I’m still playing Tiny Bookshop (neoludic games), and I have more to say about it. I left off part one by saying this is the perfect small bites game; I still think it is. I also said that I had several small complaints, and I want to expand on that a bit.
First, though, I am still enjoying the game. I still play several days at a time, and go for longer than I had planned. It’s very much has that ‘just one more day’ feel to it, and I give in to the impulse more often than not.
However, there are some small issues with the game that keep me from thoroughly enjoying my time in Bookstonbury-by-the-Sea. That’s t he name of the fictional coastal time, and it reminds me of Boston for whatever reason. I keep calling it Boston in my head, though Boston is not a coastal town.
I mentioned that during the demo, I would stress over making a bad recmmendation. Then, during the first few hours of the actual game, I was over that stress. Now, though, I am frazzled when I get requests like, “I ilke plays. I like nonfiction. I like to read books in a series.” And it’s clearly not possible to get all three. I am having a devil of a time figuring out which is most important. It’s usually the first one, but sometimes, if I find a book that fits the other two statements, I might be able to slide on the first. Or not. I’m not sure.
That’s my issue with this part of the game. Every time I think I figure out how the recommendations work, the game throws me for a loop. Also, I’ve played long enough to get repeat dialogue, so I think that the way it works is that each person has a set number of statements, and then the game just mixes them at random. Each request is rated one to four (or five) stars for easy to difficult. Actually, I’ve only seen one star and four stars, so maybe it’s a binary choice. Hm. I may have seen a five star difficulty, but it might have been four, too.
Anyway, I’m never quite sure what is going to be acceptable and what isn’.t My firiend in the RKG Discord has mentioned the same thing. It feels like a roll of the dice if a suggestion will work or not. And, of course, there’s RNG involved because you can only have forty books on the shelves for sale. I can choose how many of each genre I want to set out, but I can’t pick the actual books.
That’s too much RNG for me. I would like to be able to make a good rec every time or a decent one, but that’s not always possible. I hate not making any suggestion at all. I try to make one no matter what because sometimes, the game surprises me. I have not been able to figure out if the recmmendations actually matter or not except for certain NPC quests, which leads me to my next quibble with the game.
The systems are not very well laid out. Look. I’m a FromSoft fan, so I’m used to things not being explained. I still cannot tell you how to upgrade every weapon in Dark Souls except in very general terms. The thing is, that’s one of my least-favorite aspect of FromSoft games, and I do not appreciate it when other games do it, either.
In this case, it’s the recommendation system. I really wish it had been designed a bit better, but if it’s not actually doing anything negative for me, then fine, whatever. You can probably tell that I’m not happy about it, but there’s nothing I can do about it. If I’m going to keep playing the game, I will just have to accept it.
A bigger issue is that the game has just opened up exponentially. After a fairly tight and restrained first area, now, I have half a dozen or so places I can go to. There are seven or eight NPCs, and while some of them are tethered to one place, some can show up at several. They give you quests to do, and what I’ve learned is that I have to chill the fuck out. Whenever I get a quest from a town person (I like that better than NPC in this case), I try to do it immediately. I’ve been able to do it a few times, but not most of the time.
In addition, the game is not always clear how you’re supposed to carry out the quests. For example, at the very beginning of the game, *SPOILER* Tilde, the retired bookshop owner, asks me to meet her at her friend’s cafe and pick up a few things to take to the flea market. I thought she said boxes, and there were seven I needed to pick up. I could not find seven boxes for the life of me (I found three or four), and it took me a few times at the location to figure out that it’s wasn’t seven boxes–it was a few boxes, and a few random items.
I had them equipped in my tiny bookshop every day, and Tilde told me a few days later that I did’nt have to carry them around with me–I could just put them in my shop the day of the flea market and bring them to the market then. Which, thanks, but maybe tell me that right up front? It cost me money to put the items in my shop (or out front, technically), and as I mentioned in the last post, I was skint on money in the first several weeks. Actually, I’m not flush with it now, either, but I at least have a hundred or two at the end of the day.
Which leads me to another issue. Pricing is too high. Not if it were in real life, but for the sake of gameplay, it’s daunting to make less than a hundred every day and most items excluding the books costing more than a hundred. This is where gameplay has to trump reality to a certain extent.
Back to the quests. I think the main goal of the devs is to make the game as seamless and conevrsational as possible. It’s an admirable goal, and I appreciate it most of the time. However, it is a game at the end of the day. Gameplay needs to be clear. I am willing to admit that it might be on me, but I keep getting frustrated by what I’m supposed to do on the quests.
Also, I hate min/maxing. HATE it. So having to figure out how much each item in the shop bumped a certain genre every day is dampening my enthusiasm a bit. One of my quests is to sell out all my books in one of the locations, and I have to have all the bookshelves filled. That means I have to fiddle with my stock to optimize it for the area.
Hm. I just thought of a way to kind of cheese it. If I fill the shelves with one genre and then put all the items I have that boost that genre in the shop, that might work. Or it could leave me with a bunch of dissatisfied customers who are mad that I only have one (or two) genres in the shop.
I’m done. I will probably write more tomorrow.