I remember a while back hearing a lot of people being surprisingly enthusiastic about a Nintendo-published handheld game called Style Savvy, but I never really got around to looking into it. Recently, however, I downloaded the demo of the somewhat cumbersomely named Nintendo Presents New Style Boutique 2: Fashion Forward — the European name of the third Style Savvy (or, in Japanese, Girls Mode) game — and have found myself surprisingly involved with it.

For the unfamiliar, New Style Boutique 2 (as I shall refer to it hereafter) is a game in which you play a young woman on holiday in a hip, fashion-conscious town. Through a series of somewhat improbable circumstances that only happen in slice-of-life video games, you find yourself assisting a local clothes shop, hairdresser and beautician with the requests of the town’s apparently exclusively female population. In doing so, you earn money for the shop and yourself, and can subsequently afford to do yourself up better as well as your customers.

This is as far as the demo goes, but the full game has a story to follow as well as a number of different “professions” to explore, including modelling, fashion design and even interior design. Just the demo is an enjoyable enough experience, though, since it’s essentially a game in which the whole point is to piss around with the character creator in order to create various different looks, and subsequently be rewarded for it.

The exact way in which you go about creating these looks differs slightly depending on which aspect of the character’s appearance you are working on at the time. If you’re putting together an outfit, they’ll give you some vague guidelines — “I want a girly outfit, and I have about £700 to spend” — and you can put together an outfit according to those specifications, either through browsing manually or making use of the helpful search function. If you’re designing a hairstyle, meanwhile, you’re given the opportunity to ask the customer a variety of questions before beginning the styling process, which will give you a checklist of things to include in their haircut. Finally, designing makeup requires you to look at a photograph and attempt to recreate it as closely as possible, perhaps with the assistance of a memo scrawled on the back of the photograph giving you some suggestions of which colours to use in which areas.

What’s nice about the game is that unlike many “business” simulations that attempt to capture the feeling of, say, running a shop or office, New Style Boutique 2 has plenty of personality. Its characters all have names and profiles, and they all display their personalities through dialogue — though there is a bit of stock dialogue for things like them accepting outfits and suchlike. They also have distinctive, unique appearances, and it’s undeniably satisfying to see a character wandering around wearing an outfit you put together for them.

I don’t know how much the other elements of the full game add to the experience as a whole, but based on the demo, I’m actually surprisingly interested in playing it, and I understand now why so many people have had positive things to say about the Style Savvy series as a whole since it first appeared.