Here’s a list of things I’ve had the joy of experiencing in Tiny Bookshop, Neoludic Games’ cozy management sim in which you run a mobile bookshop in a European-inspired seaside town:
- Sold the first volume of Dragon Ball to a kid. Welcome to your new lifelong obsession!
- Earned the approval of the town’s teen goths thanks to my Halloween decorating skills.
- Fended off a pack of wild tourists, visiting by way of an environmentally unfriendly cruise ship, by inviting rabid seagulls to the Waterfront Market. Away, ye tourists!
- (A seagull wandered into my bookshop looking for a recommendation. It wanted “Gawwwk!”)
- Helped jumpstart a local production of Julius Caesar.
- Most importantly, I befriended and adopted a stray dog who lay outside my bookshop. I named him Bailey.
And here’s a list of things I had to deal with during my time as a real-world bookseller in New York City:
- Cleaned a child’s snot off of board books and picture books after they sneezed all over the bottom shelf of our New York Kids section.
- Mopped up toilet water (it was clean water, thank god) after rainstorms caused minor flooding. This happened more frequently than you’d want in a bookstore.
- Returned numerous books soaked with coffee because apparently people see a table full of books and imagine those books are coasters for their coffee cups.
- “Clopened,” or when I’d open the store at 8:30 a.m. and close it at 9 p.m.
- Explained tax to too many international tourists to count. I get it, your displayed prices overseas factor in tax already! I know!
Wanting to own and run a bookshop is a fantastical idea many book lovers dream of. They may picture their days spent on a stool reading galleys (pre-release copies of upcoming titles) and selling their favorite titles to customers who want a real recommendation, not just whatever is popular on TikTok. They don’t imagine themselves figuring out how to stay open when their air conditioning is busted in the dead heat of a New York sticky summer or how to make sales when their POS (point of sale) system is down.
Managing a bookshop often sucks some of the passion out of reading, as it’s a business like any other; whether you sell books or soup cans, you still need to pay your vendors on time and merchandise your store to best put your products on display. The dream of owning a bookshop sounds wonderful, but the reality is full of snot, coffee stains, and making sure your break room is stocked with paper plates and plastic utensils.
Instead, just play a relaxing game about it that eschews real-world challenges and embraces the cozy. Tiny Bookshop focuses less on the realities of business owning and more on the vibes of it, to great success.
My avatarless bookshop owner arrives in Bookstonbury at the beginning of Tiny Bookshop, and the locals immediately make me feel welcome. This is a town whose bookshop owner has recently retired, so your shop on wheels is servicing a need; “book” is in the name of the town, after all, and its locals take their reading seriously.
Over the course of the game, I get to meet and befriend the locals. There’s Tilde, the retired bookshop owner who seems like she can’t quite leave her bookselling life behind. Harper is in the shop seemingly every day and is a voracious reader; maybe the kid will own her own bookshop someday. Then we have Fern, the anxious reporter who chronicles the comings and goings of town, including a column on how many books I sell in a day and how much profit I make (a little invasive, but I’ll allow it). Alongside these characters and more, I too get to become a fixture in the Bookstonbury community, as all bookshops should, especially in today’s age full of heinous groups trying to ban books and defund libraries.
Real me was definitely a jaded bookseller after almost eight years of working in, managing, and buying for bookstores. Yet, there’s still a part of me today that misses it — seeing what arrives ahead of new release Tuesdays, borrowing any book I want from the shop like it’s my own personal library, curating the store’s graphic novel section, selling my favorite books to customers. Through Tiny Bookshop, I get to enjoy those memories, and the fantastical dream of owning a bookshop, without the tribulations of a real-world bookshop.
Not everything with Tiny Bookshop lands, but I’ve come to embrace its annoyances as little vestiges of real-life bookselling seeping through. As in a real bookshop, most customers in Tiny Bookshop wander in and find books on their own. Some want personal recommendations, but the internal logic of Tiny Bookshop varies wildly; recommendations are puzzles and sometimes my solution just doesn’t work. For example, a customer wants fiction from the past, and apparently Little Women — first published in 1868 — wasn’t set “in history,” leading me to fail that recommendation. A different customer wants a “classic” set in the past and loved Julius Caesar. I recommend another William Shakespeare (or Billy Shakes, as I like to call him) hit, Hamlet, though that too wasn’t set “in history.”
The genres available to sell are a bit too broad; drama might include literary fiction, YA fiction, and poetry, for example. Some books can live in different genres, though this leads to a bit of tedious time-wasting searching if you’re trying to find a specific book and it’s shelved somewhere you wouldn’t expect it. I don’t think many stores would stock the children’s mystery book The Westing Game next to American Psycho, even if they’re both “crime” novels. Making genre categories narrower would have helped with the recommendation puzzles and to better make sense of how to stock your bookshop.
While you can stock what genre books you want, you can’t pick individual titles. Because of that, you might end up with no science fiction across your shelves. And what does your first customer of the day want? Yeah, those moments can get frustrating. But the frustrations never become too big; they never outweigh the joy inherent to Tiny Bookshop, and, of course, they never come close to the real-world headaches working in retail brings. I could spend all day selling to Bookstonbury’s citizens, redecorating my shop with new plants, and getting to know the locals.
Tiny Bookshop is as cozy as a cozy game gets. When I wrote about the game’s demo earlier this summer, I said it made me miss being a bookseller. That’s still true in the full game, but now it’s also reconnecting me to that dream of someday owning a bookshop, like the past version of me had, young and fresh to New York and ready to sell his favorite books.
Tiny Bookshop is out now on Nintendo Switch and Windows PC. The game was reviewed on Nintendo Switch using a prerelease download code provided by Skystone Games. You can find additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.
