Review: Littlewood
Littlewood, Developed by Smash Games, a passion project of developer Sean Young, improves on the classic Stardew Valley farming, relationship-building and time-management formula in every way.
Stardew Valley, released in 2016, is a classic farming simulator, tailored directly from the nostalgia of farming sims like Harvest Moon. It is, by all intents and purposes, a masterpiece. It is the tireless work of a sole developer named Erin Barone who spent over eight years creating it, and continued to develop it for years after its release. Stardew Valley surpassed its predecessors in every way and created a cottage industry of farming, crafting and relationship-building games like My Time at Portia, Moonlighter, and Sun Haven. One unsung Stardew-like that I rarely see talked about online is Littlewood, released in early 2021 by Smash Games.
What is Littlewood?
The premise of Littlewood is that you are a hero who, along with a couple of friends, has just defeated a Dark Wizard plaguing the world of Solemn. Now that the world is at peace, you decide to settle a new town which you can name or leave eponymously as Littlewood. You can customize and decorate your town, harvest crops, and complete quests to attract new townsfolk and forge relationships with each of them as well as upgrade your abilities.
Similar to Stardew Valley, there are caves for mining, woods for cutting trees, fishing, gathering, and farming, but additionally there is cooking, bug catching, crafting, flower gardening, and even a battle card collection game within the game called Tarott Monster. While Stardew focuses primarily on its farm-building gameplay loop, Littlewood focuses more on laying out your town and relationship building. For instance, at a certain point in the game, it seemed perfectly OK to just let my crops exist as decoration. This is just one of the ways that gameplay evolved over time in a way that kept Littlewood from getting stale and pushed me to the endgame content that I never reached in Stardew.
A Queer Haven
Your settlement in Littlewood is a haven for Solemn’s misfits. I loved almost every one of the characters that I attracted to my town. They were often outcasts, flawed individuals with dark pasts or eccentric artists. Some of my favorite recruitable denizens included: a witch that can’t control her powers, a snobbish bisexual bird boy and a half-orc who was cast out from her tribe for reasons you’ll come to understand. These are just a few of the fifteen citizens that I fell in love with. I always looked forward to cutscenes between the townsfolk that would unfold as you progressed in your relationships with them. They were often touching, funny or surprisingly dark.
Screencapture by @flyamantia on Twitter
One thing that really stunned me happens before the game even starts. In character creation, most games follow a pattern: choose a name, choose a gender, choose some clothes and choose some hair. In Littlewood the developer made the canny decision to forgo the gender choice altogether. You are not defined by any gender, rather just by what you decide to wear or who you decide to associate with. The social interactions are all non-binary. I found this really refreshing and as a side-effect I felt more comfortable experimenting with different styles for my avatar. Ultimately, I went with a pink, soft-serve-ice-cream-top hair and black overalls.
While in other Stardew-like games, I always feel like there’s an obvious choice for my romance option (in Stardew it was Shane, I can’t help but try to fix him, he’s just so sad and cute, uwu), in Littlewood I honestly had a hard time picking because I identified with so many of the characters. The nice thing is, once you pick your one-true-boo and slide that glitter ring on, you can continue all of your relationships and see all of the cutscenes, besides the date scenes, with all the other townsfolk.
One of the other things I’d like to mention is that while most Stardew-likes are mostly non-violent, Littlewood is completely non-violent. There are monsters but they’re not malicious and there’s no way to “kill” them. You can put them to sleep or tame them but they are just part of the natural order in Solemn. Following in the footsteps of other RPGs like Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor, the game simply leaves combat out of the picture even where it might make sense as a game mechanic. I really appreciate this approach to gaming and, while I have no problem with violence in video games overall, it’s refreshing to see RPGs breaking the norm of game progression.
At the same time, the game is not entirely without competition. In the aforementioned battle card game Tarott Monster, you collect monster cards which can be bought, found by battling other players or hidden in the forest and caves. You can battle certain NPCs and any of your fellow townsfolk, in what I found to be an engaging and sometimes challenging card battle minigame. Collecting all the cards had a really fun metagame as well which tied them directly into the lore you unlock over time.
Screencapture by @SeanYoungSG on Twitter
Never Regretting Decisions
In Littlewood, I almost never regretted any decisions I made. This was due, in large part, to a number of quality of life choices the developer made that I’d love to see in more games. When you build your town in Littlewood, for the most part, all resources are refundable. That is to say that you never lose out on your resources if you make a mistake like putting a crop in the wrong spot or by crafting something by accident. You can always break it down and get exactly the resources you used to create it back. That goes for building up the terrain, placing houses or any other decorative object.
This approach gave me a lot of freedom to experiment with my town, move stuff around or tear it apart completely and start from scratch without having to farm more resources. Some of the NPCs in your town have special location request questlines like being close to a store or placing their house at a certain elevation. So while it was sometimes a lot of work, I always looked forward to reorganizing my town to suit the needs of all its inhabitants.
The only truly finite resource in Littlewood is time. However, unlike in other Stardew-likes where a holiday might come up and I’d have to weigh the decision to water crops or to participate in the town activities, in Littlewood, your crops never rot or fallow and day-to-day activities can always wait until the next day. I did still find myself trying to squeeze every possible moment out of the day in the early game, however I never felt stressed out at the end of the day that I’d missed something crucial or regretted doing one thing instead of another. Everything you do in Littlewood feels like progression.
Not Completely Perfect
I completed just about everything I wanted to do in Littlewood in my 61 hour playthrough. Which, as a full-time working human with lots of video games, books, podcasts, and social events on my list, I appreciated. I’m actually pretty sure that I could have done everything there is to do in Littlewood within 100 hours, if so inclined. This is great for completionists like me, who also usually get bored of games after the 100 hour mark, but the short gamespan could be seen as a plus or minus depending on how you look at it. On the one hand completing a game feels really nice, and on the other hand, it didn’t really give me a reason to pick it up and play it again. All of the townspeople’s quests and requests are the same game-to-game so while you might build out your town a little differently, overall there wasn’t any incentive to build again.
The only other complaint I have is the build screen, which can be cumbersome, especially when you need to make large changes to the town. You can only move the cursor for organization as fast as you can run as a character, which especially with keyboard and mouse, just felt too slow. I felt that it would have been easy to make the cursor move faster to make town customization a bit snappier.
Screencapture by @SeanYoungSG on Twitter
Play Littlewood, Seriously!
Honestly, other than what I mentioned above, I have no major complaints about Littlewood. The sound design and musical score by Bashi Boizu were wonderful. The user interface was easy to use and intuitive, and outside of town customization, there was almost nothing that felt like it took too long or was overly burdensome. There were so many little details that I thought were smart, made me laugh or in some cases even made my heart swell. While the game was relatively short, I found this to be a plus because of the quick progression and satisfaction of completion. I think Sean and the team at Smash Games did an amazing job with Littlewood and I hope lots more people get to enjoy this hidden gem’s charm.
Game Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_JxrF3QGBT8&feature=youtu.be
Littlewood is available on: