Littlewood

Littlewood

Littlewood is a Peaceful RPG by Sean Young. You are an amnesiac hero, having already defeated the Dark Lord, who has now been tasked with rebuilding the town of Littlewood. You harvest resources by mining, chopping wood, fishing, bug-catching, and gathering so you can build houses and buildings, farm, cook, make friends, and create a town as beautiful as you wish it to be.

I picked this up as a Treat Yo Self with the understanding it would be a Stardew Valley Lite. That’s a good description, it falls somewhere between Stardew Valley and Forager, which is exactly what I wanted. The game is streamlined to make the crafting/farming/harvesting and terraforming elements as chill as possible. You could argue that Littlewood sometimes overstreamlines its mechanics, and you could argue resource management mechanics must be inherently tedious or stressful to some degree because this aspect makes them appealing as games, but I think there are some excellent ideas here about how to streamline these types of mechanics and remove unnecessary clicky-clicky aspects while retaining the spirit of the genre.

Littlewood does away with inventory management entirely and eliminates the need for toolbars, reducing the control scheme to two buttons, which is particularly useful for players on consoles. Once you obtain a tool and it is in your inventory, you simply use it by pressing A whenever facing a related object. The length of a day is entirely player-driven and is based on stamina depletion. Certain actions take stamina, and when the bar is about 85% depleted it becomes nighttime. When stamina is nearly depleted you receive a warning about needing rest and you have the option to fast-travel to your house. If you don’t sleep in your bed, you suffer a stamina penalty the next day.

Littlewood does away with the timer mechanics often used for resource conversion by having harvested resources convert for a stamina cost. This does away with the need for lots of different timers and forcing the player to wait around for a thing they need, which I think is the main problem with games like these. (This segues into what should be a dev post for another day, but basically, “waiting” is an artificially imposed limitation in games, so making players “wait” for a thing to be produced–a pie, a brick, whatever–is always a potential design problem IMO. Littlewood is a game that says, “To heck with that,” and does the easier thing programmatically, which is having all gathered base resources be converted for a stamina cost.) At the end of the day, the game tallies all the experience you earned, and it is quite gratifying to watch the little bars fill up.

Littlewood is BIG on cheev-type tasks and basically checklists in general. There are all kinds of checklists. Each villager has a checklist of things they like, which could be items for their houses or the house’s location. The player has a checklist of personal goals. Each workstation can be upgraded by trading in items. I can see how 100% completion could get tedious, as there are 15 villagers and they all want 3 pages of stuff. I just build a questboard yesterday and promptly said, fuck that shit, so time will tell if this is a game I want to max out.

You can apparently romance any of the characters, and there is an ongoing story about the hero reacclimating to life after big-bad. The characters are clearly keeping some type of secret from the amnesiac hero, but overall the tone is very light and cute.

I bought this game thinking I’d be lucky to put 10 hours into it and was surprised to find the howtobeat clocks some players in at 60 hours. Currently I’m power-gaming it the way I used to power-game Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp. If you have That Kind of Brain games like these are a great way to “relax” but still burn off extra mental energy, and this is a way more satisfying grind than ACPC because there’s much more stuff to do and there are no timers, there’s a semblance of a story, the characters are more interesting and you can explore different environments.