Tiny Bookshop is an adorable game about opening your own traveling book shop in a new, small town. Hopefully stocking it with tomes your neighbors will like.
I love immersing myself in the worlds of wholesome, slice-of-life style games. In this game, you are looking to start your own traveling bookshop in the small town of Bookstonbury-by-the-Sea. Through running this little shop, you’ll learn about the people in this town.
Each day starts off with you reading the local newspaper, which has reviews, warnings about events coming up, and things to purchase. You can read ads to acquire new books (some of which are even free) or find new locations that you can sell your books at. You only start with a small amount of money, so picking how much you end up spending is really important as you will still need some cash to rent the space that you are selling at for the day.
Once you have selected a location, you need to then distribute the books you want to take on your shelf. This is done in a really intuitive way. You can drag the books you have, watching them fill up the shelves. When you have all of the books you would like to sell on display, you can then go to a location and start selling. Most of the customers that come in will be dressed in the colors of the books they want. They will then look around, and if you have a tome of that color, they are more likely to want to purchase it.
Sometimes, special customers also come in. These customers have dialogue that will appear, introducing themselves and telling you why they are important to the story. I do wish that you could click to load all of the text, then click again to make the text disappear, as sometimes I missed some of the text as it had stayed a bit longer than expected. When I was able to read all of the story, I found the characters to be quite quaint and interesting.
I only played a segment of Tiny Bookshop as a part of the Indie Cup, but found myself charmed by the small town feel and cute visuals. It looks like, in the future, that I’ll even be able to solve mysteries and help locals out.
Tiny Bookshop is currently in development, but in the meantime, you can follow its creation through the game’s site.
