Nothing tiny about the heart in this game
Some of my happiest memories are of bookstores and libraries. When I was little, I spent most of the summers begging to go to town and spend time at the library. Whenever we went to the ‘big city’ (either Sioux Falls, South Dakota, or Mankato, Minnesota), I would cross my fingers that it would include a trip to Barnes & Noble.
They’re just fantastic places. I love walking through the aisles and just touching books. Feeling the texture of the pages as I read them. Wondering how my favorite authors came up with the stories and worlds I spent so many hours in. Books were my religion, libraries and bookstores my cathedrals.
I feel the same way about some of my favorite games as I do about books; big games like Uncharted 2 and the Horizon series, but mostly the small ones like What Remains of Edith Finch, Journey, Wanderstop, Closer The Distance, and neoludic’s Tiny Bookshop, which released on August 7th.
(Review code provided by neoludic, Skystone Games, and PressEngine. Thank you so, so much.)
The Indie Game Cafe stems from my passion for connecting people with small games, those developed by smaller teams, and giving them their all in an industry that, more often than not these days, chews up all that passion and talent. In this way, I felt a kinship with my character in Tiny Bookshop.
It’s no secret that bookstores are having a tough time right now. Still, you’ve packed up your life and have moved to the picturesque coastal town of Bookstonbury, where you’ll be hauling your trailer-turned mobile bookshop around town, meeting the locals, selling them books, and changing some lives. You’ll discover different locations as the seasons change, and you’ll need to change up how you sell as the seasons change as well.
Tiny Bookshop boasts a diverse and endearing set of characters. There’s Fern, a young, earnest, and nervous reporter just waiting to be coaxed out of his shell. There’s Tilde, the recently retired former bookstore owner, who wishes you nothing but success and becomes one of your best customers. I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention Walt, the old sailor who’s happiest on his boat but also is looking for inspiration to get his stories down on paper. Finally, there’s also Harper, a young girl with a voracious appetite for knowledge, Klaus, who works retail by day and dreams of making music by night, and you’ll have to discover the rest. (Only limited spoilers here!)
You’ll have particular objectives for the named characters in Tiny Bookshop. Maryam, Tilde’s friend who runs a cafe in town, is also head of the local business association, and you need to perform and achieve specific goals before you’re allowed to join the group. Harper wants you to collect seashells so she can learn about them, and after undergoing a medical procedure, Tilde has you run a few errands for her as well as look after her cat. The storylines the characters have make Tiny Bookshop more than just another management sim, and it’s a nice way to add some variety to the day.
As the game starts, you have a limited selection of shelves, books, and other furniture, but it never felt like a major grind to progress to be able to earn more money to expand your shelf space and purchase more inventory. Fern hooks you up with a subscription to the town paper, where there are classifieds with boxes of books for sale, and even seasonal offerings you can use to spruce up your trailer and the area around it. The book offerings are reasonably priced to begin with, but sometimes, if I were to wait a day or two, the price would come down more. (Or, they would just disappear.)
The books you sell are divided by genre: Crime, Drama, Fact, Classics, Kids, Travel, and Sci-Fi/Fantasy. Real books populated each genre, followed by some that were Bookstonbury-specific. You’ll choose how many of each genre to have available for sale at each location as you visit them, but you also have a handy journal that’ll help you keep track of what performs well at each place. For example, you won’t sell a lot of kids’ books at the docks, while those will do better at the Mega Marche (Market) parking lot.
And the items you can buy to decorate your shop? Some will offer boosts to particular genres or even your customer count. A jack-o-lantern would boost sales of crime novels, while a buoy hanging on the wall would do the same for travel books, etc. It was a neat mechanic that allowed me to personalize the space but still make it advantageous to my business. For winter, I purchased a coffee maker from the classifieds, which netted me a little extra money each day and helped keep a portion of my customers coming to my trailer.
The bread and butter for Tiny Bookshop, at least for me, was recommendations. At times during the sales day, people visiting your shop flag you down and need help choosing the next book they’d like to read. Some requests were specific, while others allowed some leeway. The game offered a brief description for every title you carried in your shop, which was handy in such circumstances. I chase that high of hopefully introducing people to their next favorite video game experience here on The Indie Game Cafe or at my paying job every day. When I’d see a happy customer in my bookshop after giving them an excellent recommendation, it was the same.
I hope to see a few changes and tweaks to the game as time goes on. The background music, while matching the calm and mellow vibes of the game, gets repetitive quickly. I know it’s not easy to clear music for something like a game, but I think it would be a great addition in the future if we could have a tunable radio for the shop with some musical options. (A Spirit City: Lofi Sessions collab, for example, could potentially make a lot of sense here.) Some of the NPCs would also tell me the exact same lines every time I saw them, which brought me back to the first few days of Horizon Forbidden West and Aloy talking about her stash. (If you know, you know!)
The final issue for me was the customization of your trailer. It was reasonably straightforward, but I wish there had been a way to rotate the trailer or change the camera angle so it was easier to place and remove items, and to see what your cursor was on while in decorating mode. More than once, I ended up removing something I wasn’t intending to. Again, it’s just a small thing, and it’s easy enough to redo on my end, but the Animal Crossing player in me keeps thinking I can adjust the camera angles.
In the end, Tiny Bookshop has something that not a lot of other management sims do these days, and that’s soul. I’ve sunk more than my fair share of hours into things like TCG Card Shop Simulator, but I haven’t connected with them in the way that I have with Tiny Bookshop, and I believe that’s because of neoludic’s emphasis on the little things, the person-to-person interactions, the look and feel of the shop. Your shop.
If you want a cozy game where it’s easy to jump in and out, find connection, and not feel managed yourself, you can’t go wrong with Tiny Bookshop. (Be prepared to add a ton of books to your real-life reading wishlist!)
The game is available on Steam for $17.99 until August 21st, when it will retail for $19.99. It’s also available to download for Nintendo Switch and Nintendo Switch 2 for $19.99. I can’t speak to the performance of the game on Switch, but I will note it played great on my Steam Deck.
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