Littlewood is a fun little time waster that works perfectly on the Steam Deck. It’s a simple resource gathering and crafting game where you get resources, turn them into materials and build a village. There is no combat, time limit or any other type of stressful component. The more you advance in the story the more villagers will come to your village - all with their own demands and cute little story lines. Don’t expect much depth or some crazy writing out of this, but it is a very laid-back and chill experience that works both in small bursts or longer sessions. The main story can be completed in around 15 hours, but going for 100% completion and villager satisfaction will take a lot longer. The presentation is cute with its reduced and colorful pixel art style and relaxed music and sound effects. The best thing about this game is the fully terraformable village. You can not only place buildings, vegetation and decorations to your liking but also put streets, paths, mountains, rivers, ponds wherever you like without restrictions. Changing things up is easily achievable without wasting precious resources or materials. So, if you are a creative person, you can really dive deep into creating your ultimate fantasy town. Or just appreciate the many amazing creations in the Steam Community.

A cute little stardew-style game where as well as the typical farming game activities, you're building up the town and laying it out for the townsfolk.
While I did describe it as a 'stardew-style' game, I'd say the focus is much less on farming and is instead spread across all aspects, from fishing to mining to woodcutting, etc... quite evenly

While I did enjoy Littlewood as a relaxing experience, I will say it tends to get quite repetitive, as you spend most of your time walking around town to see what buildings can be upgraded and then gathering the required resources, and fulfilling townsfolk house requirements. I wouldn't say this terribly affected my experience, and if you want something super chill and really simple then this would be great for you.

I haven't 100%'d the game, and I probably won't play a ton more than I already have, but I do see myself coming back from time to time, so maybe one day.

There's a great variety of systems but all of them lack depth. It's fun to spend one in game day farming, then foraging the next day, then mining, then bug catching, then fishing, then decorating the town, then fulfilling villager requests, then cooking, then crafting, and finally playing a card game. However, any time I tried doing the same thing in game for just three days in a row I was just reminded of how simple each individual mechanic is. As long as you force yourself to play with variety it's a fun time.

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.

i really enjoyed this game for about 6 hours and then stopped.
the smartest thing it does is give you a little level up screen at the end of each day so you have lots of dings to help you feel motivated. i also kind of liked the plot - the hero has vanquished the great evil, the monsters are all gone, and now it's time to rebuild.
buuutttt it lacks polish (no controller support? clunky menus). it should have been about half the length: NPC dialogue starts to repeat heavily, building tiers are resource intensive yet give little benefit in return. the reward curve starts to drag around midgame. it really could use some quality of life features, like wishlists, or pointing out who you still need to talk to each day, or better reminders of when town wishes refresh.
it's not a bad game. it's right up my alley, and i enjoyed the time i spent with it. it just needed to be a bit better in order for me to get to the finish line.

Very cute, but seems to get quite repetitive, too repetitive. After I recently came back to an old file, I quickly realized there was a ton to do. The goal felt locked behind a ton of grinding. To get time to progress, you have to be doing something or else the time will stay the same forever. This could be considered a plus or minus depending on who you talk to, but I don’t really like this system (other than the fact you have a chance to go home and sleep rather quickly).

But I suppose the game is a nice little time waster or mindless game to play otherwise

After years of playing it on and off during a decent number of podcasts I finally consider my goals finished.

I love the look and the customization of my little town. The goals for each character are fun to pursue while decorating and finding the best place that fits your style and their preferences. I think the characters are also really charming and fun to interact with.

At some point I'd say things get a bit grindy, especially considering some of the RNG involved with rarer items, but I think every cozy-style game reaches the point sooner or later. My only real disappointment is that they do build up a background plot and never really conclude it, so reaching the final area left me with an empty feeling.

Littlewood is a fairly enjoyable life sim game. The gameplay is engaging, each in-game day I was asking “What to do today?”, the progression system is straightforward, you can chop wood, mine rocks farm crops or fruit from trees, fish, catch bugs, craft, and even play a card mini-game. The characters are likeable and memorable. You can customize your town, and decorate houses. And there are useful items you’ll uncover as you progress, such as an OP item that gives you infinite stamina basically. Speaking of stamina, the time flows differently, instead of just ticking down like normal, your actions will decrease the available time, which means you can do a consistent amount of stuff per day, which is pretty unique. Sounds like great time, right? Well… kinda. I do think the game is good, but I also feel it has one fatal flaw.

I think the game is severely lacking in replayability and content. I’m going with an obvious comparison here, Stardew Valley. With Littlewood, I can’t imagine my new playthroughs playing much differently, or sticking with the game for much longer. I would still fix up the town, max my skills, unlock other locations, and so on. The ONLY thing I can imagine being different is a marriage candidate, but at that point I’d rather just backup my save instead of starting over. What’s different about Stardew Valley? Well, for one, there’s simply MUCH more content and depth. The game is more sizeable in terms of the number of areas, activities, and is filled with secrets that I have yet to uncover, and I’ve player around 70 hours of that game (as of writing this). In comparison, I’ve played about 50 hours of Littlewood, and unlocked roughly 90% of the game’s content, and I have all but two achievements. It isn’t just about content. Stardew Valley gives you more replay value by offering different farms you can start on, making the game fresh. Lastly, modding, baybeeeeee. Now, modding isn’t necessary to make your game insanely replayable, I played hundreds of hours of Rune Factory 4 on both 3DS and Switch without any mods, which is a testament to its fun factor, but I do think modding is a nice extra that can breath new life into games. I really think the devs should’ve stuck with Littlewood for longer, maybe add a few new things, or aforementioned modding support for the fans to do the dirty work, instead of going straight to the sequel. At least there's hope that the sequel will be bigger, faster, and stronger too.

In the end though, I do still think Littlewood is an enjoyable enough game. It may not be as content rich, but it's simple, and it’ll still provide many hours of fun content. That is, if you don’t mind some repetition. I can recommend this.

Feels more deterministic than Stardew; it's certainly less complicated. That's not a knock on either game, it just sort of depends on what you are going for. For me this let me kill about 40 hours when I needed something simple and relatively mindless to do and it scratched that itch.

Also: this was not something I needed from this game, but I ended up playing it entirely one-handed (left hand on keyboard). If that's an accommodation that you or someone you know looks for from a game, definitely put this one on your list.