final book any more likely to appear, only catalogs do (played on Hard). It came to a ridiculous point where my top was full of pips, yet no book in sight (also I believe these may increase difficulty of levels as well? Like more librarians).
It works as intended. Both helpful books and catalogues bring you closer to the final book, but to actually find it, you still need to make the final step in the right direction according to a catalogue. If you are already as close to the final book as it can be, reading another helpful book won't make it appear in the current room - you need to follow the direction provided by the catalogue to find the book in the next room.
I tried to get to the final room by reading only Helpful books and it wasn’t possible, no matter how many pips you got (you do get more and more ghosts). I think past a certain threshold any future room should get the needed book… I don’t mean the room you are already in, but the book never appears without the catalogues, which is confusing.
So i was trying to get a better spawn with the librarians by leaving and reentering the room, but i kept getting them in spots where they were exactly one away from walking into my line of sight. curios i decided to forfeit the run and see what was going on and discovered this cursed room
Finally managed to beat medium. Overall, fantastic game and pretty good to kill some time. One request I want to make, though, is if you could please provide the name of the specific track that plays throughout the game? I must admit that your selection in music for this was right on point, but the artist's music archive is very hard to browse through. Again, great game and concept.
To rise your resolve you need to read inspiring books. Reading the catalogue shows you the exit that would take you closer to the target book, the one you need to succeed in your heist.
the game has a wonderful idea, and i quite enjoy it however i find that the ghosts and spawns of them can be a little unforgiving. (can't think of a better word but there is one) they very often are stuck in a long hallway next to either your objective or entrance. and personally i have yet to even complete a game .... even on easy .....
then again i may just be garbage at the game. either way it is a wonderful concept and lovely music to go with
The idea is that if you have enough sanity, librarians rarely can prevent you from achieving your local goals (reading a book, checking the catalogue, taking the right exit). If a librarian doesn't see you (while you are in the L-space or behind a corner), you can safely pop into his line of sight as long as you know that you'll be able to hide from him on the next turn.
Thank you! The number of rooms you need to traverse is random AND depends on the selected level of difficulty. For example, on Easy the book is in the third or fourth room. That is if you follow directions of catalogues of course.
WOW (i'm french sorry) It made me very scared! This game is so cool! The fantoms are so scary it's why i love! I love it! (just The music break the mood (a little bit) )
I think that the trick with switching rooms is overpowered and maybe I should apply a penalty for using it. For example, I could reduce progress for reentering a room. This won't make the game much harder, just a little to discourage abusing this "feature".
Very nice. I enjoyed a lot the graphic and sound design (enough to write a fan semi-article about made-up theory surrouding the place ). However, there is an "exploit" that lets you click your own place once you are in L-space and just wait that the Librarian ghosts go away. You can do this as many times you want without any loss of sanity , and the game becomes too much of clicking yourself and waiting for their random movements (and potentially very easy). If this is unintended clicking your same space should be invalid. If its intended it should cost 1 sanity like moving. If not, perhaps another difficulty where you can't just wait still would be nice. I stopped playing because once you know this you cannot ignore it and you spend over half the game clicking yourself for free advantage. (well at least, if your resolve is already at 0) Anyways, overall good job.
Clicking the avatar to skip a turn is the intended behavior. The idea is that reducing resolve by 1 should be enough to discourage abusing it. Doesn't it make grabbing the target book much harder for you?
Read large books on lecterns (catalogs), they will show you the way to the target book. Books on bookshelves may replenish or drain your resources (sanity & resolve). You may want to check this comment: https://itch.io/post/1244292
I win pretty much every time on hard. I have totally lost due to luck, though, even though I usually die to accidentally pressing the wrong key or just not noticing something obvious most of the time. I am sure it is possible to get to the book much more than 90% of the time. If you get the glitch where the book is unreadable then, yeah, you are screwed. But that has only happened to me once, I think.
