“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.” – Steam Description

In Monk Took Book, you and up to three of your friends play as monks tasked with running a grand sprawling library. You start from nothing and each day grow your collection. During the day you get new books at the dock, and maybe have some returns you need to take care of. This is also when you can buy a variety of things. At night you have to give out the correct books to the scribes, and defend your library from threats that appear. I love that this game has the cozy library feel to it until the chaos of the night happens. It’s a lot of fun to play with friends, but solo play still feels manageable with a slightly different strategy.

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Building For Success

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When you first make your way into the library you’ll see no shelves. You can pick which ones to build first and how to setup your library. As you continue through the game and open more sections you can choose where to go first. You’ll learn quickly that time is a huge factor in how many Blessings you get. Blessings are your currency that you use to purchase anything in the game including upgrades, shelves, new sections, equipment, and book repairs. With this in mind keeping things as central to the main library will be essential to finishing quickly, especially if you are playing solo. After placing your books, its time to ring the bell to start the night. The Bell Tower is in a completely different building so you’ll walk out there and ring the bell.

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In The Dark Of The Night

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The halls seem to echo with danger as you set to your task. The scribes require tomes to study and its your job to provide them. Your hard work during the day will pay off here as your stocked and organized shelves are ready to be quickly ravaged by your group. Placing like tomes together makes the query for 5 books about wine an easy grab. Oh they are asking for that symbol that looks really similar to that other one? Thank goodness your forethought put both of them side by side so you only have to go to one place in the shelves.

Unfortunately getting books is not the only thing you have to worry about. Each night there is a chance for events to happen. This could be anything from a plague of book eating rats to Viking Raiders. There are some other surprises in store also, but the long and the short of it is you need to arm yourselves and protect your library from any threats that appear. Quickly and efficiently handing out the books and rushing back to the Bell Tower to ring the bell again will end the night and cause any threats in the library vanish. When you complete a night you’ll get a note from the Prior. If you have pleased them you will be rewarded with Blessings and a fresh shipment of books at the docks. However, if you have displeased them you will get no Blessings or new books. You’ll have to play the next night on what you already have, and any returns you’ve been given.

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The Loop Begins

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Now that you’ve survived the night and have a little bit of Blessings to play with expansion might be in order. This could be buying new shelves, or a new section entirely. I would suggest getting all your books in order before worrying about spending to much money. If you have enough shelves you don’t need to buy more quite yet, and you could spend your money on other things that could help you out. This means one of two things, either shopping or upgrading. If you head over to the shop you’ll see a variety of items on sale including a ladder, a quill, a bucket, a torch, a cross, a dagger, and a crossbow. Some of these things might be a little more needed than others. At this point if you didn’t buy a weapon now’s the time.

The upgrades can be found in the basement. It’s a room full of statues and when you pray in front of one, and pay the Blessing cost, you’ll get the offered upgrade. The couple I liked to grab were increased shelf height, and anything to do with my dash. I’m not going to go through all of these to leave just a little mystery, but there are quite a few upgrades offered, thirteen in total. Balancing your Blessings is going to be a huge factor in your late game survival. If you spend too many Blessings on shelves or book repairs you might not have the upgrades you need to protect yourself and your library.

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We’ve Got Options

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One of the best features in this game are the vast array of options so that you can customize your play style. If you want to have a calm cozy library experience, you can turn all of the dangers off. If you want to play the game on hard mode, you can turn all of the options up to eleven. You have full freedom in your experience as long as you are the host of your lobby. When I played with my friend we didn’t mess with the settings at all and there is some challenge at normal, but maybe with all full crew of four I would have turned up some of the settings. As I was going through to get some more images for this review I turned all the dangers off since the gameplay wasn’t the focus at that point. The fact that they give us so much control is what truly makes this game scream “cozy” to me.

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• Graphics– I enjoyed the pixelated style of this game. The symbols were still clear and easy to understand and the enemies looked great. It’s not over the top but it doesn’t need to be.
• Gameplay– I will say that this is a fun cozy game, but the loop feels a little dry sometimes. The day takes so long to organize and get everything into order in later rounds. While the night is short in comparison. I think in shorter sessions it wouldn’t be so bad, but we played it for four hours straight in one of our sessions.
• Sound– The sounds weren’t anything to write home about, but not unpleasant.
• Controls– Most of the controls felt great, but every once and a while I’d end up throwing books without meaning to, which can cause damage to them, and that was annoying. It would be when I was trying to place the books on the shelves, or give the books to the scribes. I also felt extremely slow all the time. Which is why Dash upgrades felt so important.
• Story– There isn’t a whole lot here for story. I don’t think that’s a bad thing. They kept everything on brand with a medieval monastery library vibes with all the medieval style writing throughout the game.