This is a librarian adventure game. As a new employee of the library, you will lend at the counter. The story branches by selecting the book that the user wants from all 260 books. Multi-ending with multiple bad ends.
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Something you may not know about me is that I would like to be a librarian. I have many careers I’d love to venture into, but of the ones that are less fanciful, librarianship is the most prominent. And of the possibilities, I would love to be a reference librarian. There are a lot of specific reasons that I won’t get into (and reasons it may not be in the cards for me) but a big part of it is just that I like helping people, and I like helping people find things. One of my favorite things in the world is recommending things to people. The reference interview is a bundle of opportunities: the opportunity to explore the patron’s understanding of the library, to explore the nature of their interests, and to explore the vast well of human knowledge found in the library stacks. It is a beautiful thing that I would like to be a part of.
Kakureza Library, is, unfortunately, not really about this, even if it is trying to be. It’s a short visual novel that is framed around you running the checkout counter at a library. While I may come across as harsh going forward, I want to clarify that I think the game is merely mediocre. It’s a bit of a mess, but nothing cruel is in here, just my own disappointment. There are other failings here, of course: it’s plot is kind of nonsense (something about a cult and robots?), the characterization isn’t too in-depth, and it’s very poorly built and poorly localized. But none broke my heart more than realizing that Kakureza Library could never be the fantasy I was hoping for.
I understand that this game is not exactly a blockbuster hit, so I’ll explain how it works. The way you play Kakureza Library is pretty simple. Patrons come up to you, with books both to return and check out. First you click their library card. Then, you click all the books they’ve brought to you, and the game automatically checks out or returns anything they’ve brought to you. About once a day, one of them will ask you if you have a certain kind of book. Sometimes they know exactly what they’re looking for, and sometimes they only have a vague idea of what they need. So, you look through the little catalog app you have, looking for what they seem to be asking for, and you loan it to them. Depending on whether it’s what they need, your little score in the corner goes up or down. Other random non-checkout related things raise and lower the score, like some minor puzzles. If you get a perfect score of 36, you get the true ending. That’s sort of it.
I want to make a brief comparison to Papers, Please, which bears some similarities. Both essentially deal with processing people through a system. In Papers, Please, it’s the border policies of an authoritarian regime. In Kakureza Library, it’s the check out policies of a local library. But the result of these simulations are the same: by the end, the people who pass in front of you are gradually dehumanized. Now, of course, the dehumanization in Papers, Please is a lot more severe and a lot more pointed. In Kakureza Library, it is a banal one. There’s an old Mitchell & Webb skit about a librarian cruelly berating a woman as she checks out a book for her horrible taste. That she is tasteless, predictable, and dull. Kakureza Library gives you the creeping sensation that you could become him. Of course, you'd never be so cruel, right? But the humdrum goes on, a part of you could turn bitter. The old man always wants local history books. The young boy always wants comics and sports books. The goth girl always wants vaguely goth themed books. There’s little aberrations, sure. But people, ultimately, are not all that deep. They like the things they like. They know what they like, and they like what they know. They’re entitled to that, of course. But your interface with them is as simple as a series of quick clicks. It’s as over as quickly as it started, and there is not a chance for much to develop.
And this, to me, gets at sort of the root failure of Kakureza Library. The beauty of the reference interview is, in part, found in the recognition of another human being. You need to open yourself up to understanding someone else’s wants and needs. It’s not just about handing them a book. When someone comes to you with a query, when they ask you for help, you start a journey together. You try to understand what they want, what they are looking for, what they want out of the library’s resources, and what you can give them. It can take you all sorts of different places, and you rarely know where you’ll end up. They may end up with nothing, or something wildly different from what they were expecting. It’s a tour of junctures, a peek into the archive and its machinations. That journey, that process of discovery, of learning how to navigate the archive, the uncovering of the known, this is part of what makes libraries beautiful. But that never happens in Kakureza Library. You always have the exact right book for them. You always have exactly what they needed. They always need one specific book. You tell them what it is and whether you have it. You hand it to them, and then they leave.
Libraries are so much more than a silo of information. They are also gymnasiums of meaning, of meaning-making, of possibility and discovery. I want to be careful about romanticizing them, but I do not think recognizing the transformative capacity of the library is in opposition with a realistic understanding of what they are. Libraries are perfectly mundane, but are filled with possibility. It is this duality that is important. Libraries are, both fortunately and unfortunately, one of the few socialized services that most towns and cities currently allow to be free. As such, they are often havens for needs beyond just books. They have movies, music, audiobooks, games, newspapers, computers. There are seminars, readings, children’s events, workshops, and most of all, places to simply be. These are the libraries of reality: both boring and quiet, and bursting with possibility for each person who walks through its doors. While this wasn’t always the case, this is not an uncommon perspective to hear from librarians these days. When we treat a library as a simple database, we can start to treat the patrons who use it as information receptacles, like the banking model of education. They want nothing other than information, and so we shove it in their mouths. This is the worst kind of library to be in. Libraries ought be places of discovery, of dialogue, of liberation, of investigation, of development. Libraries ought not be houses of interpellation but houses of invention.
