"At the time, I didn't immediately think my boss was filling the walls of our place of business with corpses," so opens the reveal trailer for Something is Wrong with the Library, the latest game from the studio that is most hard to pin down genre-wise, Strange Scaffold. Though, considering they've made games about isekaing people, trading space babies on the stock market, and cuck-, I mean, Clickolding, perhaps the way you pin them down is "games for freaks and weirdos."
In Something is Wrong with the Library, the thing that is wrong with the library is gentrification. Here's the set up for the game: a billionaire came in and "revitalized your small mountain town," by introducing fiber internet, landscaping, by making it a tech-hub, the usual kind of thing. To aid in his own efforts, he also killed a number of houseless people and, for some reason, decided to put them in the walls of the local library. And so, the thing that is wrong with the library itself, is that it's haunted.
Something is Wrong With the Library. Our next game, coming soon. 📚 Organize the Alex Dieter Public Library and Center for Reflection 💀 Dead people are stuffed in the walls 😨 It is extremely haunted 🌊 The Drowning Room Wishlist now. store.steampowered.com/app/3971340/[image or embed]— Strange Scaffold (@strangescaffold.bsky.social) September 28, 2026 at 2:01 PM
"Its shelves are in disarray, books thrown to the floor by supernatural forces and long-departed patrons," the game's Steam page explains. "With the help of its former administrator, Phillip Shed, you will clean and organize the library in one tense night, unraveling the story of complicity at its heart and bringing it peace–one shelf at a time." The in-game library is filled with real, actual book titles, though whether you can really read them or not I can't tell you.
It also utilizes the Dewey Decimal System to help you find and organise the books, made more challenging by its modular chaos system where "every playthrough gives you a different set of books to shelve." There is also The Drowning Room. I do not know what The Drowning Room is. I'm sure we'll all find out eventually.
It's actually the point about the Dewey Decimal System I'm most curious about; the man who came up with it, Melvil Dewey, was a racist, anti-semite, misogynist, and was accused by multiple women of sexual assault. The system itself is notably quite biased as well, leading to calls for its dismantlement in schools and libraries. It's not often we get games about libraries, so I'm keen to see if it reckons with this history amongst all the slightly more fantastical horrors.
Something is Wrong with the Library is due out by the end of this year, and you can wishlist it on Steam here.
Source: Rock Paper Shotgun