Tiny Bookshop

This is a sweet, cozy, "community helps community" kind of game with a lot of love for diversity, themes of friendship, family, and chosen family, and settling in a new place that you want to call home. There's a lot of great quests for different characters, a cool selection of books and genres, and locations, and it's fun dressing up your little mobile bookshop for different locations (the presets function is incredible). There's no negative consequences for getting a Rec wrong (and sometimes you really won't have anything that suits, though make sure to always look outside of the genre they're asking for first!), and you can pretty heavily customise and tweak accessibility in ways that suit you. Some cons include the fact that every time I recommended a story on feminism/LGBT theory or Black theory to a customer asking for something "political" they'd go "that's not very political." Which is uh, incorrect, and a bit weird for a game that clearly does showcase diversity and different themes. I could never quite wrap my head around the fact that Black women fighting for their rights was not considered political, even though the book listing and blurb was right there. It felt jarring and tonedeaf for the game itself. (I could understand it in a game that wasn't going out of its way to depict this kind of diversity, but in one that is??) I appreciated the cast of characters, they were each allowed to be flawed (and sometimes annoying depending on what you like/don't like) in their own ways. Generally speaking it was not buggy/glitchy, and it never crashed for me, and every achievement triggered properly (except for one, which I think bugged out and then eventually corrected itself). Ultimately I also got a nice little reading list out of it! And it was incredibly fun to see titles from my own shelves, like Ace, Omniscient Reader's Viewpoint, etc. along with many beloved classics and some really interesting crime / fantasy etc. I definitely recommend this game to folks looking for a cozy, gentle game with good pacing, and a lot of meaningful cosmetic adjustments along the way! It was fun collecting every item. :D