tiny bookshop is great

 

dude come on.

I've been playing Tiny Bookshop on my Switch for the past few weeks and I've been loving it. In Tiny Bookshop you run a, who guessed it, tiny bookshop. It's mobile as well, and every day you pick a new location in town to sell books. You meet different townsfolk and can help them with problems, as well as sometimes needing to recommend specific books to customers that fit their criteria. The art is super cute and all the characters are very fun. It never fell into the "cozy game" trap of being too sweet and saccharine, or having too little to do. While yes, there are segments that play almost like an idle game, where people are just picking out books in your shop, there's never enough time between specific events that I felt like I was waiting around. In the recommendation events, a customer gives you a list of things they want or don't want their book to have. Then, you sort through your shelves, which are made up of real-world books, and use the summaries and genres given to figure out what to sell them.

As someone knowledgeable about a decent amount of the books on the shelf, I have sometimes ended up sabotaging myself. For example: A customer asks me for a fantasy book from a series that includes romance. I give them a Lord of the Rings book. They reject it because "Where's the romance in this book?" Well, Aragorn and Arwen have a romance, right? Does this customer have no appreciation for dwarf-elf yaoi? But I guess it makes sense. In the code of the game, the Lord of the Rings books probably weren't tagged with being romance novels as compared to like, A Court of Thorns and Roses (which is also in the game and would've fit this request better if I'd had it on the shelf that day). Also, sometimes the (assumedly) randomized requests make no sense, like in my picture above. Buddy, what do you mean a fantasy world with no magic? I went through every book on my shelf and I couldn't find a single one that would fit, and I'm not even sure it's possible.

Besides those little frustrations, Tiny Bookshop is a lovely time. I would like to apologize to all the people in Bookstonbury I have sold Colleen Hoover books to because they were the only romance novels I had left.