Littlewood Review (EchoEcho)
Littlewood is pretty grindy from the get-go, and doesn’t really improve 5 hours in. While it’s a cozy simulation game, somewhere in between Animal Crossing and Stardew Valley, it feels too spread out with limited dialogue options and too much accessibility early on. For example, the terraforming feature in Animal Crossing: New Horizons recontextualizes the game by being doled out much later in your playthrough, so you have an appreciation for coming back daily and slowly building your island. In Littlewood, you can fast travel from any area back to your house, meaning when you aren’t progressing at 200% speed, you aren’t appreciating the game very much. While I was kind of into how I could “optimize” my gameplay moving so fast, it got progressively less exciting as I felt I had seen everything despite not playing most of what it had to offer. After 40 in-game days of grinding and menuing, I’m pretty fatigued by it and by the lifeless characters who only have maybe three things to say.
Perhaps what makes Littlewood feel more like a grind than other simulation games is its unclear and sparse sense of progression. Whereas Animal Crossing: New Horizons and Stardew Valley reward or sell you ways to operate more efficiently, at the end of each day in Littlewood a screen showing you all of your skill growth lets you know that Mining is now level 20, Fishing is now level 17, and so on. However, for the most part, these levels don’t matter. They don’t make you faster at acquiring resources and they don’t enable special power-ups. Another resident might send you a measly amount of money every five levels, and you might get a reward at level 30 for a couple of skills, but everything under that is just so the player can get a tired dopamine hit at the end of the day when they watch a progression bar.
Lastly, it’s not clear what you could or should be doing at a given time. The game does not offer any way to track the quests you have or what materials you need to be constantly upgrading everything in your town. In fact, all this game wants from you is to be constantly upgrading your town, but it does no work to set you up for success. It is a materials-gathering sim set in a town full of one-note characters with little else attached to it. As soulless as Animal Crossing: New Horizons was, at least it had the training wheels on long enough to help you learn how to play and appreciate its systems. Littlewood is dull and unfinished from the start and from what I can tell, it doesn’t get any better.