Tiny Bookshop review

If you’re a book lover, Tiny Bookshop is the perfect proposition. A cosy game about selling books that’s more about the actual books than retail management. All you need to do is make sure your shelves are stocked with a range of genres, and occasionally provide a recommendation to a customer. It’s an utter delight.

It looks absolutely fabulous too. Equipped with a trailer on the back of your car, Tiny Bookshop sees you travel the small coastal town of Bookstonbury. Park up by the lighthouse, by a quaint coffee shop or in the local university grounds and, as you wait for customers to clamber into your little shop, you can admire the gorgeous scenery. With a hand-painted visual style, every single scene is a work of art to be admired. It’s truly stunning.

Tiny Bookshop has been designed in such a way that it can be played completely at your own pace. While there are tasks to complete — in the form of stamps to collect to fill your journal with — there’s never any time constraints on these, so you can choose to focus on them (or not) whenever you choose. You’re only somewhat restricted by the in-game calendar: the flea market location is only ever available on a Saturday, for example, so any stamps relating to the flea market will have to wait until then.

While Tiny Bookshop describes itself as a “management” game, the management here is very light. You don’t have to worry about setting prices, managing profit and loss, paying utilities, dealing with customer complaints or any of that dull stuff that typically comes with retail management. Your daily expenses are outlined, you choose a location, and you sell books — that’s it.

You can, however, customise your bookshop a little. The items you acquire to decorate with — be it a chest that can hold more books, a picture to hang on the wall or a hanging plant to place outside — all offer some sort of perk. A piece of art might increase your chance of selling a classic novel, for example, while having a ladder and some children’s books stocked on your highest shelf will increase your chance of selling kids’ books. Some items will also have the occasional negative effect against some sales, and even your location or the weather can impact what is and isn’t popular.

Related: The best games based on books

I wouldn’t say strategy is important, but you can certainly maximise your sales in Tiny Bookshop if you pay attention to your location, what customers want, and carefully think about what items you have on display. Of course, the tactic of simply filling your shop with as many decorations as possible seems to work too, so it’s entirely up to you how you want to play this game. It’s designed to be a relaxing, cosy experience, so focusing on aesthetic rather than profit seems like as good a plan as any.

For the most part, the act of buying and selling books is automatic. You’ll typically buy your stock in bulk without knowing what individual titles you have in stock. Your books are simply categorised as one of seven genres: crime, drama, fantasy, classic, kids, fact and travel. But when it comes to giving customers recommendations, you’ll be able to see exactly what books are on your shelves, and this is my absolute favourite part of the Tiny Bookshop experience.

Once or twice over the course of an in-game day, a customer will get a bubble over their head announcing that they need your help. Interact with them, and they’ll tell you their likes and dislikes, and they may even mention another book that they loved. It’s up to you to then search your shelves and find something that matches. You might get someone who’s looking for a classic play — a Shakespearean work is generally a good shout, and you’ll likely have one or two of those in your classic collection. But not every suggestion is easy, and often you’ll have to rely on your own knowledge of books to come up with a good recommendation.

I’m someone who reads voraciously, but I’ve probably got more recommendations wrong than I have right. There are clues in the game’s own blurbs of the books that might help, but you’re frequently expected to rely on your own knowledge. A customer might ask for a book in a series, for example, and you’d likely only know that Holly Jackson’s Good Girl, Bad Blood is part of a series if you’re familiar with it yourself.

That’s another surprising thing about Tiny Bookshop: the range of book titles that pop up are eclectic and varied. There are plenty of modern books mentioned; everything from A Song of Ice and Fire to Elliot Page’s Pageboy make an appearance on your shelves. It’s just a shame that the library seems fairly limited. After only a couple of hours of play, I was seeing the same books pop up again and again, and only rarely seeing new titles. But it’s a wide enough selection that it’s led me to add a few new books to my own IRL wishlist, which is rather neat in itself (The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin and Thornhill by Pam Smy, if you must know).

I’ve had a wonderful time playing Tiny Bookshop, but its charm is going to be somewhat limited. After only around five hours with the game, boredom was setting in — you’re simply going through the same motions again and again, with not enough to mix it up. Sure, the odd conversation with a Bookstonbury local is a joy, and being asked to recommend something keeps you on your toes. But after a while, I simply felt like I was waiting for either of those events to kick in, with not enough reward or variation in between.

Will I go back to it, though? Certainly: the simple, bookish charm of Tiny Bookshop is an absolute treat to behold. This truly is a game for literature lovers — you simply have to love books to get any real enjoyment out of the title — and for the bookworm inside me, the simple and repetitive gameplay is enough. But the video game lover in me craves something a little deeper, and I just wish there was a little more here to keep Tiny Bookshop interesting.