Tiny Bookshop got a surprise launch for Steam and Switch during last Thursday’s Nintendo indie presentation. As the name implies, you run a tiny bookshop in a seaside town, meeting the locals and recommending books to them.
Your bookshop is run out of a cart attached to a car, meaning that every day you have to decide where you’ll set up shop. People at different locations want different kinds of books: beachgoers want fantasy and kids books, while folks at the coffee shop want classics and drama. The sailors at the waterfront want travel books, while the students at the university want non-fiction. After you visit a place for the first time, their preferences are kept in your journal, and there’s a pleasant pre-departure ritual of stocking your shelves with the kinds of books your potential customers like best.
You can also boost the sales of specific books with decorative items around the shop. A skull will increase the sales chance of crime, for instance, while a vintage bell will boost the sale of classics. Some items will boost one sales chance while diminishing another, and all of these items will add a small cost to your daily expenses. New items, as well as more books, can be purchased at the weekly flea market or from a day’s edition of the town paper, where you’ll also find the weather forecast and upcoming town events.
There’s a light narrative atop all this in the form of various recurring characters, who give you small quests to complete as you get to know them. I didn’t personally find any of these characters terribly compelling–they wear their motivations pretty nakedly, and they glom onto you as a newcomer to town with an intimacy I found a bit too fast, but this all makes sense for the limited interactions you can have with them and for the story the game wants to tell about how relationships are formed in a small town.
My favorite part of Tiny Bookshop has been the book recommendation system. While characters will mostly handle their own browsing and buying, every so often a character will ask you to recommend a specific book to them. These can be a straightforward request for a short romance or recent kids book, or it can be a more complex preference that could span genres. You scan your shelves for whatever’s turned up or still left, most of which are real books, and then offer them a book you think will meet their needs. If it does, in addition to getting to feel clever about it, the sale will give you a short boost that encourages other patrons to buy more books.
Besides breaking up gameplay that is largely just watching NPCs buy things, I loved flipping through the titles on my shelves and trying to think of what a character might like or not like. Sometimes the requests are hilarious– one character, with a kid in tow according to their dialogue, disturbingly asked me if I had “anything like American Psycho.” There’s also a lot of humor potential in what you can suggest; I skimmed to Elliot Page’s tragically-titled memoir Pageboy when I was looking for a book for a character who told me “I’m looking for a new hobby,” leading me to ponder whether transitioning is a hobby. I became determined to sell someone Titus Andronicus regardless of age level, or Annihilation when someone asked for a romance with a happy ending. (It didn't work.) Their responses will also sometimes be unintentionally funny: One character, looking for a long book, scolded me when I suggested Moby Dick because it wasn’t long enough, and another, looking for a romance, reacted with delight like I’d found them the most obscure book in the world when I suggested one of Shakespeare’s romantic comedies. It helps if you know the books, though they also have pretty solid summaries to help you make your decision.
If you’re a literature person, a pretty solid assumption if you’re playing a game about books, making book recommendations is really fun and thought-provoking, and it’s super satisfying when you get one right. You won’t always have something appropriate on hand, especially if it’s been a busy day and your shelves are looking bare, but nothing in Tiny Bookshop is too punishing if you mess it up.
The game is broken into seasons; I’ve just completed summer, which ends with a surprisingly introspective bonfire. The gameplay has felt a little shallow and repetitive to me at times, but the book recommendations break this up, and, like many “cozy” simulation games, it feels like it’s more about chilling with the vibes than exploring the reality of running a business. (Thank god.) I’ve been playing it on PC, but it definitely feels like a game best suited to chilling on your couch, fiddling with your shop decor and flipping through your wares to unwind. There's a demo on Steam if you want to check it out first.
