I worked as a bookseller for about half a decade. My favorite part of the job was when people asked me for recommendations. I like to think I got pretty good at it; even now I can still tell you some of the New York Times top lists from 2013. Whether I was helping a grandma trying to figure out the AP level of a six-year-old or a shy teenager preordering a Cassandra Clare book, while doing that job I felt like my positive influence on the world around me was easy to see.

So perhaps it’s no surprise my favorite trailer from the Wholesome Games stream last week was for Tiny Bookshop, a bookstore management game where you choose books for customers at your seaside micro-shop. In the demo available on Steam, you’re new in town and meet a kindly retired bookseller who shows you the ropes of moving copies, along with a newspaper reporter and a few other citizens.

I played through a couple days of bookselling, which was enough to get the hang of stocking inventory and dealing with difficult customers. Ahhh, home sweet home.

Tiny Bookshop combines two of the most potent ingredients of simulation games from the past few years: Running a small business, and interior design. You can customize your small green book wagon with items you buy with your day’s profits, which are decorations like ships’ buoys, plants, and a Billy Bass-like talking fish, as well as tables and stands to prop up even more books.

The heart of the game is selling books, which follows the same structure every in-game day. First, you choose a location to set up for the day. Then you open up your cart with a few clicks. Customers stream in automatically, and they pick their selections from the genres you have in stock. Each genre has a percentage chance to have the book they’re looking for, depending on how many books of that type you have in the store. If you have mostly fantasy novels, for example, the travel enthusiast is going to walk away disappointed. Every night you tally your profit, buy your decorations and reset your stock for the next day.

Your mobile bookstore can move around from place to place. In the demo there are just two locations, a waterfront area and a town square, each with unique clientele. In the first one a runner jogged up my ramp and asked me for classics. In the second, browsers came over from the nearby cafe. Every so often a customer can ask you for a recommendation, either to jog their memory or to find something new. You then have to look at your collection and guess from plot summaries whether your customer would like a book. These books are real, and some of them actually taught me about books I’d never heard of (did you know Kiki’s Delivery Service was a kids’ book before it was a Ghibli film?).

The process also felt relatively true to life, though maybe a little more punishing than in the real world. Helping a customer find the perfect book always comes with a risk, after all, that you might recommend something they absolutely hate. These customers are always ready to tell you if they don’t like what you offer—and follow it up by walking out of your store.

The art in this game is gorgeous, with a watercolor style that depicts the starting pier and the winding roads of the town in a soft, calming light. I imagine when I collect a few more decorations my bookstore will really start to feel like home. No matter how many cosmetics I add, though, the wall of books remains the centerpiece, and adding and selling books from it makes those I hold onto feel like a genuine collection. I lingered in-game at closing time, waiting to shut the bookstore’s doors and windows just to admire how it looked in the sunset. Tiny Bookshop really succeeds in giving me enough control over my store that it feels like it’s really mine, a shop but also a sanctuary.

Organizing my wares into tidy shelves reminded me of a game from last year called Book of Hours, where you manage a palatial library made of different types of books. That game was more mysterious, while Tiny Bookshop seems so far like more of an open book. I couldn’t sense any hidden darkness lurking under the surface, though the website hints at some small town drama. The writing in the demo stays light, and it never reads as too pretentious or too plain, which is important for a game about selling the written word.

There’s an in-universe newspaper that tracks your progress and where you can buy books from estate sales and literary fans. And there are plenty of literary jokes that never strain towards being stuck-up or annoying, like one about Sappho’s poems of passion (for women) or a summary of All’s Well that Ends Well (sometimes a happy ending can be a woman getting the man she wanted, even if he’s generally quite unpleasant).

But the center of the whole thing is bookselling and taking care of your store. While the demo never got challenging, the process of choosing what books to stock is a modest puzzle. I don’t see it getting much more complex than this, though I wish there were ways to sell someone on a book they never thought they wanted (as I remember doing with people who came in for a cookbook and left with a Donna Tartt novel). But ultimately I think simple, in this case, is fine. As with the plot, the overall impression of the game is made up of relatively simple parts—sales, interior design, and progressing the story—and none of them overpowers the others.

