Littlewood is a fun twist on the Stardew Valley-like genre of simulation games where you’re a very chill character starting their new life farming, mining and woodcutting your way across town in order to slowly improve yourself, complete small quests and befriend the townspeople. I had a good time with it, but the core loop got a bit too stale after a while so I ultimately didn’t see everything the game had to offer.
After a small introduction - you’re a legendary hero who saved the world from an evil force - you’re thrown into a town and made mayor. Right off the bat, the main things you could do felt familiar to me; chop trees and mine rocks to clear them from the town, sell materials at the market to make money that you can then use to upgrade various buildings that you then use to process wood into planks that you donate to other buildings for various effects, or use to make furniture and build structures for your town. You’re only gated by energy which goes down whenever you do something, and when it runs out you have to go to bed. You have complete control over your town layout and can create hills, ponds, move buildings around and all that, which is fun but sometimes it made me question whether I had to make the most efficient layout, something visually pleasing, or a mish-mash of both that was sometimes hard to navigate.
There are many skills to unlock, from fishing to farming to cooking to bug catching and they all work more or less the same, you level them up by doing these actions (which in turn cost energy) and by leveling them up you can do more things related to that skill. Planting different trees, getting access to woodcutting areas you didn’t before, selling more items in the market. It’s pretty fun! You’ll get new characters or new projects that ask for specific materials that you might not have, so then you need to chop trees of specific types, make planks and then build a new thing, this gets easier as the game progresses but sometimes it takes more than one day to finish a small goal you’ve set yourself, and that can feel a bit frustrating.
As the mayor you can slowly buy town upgrades to improve the quantity of items you gather, or your maximum energy, things of that nature. You can also hang out with townsfolk and give them gifts, create new buildings that unlock more features - a coffee shop where you can get a daily boost, a tavern to cook food, houses to get even more characters in town - and participate in events that occur as the calendar days go by. I’m not a big fan of calendar events because time passing is always stressful in games, but I get why it’s here. More locations get unlocked via hot air balloon and they all serve the purpose of collecting different types of items to craft and build (at one point your starting town wll run out of trees and rocks, so you need to go to these miniature dungeons), which is also pretty neat.
There’s a lot of neat things in Littlewood! Each NPC in town has a list of quests they want you to complete with regards to their house (where it’s located in town, what’s inside), you have a bunch of personal quests to progress through, there’s a museum where you can donate one of each item, you can get animals, there are plenty of things to unlock and discover, I had a good time!
