Video Game Review: Littlewood

I first heard Littlewood described as "Stardew Crossing" and though "hey, I'd enjoy that!" The premise of the great battle of good and evil is over, it's time to rebuild, is an idea I have had before and I always like to see my ideas made real with no effort on my part. So when I saw it I was happy enough to jump on it as something I knew I'd love.

Good things

Peaceful

I love the original harvest moon and many of the derivitives. I also greatly enjoyed Stardew Valley and plan to replay it. However the combat in the later harvest moons, and Stardew Valley I found to be an annoying little side thing and not adding much of interest. While I'm sure I'm over stating that as certain parts of SdV are indeed made interesting by the presence of hostile mobs, the fact that there is no combat in littlewood is kind of refreshing. Not to say there isn't adversity in certain locations. Both the mines and the enchanted wood contain mobs of some sort that provide a little bit of interest in these locations. But you cannot attack them for the most part. Meaning these could be environmental just as easily as they are monsters. As a result this game has a very hard focus on "chill" and being peaceful and relaxing. Litltewood may never have your heart racing, but that is totally the point.

Reasons for furniture in people's houses

With a lot of games, like Terraria, there is rarely a reason for decorating people's homes. Littlewood managed to provide good motivation for decorating people's homes. Each NPC has a set of requests in three tiers, each tier consisting of 5 requests. This results in 15 objects or constraints that you get to arrange in and around their house. Some are items like a specific bed, others are locations like being near some one's house or a certain building. It adds a lot to the game both for how you decorate people's houses and how you layout your town.

Stamina Alone

Unlike the Harvest Moon decendents Littlewood does not have stamina and time, rather it has just stamina, which dictates the time of day. This is nice because it means you can make as many trips as you one to various locations because you forgot an item or something. It goes well with the games "chill" design goal. And it means you rarely miss an event due to time of day, as the time of day is entirely dependant on your stamina usage, so you just need to make a note of how much stamina you need to use before your event.

Hanging out with Friends

A neat mechanic that they haven't explored much is the ability to ask a friend to hang out. When you ask a friend to hang out they follow you around until you go to bed (awkwardly abandoning them in your house) or until you dismiss them. In practicality it's just a way to curry favor. I would love to see this mechanic explored more. Perhaps certain locations are only open if you are hanging out with a friend. NPCs say different things if you are hanging out with some one. Things like that.

Market

Better than the generic box in the Harvest moon game, Littlewood had a market in which you could slowly sell 8-24 items a day. This means you can't just dump a massive harvest all at once.

Improvable things

Inconsequential re-arraging

When I design things in minecraft I have to be careful about what I do because it is a lot of work to move a building in minecraft. You basically have to rebuild the entire thing. In Littlewood you can re-arrange things at will. I understand that a lot of games have this, and I am disappointed with how easy it is to do in Stardew Valley. It encourages you to try things and see how it will work. But with low consequnce can come low meaning. I didn't really bother really thinking about the arragnement of things because it was easy enough to just move it later if I changed my mind.

This is notable with houses, but most notable with plants like trees. There are some trees that grow, but the fruit tress plant and immediately producing fruit. Trees that have grown already can be moved without loosing their growth. For my taste it is just to easy, but that is entirely subjective.

Arbitrary limits on objects

For purely gameification reasons you can only have x number of items like crops and fruit trees. You can increase the number with policy changes in the town hall, but that just highlights the gameification to me. This is probably the Harvest Moon player in me balking, I've not actually played animal crossing so maybe this is the norm there. It just seemed annoying to me.

No modding support (yet)

A lot of the things I am complaining about in this post are personal flavors. I'd rather play in a slightly different way. These could be aliviated by having modding support. I have done like wise in Stardew Valley, increased the difficult in some way and in other ways made it easier. There is no modding support for this game and there doesn't appear to be plans to include such so far as I can tell. I understand that small team like SmashGames only has so much time to work on things. But modding support adds a lot to a game, it shouldn't be an afterthought. It is literally free content for your game.

Stamina Alone

As much as I like the lack of time separate from stamina in this game, it does change a lot of the character of the game. There were regularly times in the game where I would go to the lumber mill and spend the entire day, several days in a row, making lumber. My day would just zip by in an instant. In a game like Harvest moon if you burn your stamina immediately you would be incentivized to go out into town and talk to people and forage or something. Inversely if you wanted to save stamina for the end of the day for some reason you could in Harvest Moon, again not so in Little wood. You are always tired in the evening because the evening comes when you are tired.

Predictable woods

Littlewood's enchanted forest and mine suffer from the minecraft problem. The fact that everything is random means nothing matters. Every visit to the forest is different, but none of them are notable. This made the forest and the mine honestly quite boring. If it were me I would have made a forest that is just a little to big to explore all of it but with the possibility out there. This would encourage the exploration to find all of the potentially predetermined item drops in the forest. It would be nice also if the other locations on the world map were not available for fast travel until you've worked you way to them via the forest.

No inventory management

Your inventory is unlimited in this game. This means I never had to care what was in it. Which meant I never knew what was in my inventory. I just had everything which also meant I could horde everything, again meaning that getting items was relatively meaningless. When you are forced to decide whether or to chuck an item because you are out of inventory space it forces you to decide what items are worth having.

Conclusion

Overall I liked Littlewood but I walked away feeling like it was unfulfilled. I feeling I have certainly had with many of the games I have tried to make. So I'm certainly far from being able to say with authority what's wrong, but I know I can feel that there is something a miss. We'll see how it looks in a year or two since basically all games get constant updates these days. They have a great base, I'd love to see it expanded just a little more. I'd like to see more challenge, but again, that's more my flavor, the whole point of this game is that it's relaxing, not challenging.