Littlewood

I love it! It's a cozy game I love coming back to. My only gripe with it is that it's very apparent you hit a "late game" where there's nothing much left to do, which is why I take breaks with the game and come back after a while with a fresh save to do the grind all over again. Also, character customization isn't very good, so don't expect to have a very unique character. You'll get about 20 hours of gameplay out of it, and it really is fun to come back to, because you can choose a difference romance path and have a whole different town layout/decoration if you choose to. If you liked Forager and you enjoyed Animal Crossing, you'll like this game!

A grindy, unforgiving wiki game. The town feels way too crowded for what it asks you accommodate. The upgrade progression makes no sense, to expand your town requires large sums of endgame-tier money. The midgame tier upgrades with the workshop allow you to get ridiculously OP permanent buffs like every dish at the tavern being perfect, 100% double planks, etc. 99 Cooking sorta just sunsets the need for money ever again, as all dishes become worth 999 dewdrops each. You are given ~15 villagers that you have to work on fitting all of them into town like puzzle pieces, all while meeting their needs (each of their homes being set near certain places of interest, etc). It is extremely difficult management and very unforgiving with the upgrades. Not to mention the game keeps you consistently broke by asking for your money and resources for various buildings around town. The game starts out really rough around the edges. At the start, you're not really given tutorials on how to do anything. I think that cooking ended up being the most daunting to me, and now, even though I know how it works, I still think it's awful. If you load it up with the ingredients for the stuff for the outcome you want, it will seemingly make them at random, leaving you to have to put only 2 items in at a time, which is extremely tedious. It could benefit if you could just select what you are trying to make, but as it stands is awful. There are no in-game tutorials on HOW to cook or what goes in any of the cooking stations, that I was made aware of at least. There's a daily hint of a new recipe that really didn't help me much. I ended up having to look up a wiki of all the recipes, and even then, cooking still isn't fun due to the UI. Acquisition of fruits and veggies is unnecessarily brutal. You're missing 1 or 2 fruit trees or vegetables? Good luck. The game could easily go on for years (in-game time) before you eventually stumble upon them. This is because you cannot forage them in the wild, and shop inventory is complete randomized. I think I was year 3, checking the general store and deluca every single day, before eventually getting a Crescent Moon. At which point I had already pretty much finished the game by then, with 99 Gathering, rendering it a minor convenience by that point, for museum and whatnot. Speaking of the museum, curse the stupid flower room. Flower breeding mechanics should not have been mandatory. The game's achievements boil down to doing the same actions thousands of times. As you progress in levels, you unlock new areas for mining and foraging, but the layout doesn't change, They're just copy/pasted, essentially giving you more of the same resources, not new experiences. This lack of a real reward for progression felt very underwhelming. Getting to level 60 just to see that it's the same area as last time. Gameplay elements feel a bit OP. From being able to use build mode as a fast travel, to having a golden watch that lets your days run infinitely, to having a statue that doubles or triples market value for your items, it all just seems a bit cheaty. I would have much preferred being able to sell more items at once on the market, as opposed to fish and weeds being worth absurd amounts of money. Unlocking the last area in the game requires you to tediously acquire all 24 library books, and for some reason that's not even win game condition, marriage is. I like having total creative freedom over the town. I think that's a really neat detail. Passing out and waking up where you fell asleep is nice. "Unlimited" time (in the sense that action = time passed) is a breath of fresh air as well. I still feel like actions move time along too quickly. On a bad day, you could fly through more than half the day just picking up veggies and fruits from your garden. Overall I would give this game about a 5.5/10. I don't hate it, but I can see that it's very shallow and the compelling factor is to just keep the player grinding away. I'm making a positive review because I love the atmosphere of this game, I just feel like the gameplay makes it hard to stay comfy.