u/pH_101

Hi, we’re Alastair and Sarah, the bf/gf team behind SquarePlay and we are very excited our latest game Monk Took Book is out on 3 Sept!

It’s a co-op game about organizing, stacking and remembering where you put hundreds of books in a cozy-creepy medieval library.

But in this library the books don’t have titles, just symbols on the cover. There is no correct shelf and no right answer, so it’s totally up to you where you file them. At night there are book orders that you need to deliver.

Getting in your way are occasional hauntings - and since the demo came out we have redesigned the enemies as cute Viking skeletons - and you (and your friends’) ability to remember where you put them! Easy when you have only a few books but more challenging when you have an entire library to manage!

We have taken a lot of inspiration from the fantastic Wilmot’s Warehouse, so it's not a "tidy up" game.

But if you'd rather keep it relaxed, enemies, fires and time pressure can all be reduced or switched off, so you can focus just on organising, expanding and running the library (and occasionally petting Lord Fluffy, the abbey cat).

You can play with up to three fellow monks - and we still enjoy organising our library together (with only a few minor disagreements book classification 😊) after two years, but it’s totally possible and very fun to play solo as well.

We hope you like how it’s turned out and if so you can wishlist now on Steam, check out the demo or even buy it in two weeks!!!

(P.S. We haven’t used any AI to make Monk Took Book. Art by Sarah, music by our very talented friend Gareth and wonderful capsule by Addie Jackson.)

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4022090/Monk_Took_Book/

Hi all,

So i'm not sure what to do about this if anything but I thought I'd share my story. I make games with my partner Sarah and last year in September 2025 we announced our third game (after Overcrowd: A Commute 'Em Up and Space Trash Scavenger) it's called Monk Took Book - its a co-op game about organising and retrieving books in a medieval monastic library - here it is on Steam:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4022090/Monk_Took_Book/

The announcement didn't go that well and it was not really noticed too much. It barely got any wishlists, maybe 400-500 after month, like 0-3 a day if that after the announce. It was actually terrible after working on it for a year or so already, but we carried on working.

Then in Feb 2026 I was told another team had announced a very similar looking game called Librarian: Tidy Up an Arcane Library: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4197610/Librarian_Tidy_Up_the_Arcane_Library/

I was kind of like huh, wow that looks really similar to Monk Took Book. Somehow this game made a massive splash and was getting hundreds of wishlists a day. I cannot lie, this hurt. Obviously they did something right and Steam loved them.

We realised our capsule was probably to blame. We have since improved it. We also think perhaps they had some viral short form videos somewhere.

Anyway we carried on with our plan to release a co-op demo this year, which we have done. We recut our trailer to explain the game more, and that actually did very nicely, getting 130k views on Indie Games Hub on YouTube.

So the demo launch went nicely, getting with a 97% review score I think. Finally we started to get some wishlists, and saw a huge spike, getting about 11k in 2 months, so a huge improvement, and positive feedback on the demo.

All was looking good and I forgot about Librarian for a while, assuming, we're all good. Then Librarian actually surprised me by releasing their game shortly after our demo (and before our game release). And of course its now gone on to be a HUUGE hit on Steam. It has an estimated half million players now.

Honestly, congratulations to the team. I understand similar games get made all the time, and probably they were working on it before they our Library game. They are similar but not identical. For example, we have a gameplay loop with memory and retrieval and more free form organisation, inspired by Wilmot's Warehouse, and we also have co-op whereas this is not the case in Librarian currently.

So anyway, I'm not sure what lessons to take from it, but I'm just worrying if we've wasted almost 2 years of our lives making Monk Took Book, or if it can still actually succeed after we've been "beaten to the market". I was planning on doing Next Fest, but perhaps I should rush our release out now to at least get some interest? Could their success even help us in this new "library game" genre I am part of. Will our co-op play differentiate us enough, or will players of Librarian even think we stole the idea, despite us announcing far earlier?

Interested to hear your thoughts on what, if anything, I should do and how to approach this psychologically.

Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4255310/Monk_Took_Book_Demo/

Description: A game about organizing, stacking and remembering where you put hundreds of books in a cozy-creepy medieval library. Play solo or with up to three fellow monks.

Greetings Cozy Gamers,

Myself and my girlfriend have been working on this game for a year or two now, and I think it's ready to share here. It's puzzle/simulation/co-op game about organizing books in a monastic library. We have a demo live, and our trailer above explains more about how it plays. Hope you get a chance to check it out and/or wishlist the game on Steam. Fare thee well!