Tiny Bookshop – Cozy Narrative Business Sim

Tiny Bookshop by neoludic games

Tiny Book Shop is a cozy business sim game with narrative elements; you’re running a book shop out of a trailer attached to your car, visiting different areas in a small seaside town, opening up each day. Some customers wander in and simply select and pay for books: comics-style dialogs appear over their heads, showing a pile of books they’ve selected, color-coded by genre. Occasionally, one will ask for help and a recommendation.

Location, Location, Location

Each area of the town has a different desired selection of genres: the Waterfront area loves Travel books and Fact (non-fiction) books, for example, while the Far Beach (closed during the winter) is more partial to Fantasy (which here includes science fiction), Kids’ books, and Crime. When a new area unlocks, you don’t know what they like, but in subsequent visits, your journal does tell you what genres sold best there (but you’re still better off taking notes, e.g., “I sold zero Kids’ books here”).

Each day, you choose a location to go to, then stock your shelves with books you think will sell well here – not title by title, but “Okay, they like non-fiction, stock a lot of that.” In addition, you pick up (or buy) decorations for your store, which improve (or potentially reduce) your sales, like: “Oh, cute dog, +2 customers,” or “play this track on your boombox, +15% to Travel and Fact chance of sale, -10% to everything else,” which may be useful at, say, the Waterfront, where Travel and Fact sales are already big, but maybe you want to skint on other genres.

Each location has some number of accomplishments to unlock, often given as quests from other characters, like “Please find us three manuscripts to publish for our new press,” or “Help us raise enough money so we can buy lots of shovels and make truly epic sand castles.”

A cast of characters talks to you about the goals they want to achieve, and actually, that’s a meaningful part of the gameplay: managing your shop does get repetitive, over time, but the quests given by other characters still help draw you through the game and unlock story beats. Some of the quests are multi-step “mysteries” you can solve, which typically reward you with additional decorations.

The basic game grind is: bring up your journal, see if there’s a special event today (special sale at the supermarket, the fish market is open at the Waterfront) – basically a reason to go to a particular location because your sales will be improved there. Check to see what genres sell where you want to bring, and stock your store accordingly. Look through your decorations and adjust them (oh no, Crime sells here, this deco reduces Crime sales, kill that for something else). Pan across the location to see if there’s something novel to click on (characters to talk to or decorations to pick up or the like). Open your shop, watch the customers, respond to requests for help.

Once you have a coffee machine and a watering can, you want to check them at times; customers buying coffee can help your bottom line, and “plant effects” (from your other deployed flora) are improved when you water. These time out after a while, so between helping customers, you want to click on them to reactivate.

Customer Conversations

Every once in a while, a customer will say, “Can you help me” or similar, and then you bring up the help dialog. They tell you what they want, like “I really like Crime novels with a well-known detective, and I like ‘Death on the Nile.’” So then you browse your shelves; obviously, they’ve already read “Death on the Nile,” but another Agatha Christie would work, and failing that, maybe Dorothy Sayers.

And worth checking out other genres than Crime, if you’re low on that inventory; maybe there’s a Conan Doyle or Wilkie Collins book under Classics. This is not a problem at game start, when you have one small shelf, but later, when you’ve bought more shelves, it’s more of a drag if you want to be conscientious, because looking through your whole inventory can take a while.

When you make a recommendation, there are three possible outcomes: “Yeah, I love this (hearts)” which gives you an “inspiration” tag at screen left which times down over some seconds and improves your sales in the meantime, or “Okay, not what I expected,” which is at least a sale, or “No, not what I wanted,” which is no sale, and the customer departs.

Most of the books in the game are real. Except for a few, which reference the history of Bookstonbury, the fictional town where you ostensibly live, all titles, descriptions, publication dates, and page lengths are factual. I startled at one point when I realized I’d just sold a copy of Jeanette Walls’s The Glass Castle, a best-selling autobiographical book by a friend’s ex-wife (it’s about her problematic childhood, and he is only mentioned peripherally).

Cozy Games and Comfort Reads

It’s played in 2D, with left-right scanning across the world. Graphics appear to be hand-drawn rather than modelled; the locations are all reasonably attractive in a somewhat pastel way, appropriate to a cozy game. Locations do vary in lighting by time of day, and also vary depending on weather, and by the seasons the game passes through. There’s not a lot of animation within environments, but nor do they feel terribly static.

The characters who visit your shop, or lounge about outside, are not exactly high resolution, but they do vary extensively by age, appearance, and clothing (which also changes with the season), and their animations are adequate for the needs of the game. Six of them you befriend (including Tilde, the now-retired former owner of the town’s closed bookstore, who provides useful advice), and dialogs provide somewhat more detailed head shots with varied expressions depending on what the characters say.

The music is actually fairly dull: light jazz, but there are not a lot of tracks, so the music gets repetitive after a while. There’s no voice acting, and while there are audio stings for actions and character responses, the soundscape is fairly scanty.

Although controller is supported, it’s much easier to play with mouse and keyboard; you aren’t represented on screen, so moving around is not an issue (which would favor a controller). Instead, you mostly click on things, and while you can use a joystick to move a cursor, then select with an action button, the mouse is superior.

The Verdict

I spent about 20 hours with the game and very much liked the basic setting, the challenges offered at each location, and the character interactions. It did get a bit repetitive after a while, but the quests and challenges at least offered some differentiation from the daily book-selling grind. I am, of course, an avid reader, and if you aren’t a bibliophile, no doubt it would appeal less to you than I.

Still, it’s an engaging, lean-back type of game you might find comforting to play in your downtime. While not challenging, there is at least an intellectual engagement in navigating its systems and in helping your customers find the perfect book for them.

Tiny Bookshop is a cozy business sim with narrative aspects and an engaging book-selling system that relies on real-world books and recommending books to your users. It should appeal to any player who sometimes fantasizes about running a bookstore or who enjoys playing games for relaxation rather than challenging action.

Tiny Bookshop is available via the Nintendo eShop and Steam.

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