Boxroom: shelving your Steam library, and getting back the smell of game boxes

There was a time when a game collection was something you could see: a shelf, boxes lined up, spines you ran a finger along before choosing. A Steam library is a list. Boxroom tries to give the shelf back.

The principle is disarming. You design a room, furnish it, decorate it, and the game fills the shelves with titles from your real Steam library. You can then browse, pull out a box, inspect it, put it somewhere else, and launch the game straight from the room.

The studios say it themselves on Steam, with humour: it is a game, well, if you can call it that. And that is the right way to take it. There is no goal, no score, no challenge. There is a BoxCo furniture catalogue to flip through, secret figurines and collector's editions hidden in some boxes, and the very particular pleasure of sorting.

Version 1.0, out tomorrow, adds what was missing most. The game now fetches box art by itself, thanks to a partnership with IGDB, instead of leaving you to hunt it down. Free placement ignores clipping, you can merge rooms when you expand, auto-sort unplaced games, hide the ones you do not want to see. You can change the weather outside the window, and photo mode is more complete. Steam Workshop hosts player creations.

The catch lies in the very nature of the thing. Once the room is done and the shelves are full, there is not much left to do but admire it and share it with friends. Early Access got a cool reception, 70% positive out of 340 reviews, partly because everything had to be done by hand. Recent reviews are much better, 83% over the last month. And a practical detail: your library must be public for the game to read it.

At 7.99 euros, it is a nostalgia object for collectors, not a game for players. If you have ever sorted a shelf of boxes by colour, you already know whether it is for you.

Show your room on the InsertCoins Discord: I want to see who sorts alphabetically and who sorts by colour.