Patience, mostly. The basic strat for hard is as follows: Get 10 progress so books start spawning. This isn't actually necessary for the run, but it saves boatloads of time and makes mistakes less costly. Avoid gaining any more progress. Find a room that has a good room layout to use as a base. That means it has two exits very close together and no long hallways librarians can spawn in that have view of the exits. You can actually do it with certain hallway-like rooms, but it is harder and more complicated. Once you have found such a room, take one of those two exits. If it goes to a hallway or you can't see any books, leave and use the other exit from your base. If not, flip back and forth until it is safe, then go check if the books are worth reading, never going far enough out that you aren't guaranteed to be able to get back to your exit if you see the lantern light from a librarian coming. Get resolve up asap, but don't read sanity lowering books if you are below 80 sanity. Don't go above ~35 progress until you've maxed your stats-- 100 sanity and 40 resolve. Then you start grabbing all the progress books you see, which slows things down, until you have enough progress that the book spawns (sometimes I give in to laziness and make a break for progress via catalogues here, which is risky, but usually (i.e. almost always) works out fine because 100 sanity is a lot of L space movement). You have to go for the catalogue in that room, which, unless you are incredibly lucky, means getting seen by Librarians and using L-space to evade them. Librarians come over to where they saw you last for a bit after they've seen you but before you enter L-space if you break LoS. Going one direction and then cutting across bookshelves at the last minute into another section of the Library usually works to clump most of the Librarians together, which gives you the space you need to read the catalogue. Unlike normal books, there's no penalty to reading your target book in L-space (you're stealing it for a client, not reading it yourself), so do that if it's convenient or just read it normally, whatever. Then get out of that room, either via your original entrance if you can in which case you win, or (this is much more common for me) out another entrance because getting back to the first one would cost way too much sanity and you are down to like 30-40. Use more sanity in the next room in that case to get to another exit, and from there the rapidly lowering difficulty should resolve the problem for you pretty quickly. Remember to go back and forth across screen transitions to refresh Librarian placement in rooms, and that if you find a screen with two exits close to each other, you can just walk back and forth for a while to end the game (well, you have to do one more room with a single Librarian that you can reroll as much as you like, but that hardly counts).
TL;DR: Get a room with two safe exits close together and use it as a base. Also make sure your stats are maxed, and that you never walk into an intersection where you might have ghosts on two axes.
Also it looks like there's a new update that lowered the difficulty. Now the final room on hard might only have two ghosts. Sanity is top left number, resolve is top right. Progress is dots in center times 5.
What OS are you using? This problem was reported on Linux, but I don't have Linux to test and I failed to reproduce it with any other OS/browser combinations. I'm planning to update the game UI, so hopefully the issue will be resolved by itself.
Ran into a very unfortunate bug for the first time today. On hard the book I was searching for was called "The First Month of Druid". When I found it it required 46 resolve to read. The max is 40. I left the room and went elsewhere and then regained the lost progress from despawning the area to respawn the book but the new book also required the same 46 resolve to read. Never happened before but also the title generator seems to have updated so maybe the update introduced this bug? Is the book name also the random seed?
That's unfortunate indeed. The target book is generated in the beginning of a run, so if it gets an invalid "difficulty", the run is ruined. I'll fix it.
I notice the librarians don't become alerted to your presence if your last action was to confront a book... is that a bug or intentional? I kind of like it either way!
I think there should be some sort of score system for the books (it looks like maybe there is one already half in place?) so you can review your collection and their rarities after a successful escape. Obviously the primary target is the most important, but picking up some other very rare books along the way shouldn't hurt ;)
I also think being able to choose your target from a list might be good. I definitely suicided a lot in the first room just to refresh the titles for my main quest target. I'm a magic thieving specialist; I pick my contracts, thank you very much! XD;
I didn't have any problem with the difficulty-- the game is a bit challenging on hard but not too bad. I liked that most of the strategy comes from learning how L-space/The Library works, and that the best strategies require a bit of patience. I think those both fit the theme well.
For those struggling: 1) Once you've seen part of the Library you can always see what is there. You've got, like, magic library vision. This means that peeking around corners and then retreating will create large areas you will be able to see Librarians approaching from. 2) Librarians reset position and course when you re-enter a room. You can thus juggle a screen transition to get a spawn that works for you. 3) Librarians will never chase you outside of their room(i.e. through a screen transition). This means that juggling screen transitions is relatively safe, and that if you are being chased you can move, effectively, one space further in a straight line if that space transitions you. 4) Helpful books (literally and otherwise) may well lie off the beaten path. If your path from a catalog to its exit takes you past another exit it is probably worth checking for freebies on the side exit before continuing 5) When exiting the library, you can't use catalogs, but *every* transition you didn't just come from gives you the catalog bonus. This means if you can juggle two screen transitions near each other in a room you will accrue progress extremely quickly and safely and easily be able to exit, even if your targeted book has drained practically all your resolve (it gives you a massive hit on hard). 6) Enlightening means +sanity. Inspiring means +resolve. Helpful means +progress. Maddening, Dull, and Confusing are the respective opposites.
