Nice game! I like the title generator.
I think there should be some sort of score system for the books (it looks like maybe there is one already half in place?) so you can review your collection and their rarities after a successful escape. Obviously the primary target is the most important, but picking up some other very rare books along the way shouldn't hurt ;)
I also think being able to choose your target from a list might be good. I definitely suicided a lot in the first room just to refresh the titles for my main quest target. I'm a magic thieving specialist; I pick my contracts, thank you very much! XD;
I didn't have any problem with the difficulty-- the game is a bit challenging on hard but not too bad. I liked that most of the strategy comes from learning how L-space/The Library works, and that the best strategies require a bit of patience. I think those both fit the theme well.
For those struggling: 1) Once you've seen part of the Library you can always see what is there. You've got, like, magic library vision. This means that peeking around corners and then retreating will create large areas you will be able to see Librarians approaching from. 2) Librarians reset position and course when you re-enter a room. You can thus juggle a screen transition to get a spawn that works for you. 3) Librarians will never chase you outside of their room(i.e. through a screen transition). This means that juggling screen transitions is relatively safe, and that if you are being chased you can move, effectively, one space further in a straight line if that space transitions you. 4) Helpful books (literally and otherwise) may well lie off the beaten path. If your path from a catalog to its exit takes you past another exit it is probably worth checking for freebies on the side exit before continuing 5) When exiting the library, you can't use catalogs, but *every* transition you didn't just come from gives you the catalog bonus. This means if you can juggle two screen transitions near each other in a room you will accrue progress extremely quickly and safely and easily be able to exit, even if your targeted book has drained practically all your resolve (it gives you a massive hit on hard). 6) Enlightening means +sanity. Inspiring means +resolve. Helpful means +progress. Maddening, Dull, and Confusing are the respective opposites.
You need Sanity to not die. Librarians murdering you sets it to zero, obviously, but you also lose 5 sanity for entering L-space by walking into a not-interactive bookshelf and another 1 sanity per move you make after the initial entry. You can also lose tons of sanity by reading a book while in a bookshelf-- don't do this. On hard, once you reach 4 Librarian rooms you will be burning through sanity like crazy even with very friendly spawns, so be sure to conserve it as much as you can and explore side rooms for enlightening books and refresh rooms for good spawns. You need Resolve to read books. You need to read books to maintain sanity, which you need to not die. You also need to read your target book to win, and it can have a really big resolve minimum. You do not *lose* resolve when reading books, it is just required to be at a certain threshold based on how difficult/rare the book it. You lose resolve every time you pass a turn without doing anything, which you can do with the spacebar. If you do this in L-space, you lose resolve but *not* sanity. Resolve numbers are always lower than sanity-- 20-30 is pretty good. You'll want 40 which might be the max when you read your target on hard, though. Pacing back and forth, when it is safe to do so, can save you resolve when you want to wait. Obviously waiting is vastly better than pacing when it comes to L-Space almost always-- Sanity is super important!-- but usually if you are in L-Space you are moving somewhere else anyways. You gain 2 resolve every time you read a catalog, but you can't do that anymore once you have your primary target and are trying to escape. Progress determines when the target book will spawn and when you can leave the library. The library is magic so you can leave it from wherever-- you don't need to try to trek back to where you came in. You make progress by reading helpful books and by taking the indicated exit after reading a catalog. Note that you do NOT *have* to take the indicated exit-- the library is magic and there are plenty of other catalogues with other routes to the target book. This is important because not every exit is worth trying to get to. Some are just too far down a long hallway with nothing to hide behind. Note also that you will *lose* your catalog progress if you double back through the entrance it indicated after using it. You can just go back through to regain it, but essentially you have to take a new exit from the linked room to make real progress. Progress seems also to determine how dangerous the Library is in terms of how high level the books around are and how many there are and how many librarians there are. Once you get your target book progress resets to 0 and then every exit you take gives you progress as if you used a catalog. This new progress makes the game get easier, rather than harder, though, and eventually the game will return to the initial levels of difficulty and lighting and you can win by leaving the Library.