Tiny Bookshop review — Bookworm heaven

August has been a busy month for us cozy gamers, seeing a range of releases and shadow drops that have had my pre-Gamescom schedule looking rather full—to my dismay and excitement. The first of these games I got to play was one of the more popular releases, Tiny Bookshop. My initial expectation was that it was going to be your run-of-the-mill shop management game, with some cozy sprinkled in. But what I received was an in-depth love letter to everything literature and had me actually using my extensive book knowledge to help with its gameplay. If you’re a book fanatic or just a casual reader, there’s something here for every cozy player as you run your own mobile bookshop in a quaint seaside town.

Escaping a life you’ve left behind with just you and your travelling bookshop, you establish your roots in Bookstonbury and its many scenic spots. At the beginning of the game, you’ll be situated on the pier with an array of sailors looking for their next book, but more locations unlock as you progress through the story, from a university campus in the fall to amongst creepy castle ruins. Each location is visually pleasing and has its own unique charm, with different NPCs, quests, and collectables to find. What astounded me from the start with Tiny Bookshop is how detailed and packed full of things to do it is. Each location never felt left in the dust once I unlocked a new one, as ongoing quests and the promise of some sweet cash kept me coming back.

Speaking of cash, you make money through selling books and through other small means. You’ll take a catalog of your books every day, and you’ll need to maintain them by replenishing stock from your local newspaper. This is one of your hubs that contains adverts for people selling different genres of books, the weather, and a snippet of activities that are going on. Everything else you need can be found in your journal, like profiles for characters you’ve met, the stats of your bookshop, and a calendar of events. There’s a lot to manage in this game, and you’ll find yourself micro-managing all the things you want to accomplish after the first couple of days, creating an instant rewarding feeling for putting time into the game.

Tiny Bookshop also makes its world feel lived in through the inclusion of seasons and special events. Each season will last 28 days, and each has its own major event that happens at the end of the month. Unconventionally, you begin the game in the summer instead of spring, but I found this to be an understandable choice, as it eases you into Tiny Bookshops’ main mechanics without overwhelming you, as a change in weather can affect your time at each location, a factor that only becomes relevant in fall. At the end of summer, you attend a bonfire where you reflect on your first month and talk to the characters you’ve built a rapport with. Subsequently, you’ll have a Halloween- and Christmas-type holiday in their respective months. You’ll also be affected by the aforementioned weather, with some days being rainy and affecting how many customers come to your bookshop. Tiny Bookshop even takes it a step further and changes what locations you can go to in different months. For example, you can’t go to the Far Beach in winter, and you can’t go to the university campus during summer and winter holidays. Once again, you’ll find yourself managing your time and the long list of tasks you want to get done before you’re blocked from a location for a whole month.

What wraps the world of Tiny Bookshop together are the residents you get to know and help with their various problems. The cast is small, with 8 major NPCs to know, but each character boasts 5 friendship quests that span across the seasons, helping you build up a true friendship during your time at Bookstonbury. Each character is also distinct and instantly likeable. You have your shy journalist called Fern, who writes for the local newspaper and has a lot of social anxiety when it comes to interacting with people, and Harper, a rambunctious kid who loves adventure and proving she can read any book. It’s a loveable cast made better by their silly quests that involved you collecting seashells and solving a mystery about who deflated the tube man outside the supermarket. Some of these quests are not your one-off activity either, as you’ll find yourself going to different locations to pick up certain things and witness events. One of my favorites was funding a group of theater kids’ play where the outcome changes depending on whether you put money into the venture or not. Overall, the world of Tiny Bookshop felt so lived-in and fun to get to know with goofy quests and fun characters that an in-game year flew by, but don’t worry about rushing everything, as Tiny Bookshop doesn’t have a time limit or any restrictions that’ll completely lock you out of gameplay.

To pair well with these life-sim qualities is the actual gameplay loop of Tiny Bookshop. Surprisingly, there’s a lot to unpack here and plenty of room to strategize if you’re looking for it. From my own experience and through watching others on YouTube, my biggest word of advice is to take note of the stats of your bookshop, as they’ll dramatically affect how much you earn. I’ll explore more into this when we talk about decorating your bookshop.

At the start of every day, you’ll decide what area of Bookstonbury you’ll be setting up shop and then will have the chance to decorate your bookshop and stock what books you want in the shop on that day. Books are split up into general categories, including fact, travel, drama, classics, fantasy, crime, and kids. There are some genres merging here, so don’t be too alarmed if your fave isn’t here; fantasy encompasses sci-fi, and crime includes Horror and some books may arguably belong to different genres, but for organization’s sake they’ll feature in their main genre—for example, plays from Shakespeare will be in Drama, not Classics. Speaking of books, they aren’t just blank covers; the coolest part about Tiny Bookshop is that every book you stock is an actual book you can read in real life. Each comes with its title and a short summary of its contents. Discovering what books made it into the game and reading these summaries was a blast in itself, as they were often comedic. If you’re a bookworm, you’re in paradise here, and even if you’re not, Tiny Bookshop will be a learning adventure. Not just a cozy one.