My favorite thing about Tiny Bookshop is that it creates a town where bookstores can exist on every corner. With the one-two punch of Barnes and Noble and Amazon, the last 20 years have been rough on independent bookstores. This game elides that difficulty, at least in the demo, creating a world where everyone reads and has money to spend on it. Similarly, being a bookstore employee can be tough; you spend hours on your feet, customers can be as rude as they are at any service job, and that rough market isn’t easy for employees either. But amid the romanticization that Tiny Bookshop is admittedly taking part in, there’s a kernel of truth—it feels good to make someone’s day by finding a book just for them.

Tiny Bookshop won’t be out until 2025, but I recommend holding yourself over by taking a trip to your local bookstore.

I'm not generally a life-sim guy but I am very eager to dive into Nivalis. A big part of that arises from the strength of Cloudpunk, the previous game from developer Ion Lands, which I really liked, but Nivalis itself—based on the admittedly not-a-whole-lot we've seen of it so far—looks brilliant too.

Sadly, we're going to have to wait a little bit longer than expected to dive in, as it's been delayed until spring 2025.

"Ion Lands' highest priority is to ensure that Nivalis provides the best possible experience for the player and the team appreciates the patience and support they have received from the ever-growing community as Ion Lands navigate through this creative journey," publisher 505 Games said in a very non-specific explanation for the delay.

And fair enough, sometimes you just need more time to get things done, and I am more than happy to be patient for two reasons. One, the classic: "Suck is forever," and I'd rather wait to get a Nivalis that lives up to my hopes—which, frankly, are very high.

And two, the new trailer—the one embedded up top—has me breathing just a little more rapidly than usual. I've been in the business long enough to know that trailers are nothing more than a blend of aspirations and hype, concocted solely to get attention and, ideally, crank up excitement. Even so, sometimes a trailer hits just so, and I cast aside my game journo cynicism to let myself be caught up in it. 

This is definitely one of those trailers: It's a powerful mood, with just enough of a glimpse at previously-unseen material to keep me hooked all the way through and a poetic denouement that lands perfectly. Will the game live up to the dream? No clue. Could I be setting my sights too high? Quite possibly. Am I concerned about that right now? Nope. Yes, I have been successfully marketed to, and I don't care.

Our Sims 4 main menu experience is crowded enough already, but it's about to get more packed. This week players have managed to dig up proof of an upcoming "events" system that will dole out free rewards for logging in regularly. EA hasn't released any public information about the events feature yet, but there is, for now, an unlisted video on The Sims YouTube channel explaining it in full.

The events feature isn't live yet, but a current banner on the main menu screen says "What's so exciting? Come back in 1 week to find out." It could be related to something else, but I'd say it's a fair bet that's this new events system it's referencing.

As spotted by a few different players, including the (unofficial) Sims Community account, it sure looks and feels like a battle pass. It's located on the main menu screen with a horizontal track of rewards that you can claim for logging in a certain number of days during the given event period. Rewards are things like new hair and jewelry for Create-A-Sim, new furniture and objects for Build Mode, and what may be a new Sim trait as well. It looks like you aren't asked to log in every day, with a set of three rewards possible during week one, two during week two, and so on. And though it feels like damning with faint praise to say it, well, at least it's free.

Content creator SatchOnSims has helpfully done a bit of comparison of all the leaked items in the event rewards track to work out that most seem to be new color swatches or slight alterations on items that have previously appeared in different paid DLC kits and expansions. There's a recolor of a hairstyle from the Cats & Dogs expansion, a version of a mini fridge from the Discover University expansion, and so on.

Log in rewards are super common in online games as an incentive to keep concurrent player count strong but it's a weird thing for a singleplayer game to do. It's been a weird first half of the year overall for The Sims 4. 

Back in March it added a nagging store button reminding you to think about buying DLC all the time. Just last week EA announced that it had "assembled a team" to better work on fixing gameplay bugs that have plagued the game for years. And yeah, it doesn't feel great that another naggy sort of system is likely going to roll right on out while a major bug fixing campaign seems to be just getting off the ground. 

It's been a real mix of things nobody wanted and things everybody's asked for for years. It feels like The Sims 4 is getting pulled in four different directions like it's being stretched on a torture rack. Slapping in battle passes while that fad already feels on its way out of favor in the wider gaming community is just another shackle.

It's unclear whether this system is going to replace or coexist with the current "Sims Delivery Express" system by which The Sims 4 will occasionally add a new free item for all players regardless of when they log in next. And although these "events" look like they're currently free, I can feel everyone getting nervous that they may not always stay that way, if not in The Sims 4 then possibly in the upcoming The Sims 5. 

