Written by Colm Sheridan

Inroduction

The Library of Babel is a game inspired by Jorge Luis Borges’ short story of the same name. It takes place 20,000 years after the extinction of humanity in a world run by advanced robots who know very little about their mythical creators. Everything is orderly in this society until the discovery of a library that contains everything that has, is, and will ever be written – the perfect precursor of disorder.

You play as Ludovik, a Seeker sent to investigate a murder case in Babylon. When a state of emergency is suddenly declared, Ludovik finds himself in increasingly dangerous territory as he follows the murderer’s trail and unravels the mystery behind the library’s sudden lockdown.

Controls

Graphics and Sound.

The graphics in this game are clean and it’s a 2D side-scroller with brown tones and a few hints of reds and yellows. One word of warning: turn off your HDR settings on your TV or monitor, otherwise you will find it hard to read the text. As it’s all text-based, the only sound is the background music, which changes depending on the area you’re in. Overall, I would say the music works; it’s atmospheric and adds to the overall experience of the game.

Gameplay

This game is divided into chapters that are broken up into levels. The levels are narrow in width but make up for it in height, and the focus of the game is on climbing. While grabbing ledges can feel a bit off at first, you’ll get used to it after a while. Other elements of the game include stealth, puzzles, and point-and-click mechanics. Apart from the grabbing edges, all other aspects work seamlessly. Stealth is an important part of the game; if you’re not hidden behind crates or other background objects, you’ll be discovered and shot on sight. When you are hidden, the object will have a highlighted green mark around it. Just wait until the guard passes before moving on to the next object.

There are several save points around each level, which you need to activate using X. These are a live safer, saving you lots of time from having to restart from scratch. There are plenty of side missions and objects to collect.

To progress through each level, you need to open doors. To open these, you need to navigate through the level to activate certain buttons. As you can see from below screen buttons are highlighted in red to activate them you press X they turn green. You will need to activate several of these before you can go through the door. Puzzles are not to taxing on the brain.

There are plenty of side missions to do like retrieve certain objects for people. Once you do this they will let you buy stuff from them. One item is a tracker which bleeps when you are near hidden objects, but it’s quite annoying as it goes off way too many times and you can’t turn it off.

I found handing over items to people wasn’t straight forward. If you chat to them, it doesn’t give you the option of handing over the items in the chat menu. You must press Y button to open your inventory and then give it to them before chatting to them.

You can also combine objects in your inventory, a bit like the Resident evil games.

Summary

The game effortlessly combines platforming gaming with stealth and point-and-click elements into one exceptional experience. However, it suffers from serious pacing issues due to slow animations and needless little details that detract from the fun. The art style and dark colour palette are a nice touch. The little skits you get when combing and finding interactive parts help give the game some life. The puzzles are clever and with little to no help with solving them you soon learn to appreciate and hate them in equal measure. The game tries something new, which misses the mark, this stops it from being a consistent and enjoyable game. However, the story has excellent writing that both appeals and thrills and is the real highlight of the game.

Developed: Tanuki Game Studio

Published: Neon Doctrine

Genres: 2D Stealth Platformer, Graphic Adventure with some point and click elements.

File size: 2.0GB

Achievements: 35

How long to beat:  Main story: 15½ Hours

Code supplied for review purposes by UberStrategist PR Team.

Playing on Xbox Series X