You need Sanity to not die. Librarians murdering you sets it to zero, obviously, but you also lose 5 sanity for entering L-space by walking into a not-interactive bookshelf and another 1 sanity per move you make after the initial entry. You can also lose tons of sanity by reading a book while in a bookshelf-- don't do this. On hard, once you reach 4 Librarian rooms you will be burning through sanity like crazy even with very friendly spawns, so be sure to conserve it as much as you can and explore side rooms for enlightening books and refresh rooms for good spawns. You need Resolve to read books. You need to read books to maintain sanity, which you need to not die. You also need to read your target book to win, and it can have a really big resolve minimum. You do not *lose* resolve when reading books, it is just required to be at a certain threshold based on how difficult/rare the book it. You lose resolve every time you pass a turn without doing anything, which you can do with the spacebar. If you do this in L-space, you lose resolve but *not* sanity. Resolve numbers are always lower than sanity-- 20-30 is pretty good. You'll want 40 which might be the max when you read your target on hard, though. Pacing back and forth, when it is safe to do so, can save you resolve when you want to wait. Obviously waiting is vastly better than pacing when it comes to L-Space almost always-- Sanity is super important!-- but usually if you are in L-Space you are moving somewhere else anyways. You gain 2 resolve every time you read a catalog, but you can't do that anymore once you have your primary target and are trying to escape. Progress determines when the target book will spawn and when you can leave the library. The library is magic so you can leave it from wherever-- you don't need to try to trek back to where you came in. You make progress by reading helpful books and by taking the indicated exit after reading a catalog. Note that you do NOT *have* to take the indicated exit-- the library is magic and there are plenty of other catalogues with other routes to the target book. This is important because not every exit is worth trying to get to. Some are just too far down a long hallway with nothing to hide behind. Note also that you will *lose* your catalog progress if you double back through the entrance it indicated after using it. You can just go back through to regain it, but essentially you have to take a new exit from the linked room to make real progress. Progress seems also to determine how dangerous the Library is in terms of how high level the books around are and how many there are and how many librarians there are. Once you get your target book progress resets to 0 and then every exit you take gives you progress as if you used a catalog. This new progress makes the game get easier, rather than harder, though, and eventually the game will return to the initial levels of difficulty and lighting and you can win by leaving the Library.
Yeah, I think a scoring system would be a good idea. I feel like the player isn't incentivized to collect rare books if it is maddening or dull. A book hunter would probably not care as much as long as it is worthy for his/her collection.
Wow! Thanks a lot for your extensive strategy guide, I myself couldn't write a better one :)
The only thing I can add is that the resolve requirement of a book = the book's rarity (e.g. "uncommon (7)") = the amount of sanity you lose if you read that book in L-space. So it's safe to read common books (0) in L-space, unless, of course, they have a negative modifier (maddening, dull or confusing).
I like the title generator.
It was one of the first ideas for the game I came up with, and literally the last one I implemented - like half hour before submitting. So I'm not particularly happy about the result and I'm planning to improve it.
I think there should be some sort of score system for the books (it looks like maybe there is one already half in place?) so you can review your collection and their rarities after a successful escape.
Yes, I thought about giving points for collecting books depending on their rarity. Ability to see them as trophies is a very nice idea, I'll probably add it!
I also think being able to choose your target from a list might be good.
The plan was to portray difficulty selection as picking one of suggested "wanted posters", something like this:
100$ for the rare "The Evil Knight's Fall"
500$ for the extraordinary "Funeral of Leucis"
$2000 for the legendary "Five Days of War"
Unfortunately, I didn't have time for such fanciness, but it still may implemented later.
It was one of the first ideas for the game I came up with, and literally the last one I implemented - like half hour before submitting. So I'm not particularly happy about the result and I'm planning to improve it.
it's a really good one thou, and I hope you could share the generator as-is (and any other generator you wish) in a separate project
Lovely game but very hard. I beat it on easy in my 7th trial. That maybe strongly related to that it doesn't have a tutorial. I was aware that I need to push twice to read a book only in my last 2 trials.