Kakureza Library wants to see the humanity in your patrons. It wants to create a world where librarians can help people and treat them with kindness, and where the people who go to the library find some fulfillment. It wants to show the libraries can make the world a better place. But its visions of the library are incomplete. The pictures it paints do not show you what happens in the study rooms, in the conference rooms, on the computers, in the quiet nooks. Because all Kakureza Library is is a game about checking out books. You’re not a reference librarian, or an archivist, or an outreach librarian, or a library manager, or even really a library page. All you really do is handle books. Out they go, in they come, like the people who hold them. When we reduce the library the check-out counter, we become the laser scanner we use there: all we see is the barcode. But the library is not a transaction.
Kakureza Library, is, unfortunately, not really about this, even if it is trying to be. It’s a short visual novel that is framed around you running the checkout counter at a library. While I may come across as harsh going forward, I want to clarify that I think the game is merely mediocre. It’s a bit of a mess, but nothing cruel is in here, just my own disappointment. There are other failings here, of course: it’s plot is kind of nonsense (something about a cult and robots?), the characterization isn’t too in-depth, and it’s very poorly built and poorly localized. But none broke my heart more than realizing that Kakureza Library could never be the fantasy I was hoping for.
I understand that this game is not exactly a blockbuster hit, so I’ll explain how it works. The way you play Kakureza Library is pretty simple. Patrons come up to you, with books both to return and check out. First you click their library card. Then, you click all the books they’ve brought to you, and the game automatically checks out or returns anything they’ve brought to you. About once a day, one of them will ask you if you have a certain kind of book. Sometimes they know exactly what they’re looking for, and sometimes they only have a vague idea of what they need. So, you look through the little catalog app you have, looking for what they seem to be asking for, and you loan it to them. Depending on whether it’s what they need, your little score in the corner goes up or down. Other random non-checkout related things raise and lower the score, like some minor puzzles. If you get a perfect score of 36, you get the true ending. That’s sort of it.
I want to make a brief comparison to Papers, Please, which bears some similarities. Both essentially deal with processing people through a system. In Papers, Please, it’s the border policies of an authoritarian regime. In Kakureza Library, it’s the check out policies of a local library. But the result of these simulations are the same: by the end, the people who pass in front of you are gradually dehumanized. Now, of course, the dehumanization in Papers, Please is a lot more severe and a lot more pointed. In Kakureza Library, it is a banal one. There’s an old Mitchell & Webb skit about a librarian cruelly berating a woman as she checks out a book for her horrible taste. That she is tasteless, predictable, and dull. Kakureza Library gives you the creeping sensation that you could become him. Of course, you'd never be so cruel, right? But the humdrum goes on, a part of you could turn bitter. The old man always wants local history books. The young boy always wants comics and sports books. The goth girl always wants vaguely goth themed books. There’s little aberrations, sure. But people, ultimately, are not all that deep. They like the things they like. They know what they like, and they like what they know. They’re entitled to that, of course. But your interface with them is as simple as a series of quick clicks. It’s as over as quickly as it started, and there is not a chance for much to develop.
And this, to me, gets at sort of the root failure of Kakureza Library. The beauty of the reference interview is, in part, found in the recognition of another human being. You need to open yourself up to understanding someone else’s wants and needs. It’s not just about handing them a book. When someone comes to you with a query, when they ask you for help, you start a journey together. You try to understand what they want, what they are looking for, what they want out of the library’s resources, and what you can give them. It can take you all sorts of different places, and you rarely know where you’ll end up. They may end up with nothing, or something wildly different from what they were expecting. It’s a tour of junctures, a peek into the archive and its machinations. That journey, that process of discovery, of learning how to navigate the archive, the uncovering of the known, this is part of what makes libraries beautiful. But that never happens in Kakureza Library. You always have the exact right book for them. You always have exactly what they needed. They always need one specific book. You tell them what it is and whether you have it. You hand it to them, and then they leave.
Libraries are so much more than a silo of information. They are also gymnasiums of meaning, of meaning-making, of possibility and discovery. I want to be careful about romanticizing them, but I do not think recognizing the transformative capacity of the library is in opposition with a realistic understanding of what they are. Libraries are perfectly mundane, but are filled with possibility. It is this duality that is important. Libraries are, both fortunately and unfortunately, one of the few socialized services that most towns and cities currently allow to be free. As such, they are often havens for needs beyond just books. They have movies, music, audiobooks, games, newspapers, computers. There are seminars, readings, children’s events, workshops, and most of all, places to simply be. These are the libraries of reality: both boring and quiet, and bursting with possibility for each person who walks through its doors. While this wasn’t always the case, this is not an uncommon perspective to hear from librarians these days. When we treat a library as a simple database, we can start to treat the patrons who use it as information receptacles, like the banking model of education. They want nothing other than information, and so we shove it in their mouths. This is the worst kind of library to be in. Libraries ought be places of discovery, of dialogue, of liberation, of investigation, of development. Libraries ought not be houses of interpellation but houses of invention.
Kakureza Library wants to see the humanity in your patrons. It wants to create a world where librarians can help people and treat them with kindness, and where the people who go to the library find some fulfillment. It wants to show the libraries can make the world a better place. But its visions of the library are incomplete. The pictures it paints do not show you what happens in the study rooms, in the conference rooms, on the computers, in the quiet nooks. Because all Kakureza Library is is a game about checking out books. You’re not a reference librarian, or an archivist, or an outreach librarian, or a library manager, or even really a library page. All you really do is handle books. Out they go, in they come, like the people who hold them. When we reduce the library the check-out counter, we become the laser scanner we use there: all we see is the barcode. But the library is not a transaction.