Once everything is in place, you begin your day, and your stream of customers arrives. Each NPC will come in looking for a specific genre of book, and whether they buy one, multiple, or none at all is determined by the sale chance of each genre. Along the right-hand side, you can hover over each genre, and it’ll give you a percentage. This can be influenced through a variety of things, but mainly what you choose to decorate your bookshop with and how many of that genre are placed on your shelves. The presence of main characters purchasing books can also boost a sales chance. This is the mainstream of gameplay where you just let it run. You can’t restock the books once the day has started, so if you run out of one genre, then it’s tough luck. This is why it’s very important to spend time planning out your bookshelves. For each location, certain genres of books will be more favorable to customers; an example is the sailors of the pier love fact and travel books, and residents on the beach prefer fantasy and kids’ books. This will then inform the player on what you should stock your shelves with but also remember to maybe keep other genres in stock, as there’ll always be one or two people who want something else.

When customers interact with your books, they’ll frequently ask for a recommendation and provide you with a brief statement and often a specific genre of what they’re looking for. This was Tiny Bookshop’s way of breaking up the wait whilst people buy your books. You can accept these requests, ignore them, or even turn them off altogether if you get a bit fed up with them after the first few months. If you do accept them, you’ll need to find a book on your shelf that meets certain criteria. Thankfully, the game is quite versatile in what book you can pick; there isn’t a clear yes or no answer. For example, a customer might ask for a fantasy book that’s romantic. You can either pick a book in the fantasy genre that has romance in it, like ACOTAR, or you could maybe pick A Midsummer Night’s Dream from the drama section. This helps if you don’t specifically have a certain genre in stock, and my best piece of advice is don’t ignore the kids’ book section when dealing with adults; who doesn’t love a bit of Roald Dahl?

There’ll be a few quests that involve recommendations, so you’ll have plenty of practice, but I won’t lie and say that it’s not hard. I found myself failing a lot of recommendations, and sometimes I felt like it was down to my interpretation vs. the devs. It never felt like an impossible challenge, but don’t beat yourself up if you get more than a few wrong; I still do, and there are no repercussions if you do. You can normally gauge how difficult it will be to find a book for their recommendation by looking at the difficulty above the statement the customer provides, from 1 star to 5 stars. However, again I felt this concept was a bit flimsy, as typically 5-star books are supposed to be virtually impossible to find on your bookshelf and 1 star should be guaranteed, but sometimes it would be the other way around; it really depends on the situation.

For every recommendation you get right, you can either get a good outcome or a loved outcome—differentiated by stars or stars and hearts framing a customer’s reaction speech bubble. When this happens, you’ll trigger a golden time that lasts for a few seconds that dramatically boosts the sale chance of all your books, encouraging more purchases. If you trigger this when your bookshop is full, you’ll be raking in the cash.

The other half of this game’s gameplay is decorating your bookshop, which is not only fun and allows for some cute and themed looks but also plays a major role in the sale chances of each book genre and other factors like how many recommendations you get a day and the… danger of your bookshop? More on that in a bit. You begin the game with a standard bookcase and get some freebies from residents, like a table and a plant; from there you’ll be able to buy seasonal items from the newspaper and browse the flea market that occurs every Saturday. This is a unique location where you’ll get to splash the cash on a bunch of stalls, from paintings, plants, and Tilde’s old bookshop furniture. Each item comes with its own stats, ranging from boosting a certain percentage in a genre to adding additional effects that’ll increase the chance of customers buying specific books.

One of these categories is the danger category, which includes things like a plastic skull, a spiky cactus, and a knife. This will increase your danger rating, having an impact on your bookshop’s overall rating—there’s a surprise when your danger rating increases to a certain point. Most decorative items can just be placed in allocated slots inside and outside of your bookshop, but you’ll have to watch out for the bulkier items, which will add a bonus fee to taking your bookshop to different locations. When you choose a location to set up shop, you’ll have to pay a sort of standing charge. The bulkier the items you put in your bookshop, the higher this fee is. An example of these types of items would be additional bookshelves and any companions you want to bring with you wink. You can see this fee when you’re decorating your shop, and it’s definitely something to look out for, because even though you can go to any location despite not having enough money, you can rack up debt and find yourself not being able to afford anything.

Other fun decoration features include painting your shop and being able to buy themed furniture for different major events. I screamed when a Halloween pop-up shop appeared at the flea market, and I found myself fighting against good bookshop stats in favor of making my shop Halloween themed. This may be a turn-off for a lot of players that just want a cute bookshop, so it may not be your cup of tea. But overall, the gameplay of Tiny Bookshop feels quite meaty yet simple to get the hang of if you spend a bit of time before you set up shop.

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