There is one Librarian in the first room and sometimes I pass that room without even meeting him. I sort of like the annoyance of trying to read the catalogue while a couple of them are wandering around :)
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Good game.
banger music im not even playing game and im enjoying it 10/10 music
Here's some A.I. generated fan art of someone entering/leaving L-space.
I feel of the wonky proportions helps add to the madness somewhat.
I think the game is bugged. When I read “helpful” books, I get the pips, but it doesn’t make the final book any more likely to appear, only catalogs do (played on Hard). It came to a ridiculous point where my top was full of pips, yet no book in sight (also I believe these may increase difficulty of levels as well? Like more librarians).
It works as intended. Both helpful books and catalogues bring you closer to the final book, but to actually find it, you still need to make the final step in the right direction according to a catalogue. If you are already as close to the final book as it can be, reading another helpful book won't make it appear in the current room - you need to follow the direction provided by the catalogue to find the book in the next room.
I tried to get to the final room by reading only Helpful books and it wasn’t possible, no matter how many pips you got (you do get more and more ghosts). I think past a certain threshold any future room should get the needed book… I don’t mean the room you are already in, but the book never appears without the catalogues, which is confusing.
medium over. fascinating game,and i'll see if i can conquer hard.
hard over,with only 3 sanity points. really good game!
Probably author should write manual how to replenish these points. Or it looks like speedrun through unknown icwindale.
There is a link in the description. To get sanity points you need to read sobering books.
So i was trying to get a better spawn with the librarians by leaving and reentering the room, but i kept getting them in spots where they were exactly one away from walking into my line of sight. curios i decided to forfeit the run and see what was going on and discovered this cursed room
Cursed indeed. That's odd - I was sure the code guaranteed connectivity of all four exits of a room...
Wait they're supposed to be 4 ways out of a room? i swear i usually see only 3 exits
Hm, apparently 3-exit rooms are not that rare. Maybe I just remember it wrong...
i mean how long has it been since you made this game? it would be impossible to remember every little detail you coded in
Finally managed to beat medium. Overall, fantastic game and pretty good to kill some time. One request I want to make, though, is if you could please provide the name of the specific track that plays throughout the game? I must admit that your selection in music for this was right on point, but the artist's music archive is very hard to browse through. Again, great game and concept.
Thanks! Here is this track: https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Ketsa/33_1342/Haunted_Past
what do the dots on the top of the screen mean?!
They show how deep in the library (= how close to the target book) you are.
I'm clicking the catalogue but my resolve isn't going up
To rise your resolve you need to read inspiring books. Reading the catalogue shows you the exit that would take you closer to the target book, the one you need to succeed in your heist.
Even in easy I cannot to anything ... Do I must all the comments and watch a video for understanding how to play a little game ?
I do not recommend this game.It have nice graphics, but poor gameplay and a music who doesn't match the mood.. sorry
scary...
the game has a wonderful idea, and i quite enjoy it however i find that the ghosts and spawns of them can be a little unforgiving. (can't think of a better word but there is one) they very often are stuck in a long hallway next to either your objective or entrance. and personally i have yet to even complete a game .... even on easy .....
then again i may just be garbage at the game. either way it is a wonderful concept and lovely music to go with
The idea is that if you have enough sanity, librarians rarely can prevent you from achieving your local goals (reading a book, checking the catalogue, taking the right exit). If a librarian doesn't see you (while you are in the L-space or behind a corner), you can safely pop into his line of sight as long as you know that you'll be able to hide from him on the next turn.
I have finally beaten the game on hard mode! I will release a vid soon, and I'm also curious if there is a downloadable version of this game?
Congratulations! I can build a windows version if you need it.
That would be megacool.
Great Game! Although I don't understand how many rooms must I wander to get to the book I'm looking for?
Thank you! The number of rooms you need to traverse is random AND depends on the selected level of difficulty. For example, on Easy the book is in the third or fourth room. That is if you follow directions of catalogues of course.
WOW (i'm french sorry) It made me very scared! This game is so cool! The fantoms are so scary it's why i love! I love it! (just The music break the mood (a little bit) )
Very nice!
Thank you!
I think that the trick with switching rooms is overpowered and maybe I should apply a penalty for using it. For example, I could reduce progress for reentering a room. This won't make the game much harder, just a little to discourage abusing this "feature".
