Whether you’re on a quest to play all the cozy sims out there – a genre still holding the reigns since the pandemic – or if you are just a bookworm who also happens to enjoy videogaming, the well-anticipated Tiny Bookshop is now available to play. It is a comfort game that meets shop management and meets . . . literature. Now that wintertime is approaching, the desire to lay in a warm bed, sip on a hot beverage, and divulge into games like this is growing strong!
Developed by Neoludic Games and published by Skystone Games, Tiny Bookshop allows you to explore a fictional, homey coastal town. It opens with a cutesy narrative and introduces players to all sorts of interesting townspeople as passionate about books as you are!
Tiny Bookshop was released on August 7th, 2025, and can be played on the Nintendo Switch, PC, and Steam.
Time to turn the page
Players take on the role as a newcomer wheeling in your secondhand, mobile bookshop to Bookstonbury: a quiet, costal town filled with bibliophiles. While there is no heavy plot to the game, a small narrative will expand as players interact with folks and complete side quests to learn more about the town’s history. You will also learn a lot more about the fascinating personalities of frequent customers and friends.
There is a plethora of places around Bookstonbury to plant your shop: Far Beach, Mega Marche, Cafe Liberte, Waterfront Square, to name a few. However, each location will require a different fee to park and sell there.
One of the townspeople, Fern, is the local reporter. This bashful fellow will issue you a daily newsletter informing the player on Bookstonbury’s weather conditions (which will affect sales), upcoming markets and events, as well as advertisements showcasing heaps of books and store decorations for purchase. Players can buy items directly from this newspaper. It will also keep you updated on your own daily sales information and profit margin.
From pen to paper
Tiny Bookshop‘s UI is super simple and easy to navigate. The overall gameplay is relaxed and slow-paced, only requiring players to read some dialogue and click and drag things around.
One major mechanic most gamers know and love at this point is customization! Players may personalize their little bookshop however they please. The game provides all sorts of paints to change the color of the roof, walls, accentuations, and items within the shop. You can buy items from newspaper ads or from the weekly flea market, including hanging plants and an audio speaker. You could also receive free gifts, like a huge fern from Anne the “plant sciences student,” or maybe even find an abandoned typewriter by exploring and clicking around the scenes you are in. Some objects are interactive. For example, players can write their own short book with the typewriter. I made a poorly written fact book about bees!
Every item you choose to place in your shop can affect your sales. For example, if you place down a decorative skull, it could boost crime book sales for that day by a good margin, yet decrease kids’ book sales. You can choose your decorations carefully to cater to your customer base, or just customize based on aesthetics.
Hitting the shelves
As you open your bookshop each day, you will stock the shelves with whatever inventory of books you have. The longer you play the game, the more shelf room you will acquire. At the beginning, you can only put up to 40 books on the floor. It is recommended that you fill your shelves to the brim . . . because why wouldn’t you want to sell as many works as possible?
Luckily, players are able to color code each book genre to whatever makes sense to you. I colored my crime books to be black, the drama genre as blue, and the travel works as green.
As customers pour into your shop, they can buy as many or as little books as possible, mostly out of your control. Recurring characters can impact sales by their presence and preferences in your store. For the most part, players just chill out and wait for the sales day to end. You are able to click on your surroundings while NPCs shop around, potentially leading to hidden items or just useless but fun interactions. If you click on the seagulls, they will emit a musical note. If you click on a shopping cart, it will jostle and roll away.
One mechanic you can partake in during the sales day is fulfill recommendation requests. Sometimes, a customer will be unsure and in need your help finding a book. This is a timed interaction, so click on them quickly! These recommendations vary in difficulty. They may be a lax customer, asking for a book filled with any kind of romance. Or the may be more picky, maybe looking for murder mysteries from specifically female authors. Successful recommendations may be hard to do in this case, but you could think outside of the box and choose a book they may not expect, away from their preferred genre. If you fail these requests, it will only cost you sales, nothing else.
Don’t judge a book by its cover
Each location in Bookstonbury will vary in types of customers and genre sale tendencies. You can open the newsletter and a personal journal to check on the weather conditions of each place, and be reminded of any current side quests and previously completed ones. Players will collect cute, little stamps as quests are completed.
The recurring cast are the main people who will give you side missions. You care not required to do them, but you totally should. You will build relationships with these cool people and further unlock mysteries and history of the town you now live in. Some side quests include helping Tilde with her moving boxes; finding seashells for young Harper; and helping Klaus unlock his full potential as a musician.
There’s nothing like a good book!
The art style of Tiny Bookshop is ridiculously charming, with watercolor-like scenes and a soft, pastel coloration. The low poly style gives the game a postcard-esq look, perfectly suiting the nature of the game. I never get bored looking at the screen!
I think that it is incredibly beneficial to be able to personalize the colors of each book genre. This can help them stand out against the background, or appeal to a specific player’s mental associations. I see the classics as grey, perhaps because I refer back to black and white television and photographs when I imagine older time periods.
The music is super relaxing and cozy, with an appropriate beachy vibe. There are some sound affects and chatter noise that blend into the background. The dialogue is unvoiced, but the game is about reading after all.
Final thoughts
Tiny Bookshop is a splendidly cozy game and quite refreshing. I have not played anything quite like it before. Most of the books in-game are real, ranging from Beowulf to Hamlet to Heartstopper, with some entries fictionalized for the game’s purposes. Regardless, it did encourage me to read more in real life and reminisce about the past titles I love.
Of course, Tiny Bookshop is insanely repetitive but with an addictive quality to it. The customization options reinforces the fun, and the slow narrative progression is rather soothing instead of boring. It’s a short and sweet, cozy time.
Most of the gameplay is just waiting around though. Aside from the recommendations mechanic, I wish you could interact more with customers. I also wish that the environmental interactions could be more involved or elaborate. Regardless, I highly recommend this game. I think with the upcoming cold front and the tendency to become hermitic for the holidays, this is the perfect time to open up your tiny, digital bookshop.
