Tiny Bookshop Review: Embracing Slow-Paced Bookish Vibes

For book lovers who also enjoy a cozy game, Tiny Bookshop has been the game to watch. Initially announced in 2023, the bookstore management sim with a tiny caravan twist captured gamers’ attention with its short and sweet demo. But how does the relatively repetitive gameplay loop hold up as a full game? I had the chance to dig in early to find out. 

Tiny Bookshop throws gamers right into the action, but that action is slow and steady. Your first day begins immediately, but local former bookseller Tilde stops by to help guide you through it. The game’s tutorials are integrated into conversations with various locals, making it pretty seamless to sink into the game and the Bookston setting from the start. 

The actual gameplay mechanics are simple, easy to navigate with a mouse and keyboard. Each day, you load your shelves with books based on various genres. Then, you choose a location and head there to sell books, which mainly features watching customers slowly make their way to your tiny caravan. Pop-up bubbles show you what your customers are buying, and you can click on a few items in each location to interact with them.

By and large, however, the game doesn’t require constant attention. You’ll need to keep an eye out for customer requests for recommendations, which do need a timely response before they expire. But Tiny Bookshop offers no fast-forward option for the day, forcing a slow pace wherein you simply sit back and watch the book sales happen. Occasionally, this can start to feel a bit repetitive and a bit slow. But for the cozy gamer who, say, wants to listen to an audiobook while running a virtual bookshop, this pacing works just fine. 

The one thing that requires quick attention is customer requests. These pop-ups need to be clicked on within a certain window and allow you to take a more active role in your customers’ purchases. You get a prompt explaining the type of book your customer wants, and it’s up to you to pair them with the right match. This is where the literary attention to detail shines. The books on your shelves are actual titles ranging from Shakespeare to modern nonfiction like What We Talk About When We Talk About Fat or manga like Sailor Moon.

Getting to peruse and recommend real books really makes you feel like an actual bookseller, and it’s perfect for big book nerds like me. Each book has a description and is sorted by genre, so the game does offer help for those who don’t necessarily have the breadth of knowledge memorized. Giving recommendations is the most engaging part of the game, in my opinion, as it requires active participation, where the majority of the shopkeeping sim gameplay does not. 

If the game only offered the shopkeeping loop, it would likely get tedious fairly quickly. Thankfully, Tiny Bookshop adds a light storyline and stamps (quests) to collect, giving it a bit more momentum. Throughout the course of the game, you’ll meet several other characters, who give the game a bit more of a plot than simply selling books on repeat. Each issue challenges, asks for help, and otherwise engages with you as the local bookseller, all while requesting book recommendations. Character conversations are also how you unlock new locations on the map, allowing you to explore new areas to sell books and new stamps to collect.

The variety of characters in Bookston is one of the areas where Tiny Bookshop shines, setting it apart from more generic shopkeeping sims. Interacting with the named characters who stop by breaks up the repetitive gameplay and lets you feel more integrated into the story, giving you a reason to keep going alongside the various quests you’ll unlock. That said, some of their dialogue can get a bit repetitive as you get further in, and I would’ve liked to see a little more variety here. 

There are also weekly and seasonal events to keep things from getting too monotonous. Your journal has a calendar to track weekly sales at the Mega Marche or the Saturday Market in the city. Like a farming sim, Tiny Bookshop follows a seasonal calendar. You’ll get a few big events to prep for, like a Halloween market that requires your spookiest decor and a cozy Winter Holiday market. This adds another layer of challenge as characters task you with redecorating your little bookish caravan to suit the season.

Decorating is another place where the details elevate Tiny Bookshop. Each decor item has effects on which genres will sell well or, alternatively, which customers you might scare off. Make your store too scary, and your Children’s book sales will suffer. Cover it with maps, and your customers will get wanderlust and seek more Travel books. This adds a layer of strategy that will appeal to those who like puzzling out the best approach in games. But if you just want to make your caravan look pretty, you’ll still be able to get along. When stocking your books, you’ll see arrows indicating which book sales are currently boosted and which aren’t, making it easy to remember how to best stock your shelves. 

The genres are color-coded, making it pretty easy to tell them apart. And if those colors aren’t quite working for you, Tiny Bookshop offers several accessibility settings to adjust those colors for those with vision issues. You can also increase the request loading time if you need a cozier pace or have mobility issues that might delay response times. This extra layer of attention to accessibility in a game that’s designed to be slow-paced and wholesome helps ensure a cozy experience for all gamers. The game itself runs well, and I encountered just one visual glitch in one area while playing. It does feel a smidge more demanding than you might expect for such a casual game, but you can adjust the graphics settings to help mitigate this. 

Tiny Bookshop offers a soothingly slow-paced gameplay experience where the depth is in the story and the details, not in quick reflexes or complicated mechanics. The shopkeeping sim element is straightforward, but still allows for strategy and variety thanks to character quests and calendar events. The story, like the gameplay, isn’t quick or overly complicated. But if you were hoping for a cozy bookish game that truly delves into the literary world, Tiny Bookshop is going to deliver. 

Rating: 4.5 out of 5

A Tiny Bookshop review code for Steam was provided by the publisher.