If the recent unstoppable wave of cosy sims has taught me anything, it’s that my life would be infinitely more tolerable if only I dropped everything to start a life of aggressive vegetable upkeep deep in bucolic isolation. Yet despite all this pro-turnip (and weirdly low-key horny) propaganda, the idea’s never particularly appealed. Tiny Bookshop, though, might finally have convinced me that the time is right: so farewell all; I’m packing up for a new adventure among musty, attic-abandoned boxes and salt-scented air.
Tiny BookshopDeveloper: Neoludic GamesPublisher: Skystone GamesPlatform: Played on PCAvailability: Out now on PC (Steam) and Nintendo Switch / Switch 2
Unusually for the genre, it’s not a distant and suddenly, fortuitously dead relative that serves as a catalyst for Tiny Bookstore’s Big Move, but rather a simple yearning for a better life – which, without wanting to state the blindingly obvious too much, is probably something plenty of people can identify with right now. And so it is – with a glove compartment stuffed with Werther’s Originals and a rickety two-wheeled trailer in tow – a new start beckons beyond white cliffs and coastal roads, in the sleepy seaside town of Bookston.
And really it’s got everything you might want from a fictional coastal retreat: gently sun-kissed beaches far from the tourist scrum, a picturesque sea view promenade with enough wandering sailors to satisfy even Ryo Hazuki, a cosmopolitan café quarter, a reputedly haunted lighthouse high on a hill, and even – something we’d all love in our lives – the kind of lilting, lo-fi musical accompaniment that lets you know everything’s okay; the summer will last forever, and your troubles will bother you no more.
Amid all this, there’s the newly relocated you, your fixer-upper wagon, and a dream of a literary powered, self-sufficient future; specifically, to make your fortune by selling tatty second-hand tomes to the people of Bookston. Tiny Bookstore is, nominally at least, a management game, albeit an intentionally languid one, where the gentle roll of days passes in a low-stakes loop of daylight opening hours – different locations bringing new customers with subtly different demands – and a spot of blind-buy book acquisition using the local newspaper’s classifieds ads once earnings have been tallied and the day is done.