After a few hours, finally beat it on hard mode! Such cool game!
Very nice. I enjoyed a lot the graphic and sound design (enough to write a fan semi-article about made-up theory surrouding the place ). However, there is an "exploit" that lets you click your own place once you are in L-space and just wait that the Librarian ghosts go away. You can do this as many times you want without any loss of sanity , and the game becomes too much of clicking yourself and waiting for their random movements (and potentially very easy). If this is unintended clicking your same space should be invalid. If its intended it should cost 1 sanity like moving. If not, perhaps another difficulty where you can't just wait still would be nice. I stopped playing because once you know this you cannot ignore it and you spend over half the game clicking yourself for free advantage. (well at least, if your resolve is already at 0)
Anyways, overall good job.
Thank you!
Clicking the avatar to skip a turn is the intended behavior. The idea is that reducing resolve by 1 should be enough to discourage abusing it. Doesn't it make grabbing the target book much harder for you?
I don't understand how to play ? I know how to move and skip a turn but what are the books used for ?
Read large books on lecterns (catalogs), they will show you the way to the target book. Books on bookshelves may replenish or drain your resources (sanity & resolve). You may want to check this comment: https://itch.io/post/1244292
This is super interesting!
you can't really win this game can you?
I win every time on Easy, occasionally on Medium and never on Hard. I guess it means that the difficulty selector is calibrated correctly.
I mean on hard. easy and medium are fine
I win pretty much every time on hard. I have totally lost due to luck, though, even though I usually die to accidentally pressing the wrong key or just not noticing something obvious most of the time. I am sure it is possible to get to the book much more than 90% of the time. If you get the glitch where the book is unreadable then, yeah, you are screwed. But that has only happened to me once, I think.
how on earth do u do dis
Patience, mostly. The basic strat for hard is as follows: Get 10 progress so books start spawning. This isn't actually necessary for the run, but it saves boatloads of time and makes mistakes less costly. Avoid gaining any more progress. Find a room that has a good room layout to use as a base. That means it has two exits very close together and no long hallways librarians can spawn in that have view of the exits. You can actually do it with certain hallway-like rooms, but it is harder and more complicated. Once you have found such a room, take one of those two exits. If it goes to a hallway or you can't see any books, leave and use the other exit from your base. If not, flip back and forth until it is safe, then go check if the books are worth reading, never going far enough out that you aren't guaranteed to be able to get back to your exit if you see the lantern light from a librarian coming. Get resolve up asap, but don't read sanity lowering books if you are below 80 sanity. Don't go above ~35 progress until you've maxed your stats-- 100 sanity and 40 resolve. Then you start grabbing all the progress books you see, which slows things down, until you have enough progress that the book spawns (sometimes I give in to laziness and make a break for progress via catalogues here, which is risky, but usually (i.e. almost always) works out fine because 100 sanity is a lot of L space movement). You have to go for the catalogue in that room, which, unless you are incredibly lucky, means getting seen by Librarians and using L-space to evade them. Librarians come over to where they saw you last for a bit after they've seen you but before you enter L-space if you break LoS. Going one direction and then cutting across bookshelves at the last minute into another section of the Library usually works to clump most of the Librarians together, which gives you the space you need to read the catalogue. Unlike normal books, there's no penalty to reading your target book in L-space (you're stealing it for a client, not reading it yourself), so do that if it's convenient or just read it normally, whatever. Then get out of that room, either via your original entrance if you can in which case you win, or (this is much more common for me) out another entrance because getting back to the first one would cost way too much sanity and you are down to like 30-40. Use more sanity in the next room in that case to get to another exit, and from there the rapidly lowering difficulty should resolve the problem for you pretty quickly. Remember to go back and forth across screen transitions to refresh Librarian placement in rooms, and that if you find a screen with two exits close to each other, you can just walk back and forth for a while to end the game (well, you have to do one more room with a single Librarian that you can reroll as much as you like, but that hardly counts).
TL;DR: Get a room with two safe exits close together and use it as a base. Also make sure your stats are maxed, and that you never walk into an intersection where you might have ghosts on two axes.
Also it looks like there's a new update that lowered the difficulty. Now the final room on hard might only have two ghosts. Sanity is top left number, resolve is top right. Progress is dots in center times 5.