For now though, getting free variants on things like the mini fridge that were previously only contained in DLCs is something I'm generally in favor of, feeling "pressured" to play aside. If I could request a single-tile shower head like the one in Discover University to use in my base game tiny house builds, that would be great, thanks EA.

It's no secret that the developer of Stardew Valley, Eric "ConcernedApe" Barone, has poured his heart and soul into creating and refining the beautiful life-sim game. But like most things, this dedication can be a double-edged sword, as it has also stopped him from working on Haunted Chocolatier, his next game. 

"[Fan expectation] definitely puts pressure on me," Barone says in an interview with Aftermath, "but it's better to have a delayed game that's actually good than a bad game that's on time. When it's ready, that's when I'll release it. I'm not too concerned with the pressure. I don't feel like I owe anyone anything when it comes to Haunted Chocolatier. It's a game that I'm deciding to make. I don't need to make it."

Recently, Barone took time off from working on Haunted Chocolatier development to focus on  Stardew Valley's 1.6 update, which added a ton of new features and festivals.  "I was like, 'I can't just release a technical update because if I say there's a new Stardew Valley update, and there's literally no new content, I feel like people will be disappointed.' So, at first, it was just the Desert Festival, but I have this problem where once I start, I can't stop. I'm thinking, 'Oh, this isn't enough. It'd be really cool to add this. I would love to add this.'"

Even after the patch was released Barone said that he wanted to wait a bit longer until it was "bug-free and out to all platforms" before returning to work on Haunted Chocolatier. "Once I reopen the book on Stardew, I always have a hard time closing it again because I always want to add more things, make it better, make it cooler, make people happy," Barone says. "It's exciting. Every single thing I'm adding, I'm thinking about how people are going to play this, talk about it, and love it. It's gonna be part of their experience. It could make a memory that they might cherish forever."

Although there is undoubtedly a lot of pressure from fans who get excited by every tiny new detail about Haunted Chocolatier, most fans are just happy to see Barone carrying on with what he loves to do, confident that things are only going to get better. "You can tell from Stardew Valley how much he loves the game and its community, and I know he will be bringing that same energy to Haunted Chocolatier," one player says in a Reddit thread. Honestly, I'd be happy if Haunted Chocolatier turns out to be half the game that Stardew Valley is right now.

Former XCOM lead and pillar of strategy games Jake Solomon announced this week that he's co-founded a new studio and will be working on a life sim game, of all things. As it turns out, he's actually been hoping to work on a relationship simulation for a very long time.

"Right off the bat, it's going to seem very different from what I've done before," Solomon said after the announcement. "But this is where my passion is: emergent player stories. I want to make a game that you can't play without writing a story."

In an interview with PC Gamer last week, Solomon described a systems-driven life sim that, to my ears, sounded almost like everyone's favorite dwarf society survival game, at least in how he envisions the beginning of each story.

"What we want is for players to tell the game 'hey, I'm trying to tell this kind of story," Solomon says, whether it's about romance or family or running a successful business. "And then we actually generate a cast of characters to make this story more interesting.

"We are pre-seeding the town with relationships. So when you start the game, just like you would start up a book or a TV show, your character has relationships in the town. If you're trying to tell a romantic story then we'll say okay here's your starting cast: your ex-lover is your coworker and your neighbor is your high school boyfriend and your secret crush is this rival in town."

So it's like starting a game of Dwarf Fortress? I asked Solomon if the comparison fit.

"Nobody has said that, but that's a very good way to put it!" Solomon tells me, laughing. There are important differences of course. I don't get the impression that he's planning for players to read a giant wall of text that explains the tragedies, usurpers, and doom of society every time you start up a new town. "But yes, we want it to feel like a simulated environment," he says.

After choosing their story style and getting that starting town of neighbors created, Solomon says a player can go in and edit characters if they actually want those relationships to be different.

The concept of players always being able to concoct a story is one Solomon returned to often during our talk. He also described his ideal audience as Sims players on Tumblr sharing screenshots of their dramatic storylines.

For folks who have been playing The Sims for years, we can occasionally get that burnt out feeling where inspiration for a new project just isn't striking us. It sounds as though Solomon is envisioning a life sim where you never have to ask "what should I do next?" because the hooks of some dramatic tension are already waiting for you to pull on as soon as you start a new game.

That's most of what we know about the first project from Midsummer Studios—it doesn't have a name yet, and there are no screenshots or trailers to speak of—but you can find a few more details about Solomon's small town drama life sim vision in our longer interview.