This guest review is from Crystal Anne! Crystal Anne with An E comes to us from a sunny clime, but prefers to remain a pale indoor cat. She enjoys reading, cross-stitching something nerdy, going to see live music, and playing video games.
She works as an autism consultant by day, got a degree in information science for fun, and currently serves on her local library advisory board, which she’s written about for SBTB.
…
Sometimes you get to see your hobbies collide.
It happens more often with my cross-stitch and books (I think we all know that the number of bookish patterns are legion) but it’s less common with my video gaming and book habits.
Enter Tiny Bookshop.
I think I first heard about this game on one of the several video game podcasts I listen to, and of course, my ears perked up.
ORLY?
The premise of the game is fairly straightforward. You, the player, have decided to say “I’m out” and have moved to the seaside town of Bookstonbury with only your car and the tiny wooden trailer that you are towing, and have decided to try your luck as a bookseller.
So, fun fact about me, I actually HAVE been a bookseller in my life (I know, shocking). Back in college, I worked part-time in a couple of bookstores. I was good at the work, as I knew a lot about books, enjoyed the process of arranging and organizing the shelves, and of course, liked interacting with customers and talking to them about books. I also got to “check out” new releases and take them home and read them, which was VERY fun. We weren’t supposed to read on the job, but let’s be real, I did that too.
I also have daydreamed about opening up my own tiny pop-up type bookstores, and noodled around figuring out the process, but it’s not a dream for this moment in my time. That said, I even had a name for the place: The Dragon’s Hoard.
Much bigger than this one
So, finding out about this game is a bit like finding a way to make my little dream bookstore a real thing, even if only in this virtual space.
I mentioned it to my mom (a former librarian) with all attendant enthusiasm, and she went “That sounds like work.”
I mean...
BUT ALSO, YES, THAT’S THE POINT, THIS IS HOW I LIVE THE DREAM.
I started playing it last night, after I wrested the Switch 2 out of my daughter’s hands (she’s fully ensconced in Pokemon Pokopia, and boy, do I mean ENSCONCED).
I was not sure how it would go, since I’m not overly experienced with management sims. I’ve played a few, with Two Point Campus and Two Point Museum being notable favorites (with my interest in them being very similar to why I would pick up something like Tiny Bookshop: who wouldn’t want to run a college campus or a museum?) and just finished up Dave the Diver, which is part fishing sim and part management sim.
Yeah, I ended up playing Tiny Bookshop for the next 3 and a half hours.
The gameplay loop is fairly simple: you start your day by perusing the local newspaper. The newspaper will give you an idea of today’s weather, if there are any events happening, and will also have a classified section of people selling boxes of used books that you can buy to fill out your stock. Once that’s done, you start filling out your shelf, which initially allows you 40 books at any given time.
The books are classified into different genres:
- Crime (which can include your thrillers and your horror)
- Fantasy (which includes sci-fi)
- Kid’s Books
- Facts
- Travel
- Drama (this can be plays and your romance novels)
- Classics.
Then, once you have gotten that filled out, you choose a sale location, such as the local cafe, a local waterfront market, or the beach, among others. The farther you get into the game, the more locations open up to you.
This is where things get interesting, on both the sales and inventory management front. You want to get a feel for what sells best where.
You want to spend the day at the beach? Better stock up on Crime and Fantasy, because those two genres sell particularly well at the beach when people want something to read while sunbathing.
Plan on posting up at the local university during orientation? Stock up your Classics and Facts, because you might just be able to save some of those students money on their textbooks and English 1101 reading lists (and keep them some fiction available for pleasure reading because they deserve joy).
During your sales times, you will, of course, meet and get to know several of the townspeople, and get to help them, both by completing tasks and helping them find the right books.
In what I think is one of this game’s most charming conceits, most of the books in the game are real books from real authors. The game contains over 1000 real titles, as well as 42 in-game titles that cover topics like local history.
You can’t tell specifically what books are available until you’re in the sales mechanism. Customers will ask you for recommendations based on certain criteria, and it’s your job to help them find the right title for them – and if you’re successful, they’re more likely to buy more books at one time, because you can never have just one!
You sometimes have to think outside of their box, too. For example, at one point, a customer may ask you for a book by a female author that’s part of a series, and she’s mostly partial to Crime and Classics. I didn’t have anything that fit that brief in those genres, but I did have The Fifth Season by NK Jemisin, so I tried that, and it worked. A lot of genres also overlap, so it’s best to kind of pore through the options. Sometimes you recommend a title that doesn’t work, or you really don’t have a book that will work, and that’s okay. They can always try you again tomorrow.
It’s a low-key and soothing loop, with fairly low stakes. The art is pretty, with soft, somewhat muted colors, and a tranquil feel. And for the decorating mavens among us, you can decorate your trailer and car with plants and lights and pictures, and buy decorations from other vendors if you’d like to establish a theme. I just unlocked the goth vendor, and now I’m noodling on how to do a pastel/goth aesthetic, and can see myself getting very into that. I believe that I will also be able to get a dog and cat somewhere in the game as well, and I love in-game pets (ask me how much I pet all the babies in Assassin’s Creed games).
My little shop on a lovely spring day at St. Bookston University
If you need ideas, there’s a lovely Reddit thread in which people talk about their favorite in-game items.
This game is the very definition of cozy. There’s a strong focus on integrating into this community, which makes a point of being as welcoming and helpful as possible. I heard one podcaster describe it as being the perfect game to play under a weighted blanket.
I am also looking forward to future updates and DLCs, since I’d like to see them add books released since the game’s release, and I’d also like to see future events and collaborations. Weirdly, and it might be recency bias, but I could honestly see a crossover with Dave the Diver, of all things (Dave’s a reader; we know this because of the cutscenes in his time skips).
In conclusion, this is a good game when you need something stress-free and comforting to the brain. You’re not saving the world or romping through outer space, but you will find that the sense of accomplishment in this game feels oddly sweet.
And who knows? It may just give you ideas for a neato library display.
Tiny Bookshop Display
byu/Prettykitt473 inCozyGamers
Tiny Bookshop is available from Steam, Nintendo Switch, Playstation, XBox, and in a physical edition from the game’s homepage.
English (US) · 