Sanity/Resolve stats are not changing in Chrome 80.0.3987.163, which makes it a bit difficult to gauge risk. Working fine in Firefox 74.0 however.
Soundtrack is great, love the concept, L-space is really well executed in terms of color, sound, and mechanics!
What OS are you using? This problem was reported on Linux, but I don't have Linux to test and I failed to reproduce it with any other OS/browser combinations. I'm planning to update the game UI, so hopefully the issue will be resolved by itself.
Cheers!
This was on OS X High Sierra 10.13.6 (admittedly a smidge out of date now that I realize it!) - might not be worth too much fussing over in that case.
I couldn't figure out how to play and then realised my sanity counter wasn't going down. I think the counters aren't working in the latest version.
For me everything works as intended (and I didn't change anything lately). You know that sanity only goes down when you enter the L-space, right?
Yep. I can die. Playing easy mode on Windows 10, chrome 81.0.4044.122
OK, I think it's the same bug as this. Unfortunately, I can't reproduce it, but I will keep trying.
if the game has any saves, try deleting them and testing again. sometimes saves between versions do weird things
and sometimes bugs show up in builds that aren't in the editor
Love it!
Ran into a very unfortunate bug for the first time today. On hard the book I was searching for was called "The First Month of Druid". When I found it it required 46 resolve to read. The max is 40. I left the room and went elsewhere and then regained the lost progress from despawning the area to respawn the book but the new book also required the same 46 resolve to read. Never happened before but also the title generator seems to have updated so maybe the update introduced this bug? Is the book name also the random seed?
That's unfortunate indeed. The target book is generated in the beginning of a run, so if it gets an invalid "difficulty", the run is ruined. I'll fix it.
Really interesting game :)
Aaaaaa this is awesome :)
Lots of fun and a good challenge.
I notice the librarians don't become alerted to your presence if your last action was to confront a book... is that a bug or intentional? I kind of like it either way!
Oh, this must be a bug. I'll check it!
I noticed it too, but it's when I get within 2 or less tiles, they start flat out following me (on medium).
Very nice i like the atmosphere!
Nice, quick, intriguing.
Love it!
This is excellent. Really good atmosphere, and I love the book title generator.
Nice game! I like the title generator.
I think there should be some sort of score system for the books (it looks like maybe there is one already half in place?) so you can review your collection and their rarities after a successful escape. Obviously the primary target is the most important, but picking up some other very rare books along the way shouldn't hurt ;)
I also think being able to choose your target from a list might be good. I definitely suicided a lot in the first room just to refresh the titles for my main quest target. I'm a magic thieving specialist; I pick my contracts, thank you very much! XD;
I didn't have any problem with the difficulty-- the game is a bit challenging on hard but not too bad. I liked that most of the strategy comes from learning how L-space/The Library works, and that the best strategies require a bit of patience. I think those both fit the theme well.
For those struggling: 1) Once you've seen part of the Library you can always see what is there. You've got, like, magic library vision. This means that peeking around corners and then retreating will create large areas you will be able to see Librarians approaching from. 2) Librarians reset position and course when you re-enter a room. You can thus juggle a screen transition to get a spawn that works for you. 3) Librarians will never chase you outside of their room(i.e. through a screen transition). This means that juggling screen transitions is relatively safe, and that if you are being chased you can move, effectively, one space further in a straight line if that space transitions you. 4) Helpful books (literally and otherwise) may well lie off the beaten path. If your path from a catalog to its exit takes you past another exit it is probably worth checking for freebies on the side exit before continuing 5) When exiting the library, you can't use catalogs, but *every* transition you didn't just come from gives you the catalog bonus. This means if you can juggle two screen transitions near each other in a room you will accrue progress extremely quickly and safely and easily be able to exit, even if your targeted book has drained practically all your resolve (it gives you a massive hit on hard). 6) Enlightening means +sanity. Inspiring means +resolve. Helpful means +progress. Maddening, Dull, and Confusing are the respective opposites.
