I've wanted to stick mostly to the less famous SCP's, but today's has been specially requested by at least fifteen different people in the past couple of weeks, and its own devoted game adaptation has been rapidly gaining attention. It seems like the Ikea is the foundation's biggest breakout star right now, and it's certainly a fun concept.

If you don't have Ikea where you live or simply haven't been to one, it probably helps to understand what kind of a place it is. While billed primarily as a furniture store, an Ikea also sells stationary, books, toys, kitchen supplies, gardening tools and basically everything else needed for a home, most of it displayed in realistic, decorated sample rooms laid out in a single, winding path that takes the customer on a mostly linear but very lengthy tour broken only by a cafe and rest area at roughly the half-way point.

Getting lost and disoriented in an Ikea is a very real possibility, and it always seems to go on a little longer than you expect it too. Just when you're sure you're at the end of your journey, here comes the entire bedroom department or mood lighting section, every category as massive as its own small store.

Joked about Ikea going on "forever" have been exchanged as long as Ikea has been in business, so it's more surprising nobody shared any fiction like this a lot sooner.

The SCP version of Ikea really does go on forever, and people lost within have to contend with distorted, mannequin-like "staff" who become lethally violent after dark, even while very politely requesting that everyone please leave for closing time.

With so many other "bigger on the inside" SCP's, this one might not have stood out from the crowd if not for the recovered journal, which reveals entire makeshift towns of people who ward off the staff night after night and share strangely inconsistent memories of their pre-Ikea life, as though they've wandered in from an array of differing timelines.

It's a fun setup and I had a lot of fun reading it, though it ultimately feels to me like another "average, solid" SCP; another baseline example of good, decent quality that doesn't suffer any notable shortcomings, but neither does it innovate too heavily on themes we've seen before. Under the dressing of an infinite extradimensional Ikea and its "staff" is a situation otherwise similar to your classic post-apocalyptic society, though I appreciate that these isolated survivors do not resort to the kind of tiresome brutality that plagues said genre. I definitely like it a lot, but by my own measure of weird, I have to give the Normal Ikea a 3/5 "good" rating.