Something is Wrong with the Library makes shelving a haunted job
The studio behind I Am Your Beast and Clickolding is building a narrative organising simulator about a small-town library that has to be put to rest in a single night.
Strange Scaffold has put its next game on Steam. Something is Wrong with the Library is a narrative organising simulator from the studio behind I Am Your Beast and Clickolding, co-published with Frosty Pop and listed for PC in the fourth quarter of 2026.
One night, one library, one billionaire's tidy-up
The town is Sweet Elm, and the store page credits its revival to Alex Dieter, a Fortune 500 billionaire who paid for the fibre internet, the landscaping and a set of initiatives designed to make the place a curated hub of innovation and small-town comfort. It also credits him with killing homeless people and packing them into the walls of the local library. The Alex Dieter Public Library and Center for Reflection is consequently haunted, its shelves thrown over by forces that have not left. With the help of its former administrator, Phillip Shed, you are asked to clean and organise it across one tense night and unpick the story of complicity sitting underneath the mess.
Thousands of real books, and a different library each run
The listing promises a fully voiced story with a library of eerie manifestations to unlock, a shelf of thousands of real book titles, and a Modular Chaos System that hands you a different set of books to shelve on every playthrough. The work itself is cataloguing: fallen and missing books go back in order of Dewey Decimal classification, author and title. Steam lists Windows, single player, partial controller support and English with full audio.
What is confirmed, and what is not
There is no price and no date beyond that fourth-quarter window, and no console versions are mentioned. The story beats above are the studio's own description on the store page, and the page does not yet carry footage of the game in motion, so the tone of a night's work in Sweet Elm is still an article of faith.
Our opinion
Making order itself the horror device is a sharper idea than it first looks. A library is a promise that everything belongs somewhere and can be found again, and a haunted one breaks that promise in the most bureaucratic way available: the books are wrong, the shelves are wrong, and the only tool you have is a classification system. What separates this from a novelty is the reshuffling, because a fixed arrangement would be a puzzle with an answer while a changing one makes your own competence the variable. Strange Scaffold has form for weaponising a small repetitive task against the player's patience, and the studio's nerve in making the bodies in the walls homeless people is the part that will need more than atmosphere to carry it. Judged on the writing rather than the shelving, this is the most interesting thing the studio has announced.