Looks can be deceiving. The art of Littlewood is extremely simplistic and the game looks like it's one of hundreds of farming sims, but once you dig into it it's actually pretty great! Though there's some randomness to a 100% completion, there's a lot you can do to mitigate it and the game clock is based around actions per day instead of time. This results in a game loop based around budgeting actions effectively, which feels great!
The core objective is something of a cross between Animal Crossing's town-building tools and Dark Cloud's atlamillia system. Residents move into your town and you place their houses, and then residents will request their houses be laid out in certain ways (with various furniture, close to various landmarks, etc). You have freedom to build your town any way you want within those confines, and the tools are pretty simple and intuitive to use. The constraints make the creativity fun and rewarding; once you're done building your town, it's still nice to walk around and admire it!
The thing that kept me playing the longest, though, is the character writing. Now, it's not mind-blowing or literary, anything like that, but characters have a lot of barks, and the writing is quirky, earnest, and genuine. I enjoyed learning about the world and its inhabitants and post-marriage dialogue is extremely cute.
If you're looking for a cozy little pick-me-up, you could do a lot worse than Littlewood. Believe me, I have played all them. You're not going to see anything revolutionary here, but sometimes all you want is a nice cozy mug of hot cocoa, and that is the niche this game occupies very well.
The core objective is something of a cross between Animal Crossing's town-building tools and Dark Cloud's atlamillia system. Residents move into your town and you place their houses, and then residents will request their houses be laid out in certain ways (with various furniture, close to various landmarks, etc). You have freedom to build your town any way you want within those confines, and the tools are pretty simple and intuitive to use. The constraints make the creativity fun and rewarding; once you're done building your town, it's still nice to walk around and admire it!
The thing that kept me playing the longest, though, is the character writing. Now, it's not mind-blowing or literary, anything like that, but characters have a lot of barks, and the writing is quirky, earnest, and genuine. I enjoyed learning about the world and its inhabitants and post-marriage dialogue is extremely cute.
If you're looking for a cozy little pick-me-up, you could do a lot worse than Littlewood. Believe me, I have played all them. You're not going to see anything revolutionary here, but sometimes all you want is a nice cozy mug of hot cocoa, and that is the niche this game occupies very well.