If you enjoy roleplay games and have a knack for organization, then you should give Monk Took Book a try. Monk Took Book is SquarePlay Games’s latest title, where you take on the role of the new monk taking care of a monastic library of the Dark Ages.

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What is Monk Took Book

In Monk Took Book, you will spend your days organizing a new selection of books that arrive each morning, each bearing a unique symbol. Then when night falls, you will need to find the correct books and give them to Scribes.

You are rewarded by the Abbot with blessings you can spend on skill upgrades and expanding the library’s collection. While your job may seem straightforward, there is a slight twist. At night all manner of beasts will attack the library, endangering your book collection. You will have to defeat these creatures, using a variety of weapons, and restore any damaged books.

Monk Took Book Gameplay & Features

You have the option to play Monk Took Book solo or with up to four players with proximity voice chat and in-game text chat in public and private lobbies. For this review I played on a solo server, just to get used to the game’s mechanics.

A full tutorial day in Monk Took Book is very straightforward. You gather a few books from the dock, purchase a shelf to store them on, and then manually change the time to night. Then you collect those same books and give them to the waiting scribes, and once again manually change time to the next day.

Once you receive your first Blessings from the Abbot, is when things begin to pick up pace. You have the option to choose between storage space for books, weapons and other items, and character upgrades. This is where playing with others comes in handy, as each player can take on designated roles and apply the upgrades to what fits that role. Playing solo, you have to become a bit more resourceful with how you spend your Blessings.

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The first few days you can get away with using some of the crates around the library as storage, to keep books off the floor, as rats will chew on them if they are left on the ground. However, eventually even spiders become a threat to the books you have stacked on objects and shelves, so you should make sure to grab a weapon from the shop by the third in game day.

It took me about three in-game days to figure out a rhythm to managing the tasks I needed to complete each day and night. Organizing the books by the symbol on the spine made completing orders very easy. And while the core gameplay loop was again very easy to get used to, especially as a solo player, I only ran into a few minor issues. One being that at times interactable objects would take several tries to use, and it was easy to get a little stuck navigating around clutter objects. However, these things didn’t cause too much of a slow down in my work speed.

Final Thoughts on the Game

Overall, Monk Took Book is a fun library management game. While you can play solo, I do think the game is best with friends. A lot of the game’s charm would probably have come through with a group of people playing together, and “helping” each other stay on task, rather than playing on my own. So if you can get a group together, the game is definitely worth a try.

The core gameplay loop is easy to pick up and easy to find a rhythm, especially if you play a lot of other “tidying up” style games. But if you want to give Monk Took Book a try, it is currently available on Steam for $8.99.

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