You need Sanity to not die. Librarians murdering you sets it to zero, obviously, but you also lose 5 sanity for entering L-space by walking into a not-interactive bookshelf and another 1 sanity per move you make after the initial entry. You can also lose tons of sanity by reading a book while in a bookshelf-- don't do this. On hard, once you reach 4 Librarian rooms you will be burning through sanity like crazy even with very friendly spawns, so be sure to conserve it as much as you can and explore side rooms for enlightening books and refresh rooms for good spawns. You need Resolve to read books. You need to read books to maintain sanity, which you need to not die. You also need to read your target book to win, and it can have a really big resolve minimum. You do not *lose* resolve when reading books, it is just required to be at a certain threshold based on how difficult/rare the book it. You lose resolve every time you pass a turn without doing anything, which you can do with the spacebar. If you do this in L-space, you lose resolve but *not* sanity. Resolve numbers are always lower than sanity-- 20-30 is pretty good. You'll want 40 which might be the max when you read your target on hard, though. Pacing back and forth, when it is safe to do so, can save you resolve when you want to wait. Obviously waiting is vastly better than pacing when it comes to L-Space almost always-- Sanity is super important!-- but usually if you are in L-Space you are moving somewhere else anyways. You gain 2 resolve every time you read a catalog, but you can't do that anymore once you have your primary target and are trying to escape. Progress determines when the target book will spawn and when you can leave the library. The library is magic so you can leave it from wherever-- you don't need to try to trek back to where you came in. You make progress by reading helpful books and by taking the indicated exit after reading a catalog. Note that you do NOT *have* to take the indicated exit-- the library is magic and there are plenty of other catalogues with other routes to the target book. This is important because not every exit is worth trying to get to. Some are just too far down a long hallway with nothing to hide behind. Note also that you will *lose* your catalog progress if you double back through the entrance it indicated after using it. You can just go back through to regain it, but essentially you have to take a new exit from the linked room to make real progress. Progress seems also to determine how dangerous the Library is in terms of how high level the books around are and how many there are and how many librarians there are. Once you get your target book progress resets to 0 and then every exit you take gives you progress as if you used a catalog. This new progress makes the game get easier, rather than harder, though, and eventually the game will return to the initial levels of difficulty and lighting and you can win by leaving the Library.
Yeah, I think a scoring system would be a good idea. I feel like the player isn't incentivized to collect rare books if it is maddening or dull. A book hunter would probably not care as much as long as it is worthy for his/her collection.
I agree 👍
Wow! Thanks a lot for your extensive strategy guide, I myself couldn't write a better one :)
The only thing I can add is that the resolve requirement of a book = the book's rarity (e.g. "uncommon (7)") = the amount of sanity you lose if you read that book in L-space. So it's safe to read common books (0) in L-space, unless, of course, they have a negative modifier (maddening, dull or confusing).
It was one of the first ideas for the game I came up with, and literally the last one I implemented - like half hour before submitting. So I'm not particularly happy about the result and I'm planning to improve it.
Yes, I thought about giving points for collecting books depending on their rarity. Ability to see them as trophies is a very nice idea, I'll probably add it!
The plan was to portray difficulty selection as picking one of suggested "wanted posters", something like this:
Unfortunately, I didn't have time for such fanciness, but it still may implemented later.
Well, the game is very good as-is, but I look forward to any improvements :)
I like the title generator.
It was one of the first ideas for the game I came up with, and literally the last one I implemented - like half hour before submitting. So I'm not particularly happy about the result and I'm planning to improve it.
it's a really good one thou, and I hope you could share the generator as-is (and any other generator you wish) in a separate project
Will do!
Lovely game but very hard. I beat it on easy in my 7th trial. That maybe strongly related to that it doesn't have a tutorial. I was aware that I need to push twice to read a book only in my last 2 trials.
Yes, that is definitely related. I will add a description of the game on this page, there are some details which may be not obvious.
I really like this! Feel like it could use a max limit of one Librarian per room on Easy though.
There is one Librarian in the first room and sometimes I pass that room without even meeting him. I sort of like the annoyance of trying to read the catalogue while a couple of them are wandering around :)
Fun game, but there is a problem where multiple info messages stack up on the bottom and you can't read any of them.
I can't reproduce it so far. Doesn't each of them go away after a couple of seconds?
The issue only appears to occur when Chrome's zoom is set to under 90%; otherwise the text is cleared normally.
https://vimeo.com/user109415654/review/396234105/38028b99a5
Here's a video of me doing it. The bug only happens when loading in the page when already zoomed out.
Such a nice idea again! Lovely :D
Fantastic little Borgesian puzzler! I haven't completed it yet but I'm going to keep trying while my sanity holds...