Littlewood

Littlewood is a cute "stardew valley lite" resource management type game, focused on rebuilding a jrpg kind of town. You have a limited number of actions every day that you spend on farming, gathering, crafting etc. The game has no challenge and is more about just moping around and doing chores about your town and it's surrounding world. There are things to like Littlewood for, it has it's charm and has a way of drawing you in. However, it becomes such a time sink and a slog, that you will quickly find yourself playing this game for hours to no end - it has this "free mobile game" feel of having to waste frustrating amounts of time doing uninteresting things in order to get an unproportionaly insignificant reward. There is not really all that much to do and most of the chores are a tiresome grind. And grind you will - you have to do everything by hand and most of the time you are not even building towards anything but some numbers increments that benefit the chores in a very insignificant way. Your main incentive to go through the grind is unlocking additional content for the game - mostly blueprints for your town (and furnishing your inhabitants house), a small number of additional locations or snippets of the story (for what it is). Unfortunately, after you get out of early game, getting those becomes significantly more time consuming, to the point that everything you receive feels like a disappointment in contrast to how much effort you had to put into it. The game is cheap and i wouldn't mind it having this little content - it could be fine for what it is, a relaxing little sandbox to build and decorate your jrpg town. It's colourful, charming, building the town is tons of fun. The initial several hours show what could have been, if the game restrained itself. However, instead of just accepting this small game for what it is, the devs decided to pad everything to the moon and back, making the game into an endurance test. One which i eventually failed.

I very rarely write reviews but this game deserves it! As of now I have played 25 hours of Littlewood, still have stuff to do - and the game is still inDev with some content missing! Littlewood draws inspiration from games like Harvest Moon, Animal Crossing and Stardew Valley. You live in a small town (that you can name yourself), do some farming, bug catching, gathering, mining, fishing, woodcutting, cooking or get to know the townfolk better, maybe even find a love interest. Additionally there is a little collectible card game in game that provides some extra fun. You can terraform the town, creating hills and rivers, move buildings and trees around, plant flowers, erect monuments, and, of course, furnish and customize the interior of townfolk's houses (and your own). They let you know what they like. If that is not enough, there are little fetch quests from the townfolks, interesting little cut scenes, seasonal events and a museum that wants you to collect items. That's not all though and content is also still being added. In Littlewood time "passes" by how many actions you perform/how much is left of your daily energy bar. Instead of hurrying around like in Stardew Valley, you can just do things until you're out of energy. And as a lot of actions don't cost energy at all, like walking, crafting and placing furniture, or shopping, you can still a lot of things when "your work day" is done. This makes the game very relaxing. Overall this is a great little game! It is still inDev and needs a bit of balancing (some skills are SO much easier to level up than others) and sometimes some explanations of what the game wants you to do would be fine, but these are minor details and I have no doubt that when the game comes out this will be a five star game!

I've really enjoyed my experience with this game so far, I've enjoyed the town building & decoration element; something that games of this genre have lacked for the most part. Also, having time tied to energy makes the game alot more chill because time doesn't advance until you make an action. Also, I like the art style, it's minimal for the most part, but it's viabrant and has charcter. Despite these good aspects, there are lots of glaring flaws as I play through this. Games like this are about bring the characters to life, something this game fails to do. And although, the dialouge is pretty good for the most part, all your characters do is just stand around doing nothing for the most part. There's also just the overall clunkiness of the games. Blueprints that you already own still appear in shops after you purchase them; and given you can get alot of blueprints, it can get easy quickly to being buying a duplicate blueprint even though you gain absolutely nothing for doing so, so you can easily waste money if you're not careful. Overall, I don't recommend buying this game full price in the current state, I hope that the game devs see this review, because I think this can be an amazing game of the genre if they put more work into it. This could turn from a decent game into a fantastic game quite easily if they just polish and add to what's already there in the world.

Littlewood is a game I didn't know I wanted until I played it. There's no real pressure on you to manage your economy, keep your town safe or worry about time limits; you simply chill out while making your town pretty, your people happy and having fun as the time goes by. As simple as the game is, it's probably one of the best games I've played this year entirely on the fun it has brought me. I love it to bits, and if you simply want to chill out in a cute game then you'll probably love it too.