Parent's Guide: New Style Boutique 3: Styling Star - Age rating, mature content and difficulty

What is New Style Boutique 3: Styling Star?

New Style Boutique 3: Styling Star sees you back in the driving seat, and running your own fashion boutique, as you help customers with their fashion-related requests - including a few budding super stars! Whether its a small town farm girl, a quirky 'Mewtube' streamer or a rich heiress in disguise, the customers all need your help in putting together outfits for auditions, photoshoots or simply as a way to blend in and hide from their adoring fans. By skilfully combining shirts and skirts, dresses and cardigans and accessories galore to match their requests, you can create all kinds of different looks for your varied clientele, as you work to build up your boutique's reputation as a purveyor of fine attire the town over.

How do you play New Style Boutique 3: Styling Star?

While manning your boutique, various characters will come through your doors with fashion-related requests - perhaps they're looking for a red shirt, a girly casual dress or a rock-themed bag. As the newest fashionista in town, it's up to you to listen to their requests, and recommend the relevant items from your shop inventory.

Every item in New Style Boutique has a particular style - and by association, brand - associated with it, and its usually a simple matter of matching your customer's order with something from the right brand - so, something 'girly' from Marzipan Sky, or an April BonBon-branded item for a 'lively' character. Sometimes you'll need to think a bit harder, and deduce what kind of style a character is looking for when they ask for a shirt to match a particular skirt, or something to match their lipstick, while at other times, they're after an entire outfit to mimic a particular fashion trend.

Of course, you can only do so well as your stock room dictates, and a large part of your job as manager of the boutique is to make sure you have enough stock to cover every eventuality. Fortunately, the nearby Exhibition Hall is open 24/7, 365 days a year, so you can always stock up should you run out.

How easy is New Style Boutique 3: Styling Star to pick up and play?

New Style Boutique 3: Styling Star is pretty much as easy going as they come. While you can only sell items you actually have in stock, customers are more than happy to give you another go if you're temporarily out, or if you get their order wrong. About the hardest it gets is deciphering characters' requests, which can sometimes be a little vague - but providing you pay attention to a few key words, which will be handily highlighted, you should be able to throw together something along the lines of what they're after. Making use of the game's built-in search tools to scan through your stock room is especially helpful too - even more so if you make use of the specific 'Search by order' button in the top right corner of the touch screen, which sets all the parameters automatically, and returns any clothes you have in stock that match the order.

For the youngest of players, it's worth keeping in mind that Styling Star requires a strong reading ability, as customer orders (and everything else) in game are delivered entirely through text, and are totally unvoiced. Some of the key words characters use to describe their preferences can initially be a little obtuse - baby doll style, inners and outers to name but a few - but thankfully an in-game 'Fashion 101' dictionary lets you decipher the techno babble with ease.

Sample Sentences:

• "Emergency! Emergency! Do you have any red items on the premises? Anything will do, so long as it's red. This is urgent. Will you conduct a search for me?"
• "If you've got a casual dress that looks good on me, I'd love to buy it off you. Something kind of dainty, if possible. Like with a flowery pattern, maybe? It might not look good on me, but… I guess we'll see."
• "Oh my! Bienvenue, mademoiselle! You're a first-time customer, are you not? You must be. I never baguette a face!"

As can be expected from a cute and girly game centred on fashion, New Style Boutique: Styling Star contains nothing in the way of mature content. There's no bad language, no violence and certainly no sexual content (or even underwear sales) whatsoever - a totally clean sheet.

Age Ratings

Format Reviewed: Nintendo 3DS