The Last Librarian

The Last Librarian does not hide much about what formula it's taking off of: your primary tools are a sword, boomerang, bow, and bomb. There are 8 dungeons. Your health is measured in hearts. It's Zelda, okay? Which is fine, because The Last Librarian does Zelda very well, and in some ways even better.

Taking a page from older Zelda titles, the world of Rosarah is about what you'd expect - there's a forest area, a desert, a lava-filled mountain, a spooky area, all the usual video game biomes are here. I spent the first couple hours roaming a fair amount of it, obtaining some power-ups, learning some lore (this game has a fair amount of lore in it, too, if you're interested in reading), and generally building my checklist of places I'll have to revisit with new items. An awful lot was accomplished before ever setting foot in my first dungeon.

Befitting an adventure game of this style, there are puzzles aplenty, both in the world and in the dungeons. The Last Librarian has some excellent, although difficult, puzzles throughout the entire adventure. Many puzzles left me outright stumped - even after beating the game I have a few things left unsolved - which given the open structure is fine, as I could abandon it entirely in favor of some other endeavor for a while. Dungeons, as expected, revolve around a central theme or puzzle that, by the end, is thoroughly explored. No gimmicks that are revolutionary - dungeons range from laser puzzles to wind puzzles to figuring out how to light torches, but the difficulty of what you'll find is a lot higher than what you'd find from any Zelda title. The versatile nature of your toolkit allowed for a lot of inventive problems and solutions - the bombs can be moved by your boomerang, which can be held in place and ricochet your bow's arrows, which can teleport through thin obstacles. More than a couple of times I would say "wait, that was the intended solution?" as I pull off a truly ingenious trick shot.

For the strength of the puzzles, the combat is surprisingly lacking. Enemies take maybe too many hits to be fun, since the starting monsters outside of your hometown can take six attacks before going down. It's difficult to shake enemies off you if they get close, and you can't open your menu - for, say, a healing item - if you're in the invulnerability-after-getting-hit state. The vast majority of my fights were kiting with the bow or boomerang, a tedious process to say the least. One dungeon in particular had enemies popping out of the ground unseen, moving very quickly, and often you'd be forcibly moved into a place where they'd immediately be set upon you - a thoroughly unfair gotcha.

Also, the music is serviceable but forgettable. A single night theme for the entire map got a little repetitive. I didn't have a better lead-in or lead-out, so here's your three-sentence paragraph for that.

Probably the saddest thing about The Last Librarian is that it appears that nobody played it. Googling showed maybe a couple forum posts about it, and youtube videos are either from the dev, the demo, or one of those "indie spotlight" sort of video collections. Even conversations about this Itch bundle specifically don't seem to bring it up at all. This is not a small game - the store page pitches 10-20 hours, I spent 10 and could easily see 15 - and a lot of intelligence was put into it. But it looks like it was passed by the world.

I know that's the fate of a lot of games. People already believe there's a video game oversaturation and they have no idea just how many video games exist out there - this bundle should be proof enough of that. So much work was put into each one of these games, and getting any notice at all is bound to be a miracle, much less a meaningful return. I liked this game enough that I actually beat the whole thing - thank goodness I had a backlog for scheduled posts - and it kind of hurt me, just a player, to realize I might be pretty alone in that.

I doubt this post on a forgettable site in particular is going to change anything about that, or give The Last Librarian the small-but-adoring fanbase I feel like it deserves. But I noticed it, tried it, played it. That's the least I can do for all the games here.

I enjoyed it. The Last Librarian is a good game.