I started playing Tiny Book Shop today, whose premise is that you've got a bookshop-in-a-trailer that you take to various spots around this town.
It is, in some ways, a kind of nothing game. You decorate your bookshop with various things you purchase, this gives you bonuses, you buy up books from different genres, you curate your selection for different locations, it's probably pretty hard to lose money and maybe even impossible to lose the game outright, there are a bunch of named regulars that you have quests with ... not the kind of thing that anyone is going to call their game of the year, but it's nice, cozy, slow, and simple.
But what really interests me about the game is that all the books you have are named books, and most of them are real ones, complete with a little blurb about what the book is about. And then these people will occasionally say "um, hey, can you help me find a book, I'm kind of looking for a romance with historical elements" and you have to see what you have in stock on that particular day that might meet their criteria.
And this would work much less well if they were fake books (though there are some fake books thrown in there), particularly if you're moderately well-read, which I consider myself to be. And whatever they're using on the backend (a tag system, I assume) is robust enough and well-researched enough that you can make connections that aren't on the provided blurbs!
It's interesting to me that they're taking actual domain expertise and translating it into gameplay. There's an element of trivia to it, I guess. I've read like ... 30-40% of these books? And I know another 20% by reputation or through adaptation to film/television.
I'm wondering how well it would work to do the same thing with e.g. a video rental store: it's the early 2000s, you're a video store clerk, people want to come rent movies, and your job is to serve as a recommendation engine for them? I was going to say that getting the rights to do this would be hard, but actually, it wouldn't be much different from what IMDB or Wikipedia do.
It's the first game to make me feel like that English degree is paying off!
I'm enjoying the game Tiny Book Shop, and the books really are doing a lot of heavy lifting.
There's a young girl, Harper, who is one of the regulars, and she buys an enormous amount of books from me, tearing through them. The game has little dialog bubbles sometimes, and these are probably not bespoke (I've seen some repetitions), but when Harper said, "I think I'm going to enjoy Snowcrash!" I gave a little snort, because I have my own relationship with that book, and I'm imagining how this little girl is going to react to this book and its riotous opening and muddled linguistic-heavy ending.
Someone asked me for a fantasy book with no animals and I suggested Kiki's Delivery Service, and they got mad, I assume because of Jiji, and I thought "well come on man, Jiji is such a minor part of that book, it's really not, like, 'about' Jiji" and this was a fun little moment for me.
Or I slip someone American Psycho and say "have fun with that!"
Do these people buy an unreasonable amount of books? Yes, they do. Would I rather be a librarian rather than living out a petite bourgeoisie fantasy? Yes, obviously, the transactional nature of these relationships does sometimes make me feel a little weird and raises a lot of questions about the economics of this whole thing, though it's clear that I'm just supposed to not worry about any of it. And yeah, I would love to have them report back their feelings on at least a few of these books, just tiny little things that are probably beyond any reasonable scope a game this size could have.
But I'm impressed overall, and mainly it's because I don't usually see so much cultural power leveraged in this way.
I'm going to make a comparison that makes me sad, but maybe it's a little like Ready Player One.
I think in an earlier post I described this as "kind of a nothing game" and in some sense I do stand by that, but I also recommend it if you're looking for a casual/cozy book-selling game. It's painfully easy and undemanding, but it does hit a few of the beats I would expect if the phrase "I'd like to run a bookstore" doesn't immediately send you running in terror.
(This review is spoiler-free, not that there's much to spoil. It's also mostly about the fantasy of owning a small business, rather than the game itself, sorry.)
The core gameplay is buying discounted books from adverts, decking out your mobile bookshop for bonuses, then filling it up and trying to sell out. Different locations favor different books, but this tends to be a relatively minor consideration, and I never needed to hotswap to a different loadout of decorations in order to make rent: I found the game extremely easy.
No, the thing that interested me most about the game, having completed the first year and about half the achievements, is how much of the fantasy of owning a bookstore it doesn't fulfill.
There's a thing in FPS games where you have a gun, and so most interactions with the world are done by gun. You don't turn off lights by finding the light switch, you shoot them out. You shoot locks instead of using a key. You don't untie the boat, you shoot at the rope holding it in place. There is a sense in which your gun is just ... how you interact with the world.
And in Tiny Bookshop, the sole method of interaction is through selling people books.
To some extent, that's fine, and there are a handful of events that take place outside the bookshop.
But by the end of the game, I kept thinking to myself "is this really the fantasy?"
I guess to me, the fantasy of running a small business is that you set your own hours, you get to make a bunch of decisions about what you're going to do, but importantly, you get to slack off if you want to. You're in a quiet little town, and you can pop over to the local café for a pain au chocolat and a coffee when business is slow. You sit and chat with people who come in, either tourists who are passing through or the regulars who stop by every now and then. I want to give discounts to people. I want to be able to slip another book into someone's pack, telling them that they'll love it.
The fantasy is not selling books, at least as I see it, people don't start a customer-facing business like this because they think it'll be wildly profitable. The fantasy is that you're socializing, providing a service to the community, demonstrating domain expertise, fulfilling a vital role where everyone would be worse off without you doing your thing. At least, this is the part of the fantasy that appeals to me, though I'm sure most of these things are broadly applicable.
In the game, you can buy things from other characters who run their own shops, but everything feels like it's in service to running your own store. There aren't simple pleasures to take in, though the scenery is pleasant enough.
I think that what I might have here is a Bad Criticism. This game was made by a small team in Cologne, and when I think about what I would have wanted from the game, I come back to the question of development costs and mechanical implementations. It's very likely that they did the best they could with what they had, and they do manage to not feel too constrained by the central conceit of selling books for most of the runtime. What did I want, an open world where I could actually go for a mid-day hike? Did I want a little apartment to decorate too? Did I want to read through a book while waiting for customers? Did I want to have an argument about whether Animal Farm was anti-fascist or anti-communist with a customer? I mean ... kind of I did want those things, but I don't even know how that would be delivered to the player as something they could click a buttons to do.
I think this is something that a lot of games like this run into: the fantasy extends beyond what's reasonable to implement in a game, so it can only mostly be gestured at.
I do think I'd have liked this game better if I had a small mobile library rather than a bookshop. The monetary nature of things sometimes strains credulity, and tints everything with commerce. There are things you would have to change about it, since the nature of a library is that books do return to you, but maybe a book return bin and flagging down patrons who have books overdue could have worked. Maybe you could have a mechanic where you sort books or something, maybe you could have a library log where you look up what patrons have checked out in the past, I don't know.
Like I said, I do recommend this game if you're looking for a cozy little shop game. The "recommend a book" mechanic is something that you'll get a lot more out of if you've read a lot of books, but I've read a lot of books, so it worked out for me.
May I recommend this really cosy game about selling books, with a soundtrack that is hard to get out of your head once you've spent hours playing it? :3
