Littlewood: An Informal Review

I’m somewhat a connoisseur of cozy slop games. Ever since I played Harvest Moon (since renamed to Story of Seasons—don’t play games with me, kid) and Rune Factory via emulator in middle school, I’ve been trying to recapture the high of these Precious Moments looking baby farmer things. I followed Stardew Valley since long before it was published, and when it came out (though it was very impressive as a project and certainly fun) I wasn’t fully down with its aesthetic. Since it blew up, there have been so many takes on the formula that preteen me wouldn’t have had to download sketchy apps on my phone to scratch my itch, but a lot of them are lazy and sloppy and skirt by on there being now a massive audience for what have become known as “cozy games”. My favorite entry in the genre (far from being slop) is Fields of Mistria, but it’s in early access and PC-only, which means I can’t play it on my coral Switch Lite. So I was in the market and found a game which, though its premise doesn’t do that much for me, is so impressive on the level of UX that it made me think about what I want out of game UX more generally.

Littlewood, like (if I may make the comparison) Not Another D&D Podcast, is a game after the game: you saved the world from an evil wizard and retired with your party to a quiet village, but you wake up and have amnesia. Then you just progress this sleepy village by logging, mining, fishing, creating, building, and (only after a few days—one appreciates the developer holding off) farming. Everything I’ve described thus far, in and of themselves, is passable. The premise isn’t particularly enrapturing for me but neither does it factor much into the game except when your party members recount stories of your campaign that you apparently forgot. The base activities are all bog-standard for the genre, which isn’t so much a complaint since I seek this shit out. It’s definitely cuter than Stardew Valley without being coquette or grotesque, and it’s really nice that I can decorate/rearrange my villagers’ homes off the bat and that doing so is an essential part of the base game (AHEM). And I’m only a few days into the game, so I keep getting surprised by what features are hiding in its various little niches.

But what really distinguishes Littlewood is its UX, because it accomplishes for its genre something I strive for in most of my own efforts: it reduces the cozy village game to its pure structure. You don’t have a toolbar because your action is assumed based on what object you’re interacting with, provided you have the appropriate tool: if you possess an axe, you can chop down trees; if you possess a pickaxe, you can mine rocks; if you possess a fishing rod, you can fish; if you possess a bug net, you can catch bugs (and it’s neat because bugs are stationary except, if you try and fail to catch them, they move over 1 square). You build things in the village using a separate game mode; the build mode interface could be improved, but I appreciate how this simplifies the main walking-around portion of the game. Rather than managing a stamina bar throughout the day, and rather than getting rid of it altogether, your stamina is represented by the passage of time: this means time only passes as you use stamina, and night time means you’re fully spent. Though Littlewood could benefit from more content, and I think this is the major complaint from others who’ve played, how it refines the experience of the cozy game is simply so good.

This kind of UX design is what I strive for in most of my efforts, whether digital with Resourciv or analog with Cinco. I think sometimes we think of reducing game design with respect to content, and less so when it comes to structure; then we attribute cruft to the former instead of the latter. Every axis of interaction should be interrogated, I think. Wasn’t it silly that Animal Crossing: New Horizons introduced a “toolbelt” to quick-access tools instead of checking for the presence of an axe when interacting with a tree (prompting the user: do you want to collect fruit or cut it down?) or a shovel when interacting with a rock? Would Fields of Mistria, where you generally are only going to build in one plot of land, not also benefit from a separate build mode to simplify how you interact with the game in other contexts? Isn’t it annoying in Civilization when you move a unit but they have movement points leftover? Do hit points in D&D really do that much for us when we’re looking at sufficiently significant quantities structured the same at different levels? Couldn’t Daggerheart have cut a few layers of damage calculation when addressing that very question? Littlewood is the perfect game for me to pick up and play because it’s so intuitive and straightforward. More games should be like Littlewood.

Also shoutout to Polytopia which accomplishes this same feat in a strategy game context, though I think rather than feeling perfectly complete in its streamlined design, it invites questions of how one might reintroduce axes of complexity: which ones are worthwhile, and how can they be handled intuitively without becoming a convoluted mess.