Littlewood
Released: August 4, 2020
Game Length: 30 Hours
Grade: A
Development: When it comes to finding the right game, I tend to look at the video game's history. A developer by the name of Sean Young started this little Kickstarter Project back in January 2019. He continued updating the game while it was in Early Access and officially released it in August 2020. There were some major changes in the following weeks with Update 1.01 & 1.02 and then complete silence. I had worried a little that the game was considered abandoned at this point. However, the reviews were decent enough and the $15 price tag was a pretty good deal. I figured, "Why not?"
Gameplay Phases
Early Game: When I first played this game, everything was awesome and new. There was a lot to discover and plenty of things to unlock. You slowly recruited people from all over to your little town. Each one unlocked their own house to add. After adding decorations to their associated tastes within their one-room house, they would provide you with a blueprint that established another thing you could play around with. Growth was essential at this stage of the game. Every single item, right down to the amount of dirt you used for your roads, required some sort of material. There would be ways to gather each specific reagent from several different locations. This required to expend a certain amount of energy. The game was fair that every action cost the same, with some things like watering plants and buying items not expending any energy at all. You could also break down anything and everything to retrieve a 100% return on the materials used. One thing I did not know right away was the lightning sword tool that could be used to automatically break down all of a particular type of item in your town. Everything was documented - the desk told you what the people wanted in their house, the journal told you want material you needed to sell at the marketplace for specific travelers, categories for important and useful structures, and silhouettes of ingredients to determine what cooking recipes you still needed to make.
Mid-Game: By the time you unlock most of the locations and establish all of your buildings, the game becomes pretty open-ended. The thing to become aware at this point is to not do everything at once. You can only upgrade the total amount of energy 9 times at the office, and it will never be enough. There is no physical time limit. It will always get dark when your energy is running low. Your goal is dependent on what you feel like doing. Do you want to cross-pollinate flowers? Do you want to try and beat the elite 5 to a card game? Why not decorate your town with roads, hills, lakes, trees, and fences? Ultimately, the idea here is to get all your skills up to level 50 to retrieve the chests and level 60 to unlock the final landscape areas. The various spots that require dewdrops should be completely unlocked at this point.
Endgame: As much as you enjoyed unlocking your town, all things must come to an end. This is where the game falters depending on your expectations. You see, gathering all 24 books from the travelers to unlock that one last location does nothing. The place is essentially a tourist trap. Your only reward is the ability to skip between the seasons and a cape that makes you invisible. You do not get any grand reward for placing all the artifacts in the museum or unlocking every cooking recipe. The higher-end options - expanding the borders of your town, buying various clothing options, or collecting pets - were always out of my reach. Once you obtain the "unlimited dewdrops" perk from reaching level 99 cooking, nothing really mattered anymore. The credits officially roll the moment you get married, even though you can still unlock more decorations after-the-fact.
Summary
Opinion: The game prioritizes unlocking things, does a decent job when it comes to decorating, and lacks substance when it comes to the story. The amount of content was more than I originally expected. The problem lies with how my previous expectations weren't met. I expected the ability to build custom houses for random travelers with all those extra decorations we obtain and the paintbrush to add color to more than your own home. I wanted the inside of each house to be bigger and the option to rotate more than just chairs. The limited borders of your town prevented any sort leeway for landscape aesthetics. It was just enough to fit every single building, decoration, and tool. Although the limited energy annoyed me at first, I soon grew to understand the design choice. I would have appreciated more dialogue or a better "friendship" system outside complimented, flirting, and dating people. However, the ability and bonuses you receive to hang-out with people is quite enjoyable in its own right.
Review: Littlewood most definitely is an oddball. The experience of unlocking new features and building a town full of people is an enjoyable one. There are plenty of interesting additions that one might not expect to find, like the ability to cross-pollinate flowers and play a decently-developed monster card game. The game fully-documents what is required of you every step of the way with posters reminding you of what days things change, a journal listing the requirements of travelers, and what things that need to be addressed for each person living in your town. The gameplay cycle is short but a fair one. You can build an abundance of features, move absolutely anything, or destroy with a full refund of material value. Music is decent enough, but can get repetitive when your gameplay loop extends longer than the song lasts. The only issues I encountered were restraining decorating options and the strangeness of proper results of finally reaching the end of your fruits of labor. In any case, $15 is an extremely nice deal for a game I played for 30 hours.
3-11-2022