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My partner and I ended up finishing this awhile ago. It was very cute, very comfortable! I believe it was adapted from a manga, which I will not likely read or review, but I think this is a simple enough anime for me to do a short review on.

My partner and I have been slowly watching each episode of Mr. Villain’s Day Off and its such a delightfully cozy show… i can’t help but love anime like this. It’s so short though, I don’t wabt it to be over so soon!

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I kinda wanna write a review of baldur’s gate 3 but i’m not really sure it would be that fun or useful as I feel like I’d need to do at least 3 more runs to really feel like I’ve seen enough to have a fully informed opinion, and I’m not entirely sure i’d be able to say anything new that anyone hasn’t already. Like, I can honestly give it a ranking without needing to spend my time writing a review tbh

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Another facet of my discomfort with Willow as a character in Littlewood is the fact that one of Willow’s requirements to 100% her home requests is to have her home placed close to the player’s home. Sure, this is technically optional, but if you want to 100% your save you HAVE to do this. As far as I remember, no other character has this type of home request where they request to be within a certain distance of a specific person, only certain town amenities.

It further makes it feel like the other characters are less important than Willow. And it makes things even more uncomfortable if you dislike Willow for any reason or aren’t attracted to women, or if you marry a different character. I bring it up again because it’s such a strange and unnecessary addition to a lighthearted game where it feels like every romancible character should have an equal shot at the Hero of Solemn. In general I have a pretty strong distaste for games that insist or imply that a particular character is the “right answer” when it comes to romance. Like, if there’s only one objective choice, why make the game have a marriage/romance mechanic at all?

Also it gets in the way in the player’s freedom to design the town as they like. Players usually like making their house stand out from their residents by method of location and natural features. What if I prefer having willow literally anywhere else? What if I want my house to be on a big hill or have a mote away from others for aesthetics/symmetry reasons or have the residents in a simple grid pattern while still fulfilling their other requests?

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Littlewood DLC & Content Update ideas:

I mentioned in my Littlewood review that the game could greatly benefit from a myriad of DLC + content updates. These are some ideas I had in mind if I had the ability: Customization: - Sewing machine furniture item. You can use this machine to craft little hats for your character. The player can unlock hat blueprints by reaching affection level 50 and affection level 99 per villager. Hats would include a party hat, a witch's hat, cowboy hat, crown, hair clips, cat ears, etc. - A permanent upgrade to the clothing shop to unlock new + special wardrobes and hairstyles. Clothing and hairstyles include other characters' clothing, and their hairstyles. - Paintbrush mode. Going into Build Mode and selecting a paintbrush symbol allows the player to go into Paintbrush mode. The player can select different colors and skins of the preexisting flooring, hedges, and fencing town decor. This can allow the player to make their cobblestone ground rainbow colored, and their dirt paths a more rich brown, for a couple examples. Spouse-Related Updates: - Your spouse now has more relevant and character-specific dialogue, and will occasionally ask you questions. (I have only ever married Toby and most of his marriage-specific dialogue is pretty generic, i want to know more about him and have him be even more cat-affectionate!) - Your spouse is no longer imprisoned inside your house. Sometimes they will be outside or visit their own home. Additionally, you can choose to sleep in their bed, too. You also do not need to accommodate for their preferred housing needs any longer if you are married. If you do not complete their house before marriage, you will automatically receive all rewards you would have otherwise after marriage. - Marriage-specific items. After marriage, your spouse can give you special exclusive furniture and outdoor decor blueprints. Various Added Content: - You can "hang out" with pets and they can follow you around. They don't give you extra dewdrops or bonus items when working, but they can make cute little meowing/barking sounds! You can also choose for one to stay indoors inside your home. Villagers also occasionally talk about your pets. They have more generic dialogue about your kitties and dogs, but the exotic pets have unique dialogue. - Decorative rock formations and ponds, which attract lily pads, golden frogs, yucky goo, and occasionally light fairies. The pond has little lightning bugs floating around it at night. - I think it would be too much to add content including going to the underworld, but perhaps having SOME use for the Edge of Solemn would be good? One idea is that you can use your fishing rod to fish up unique fish, bugs, and special items from the depths. - Pet Shows and various Animal Contests - A Harvest Moon/SOS Staple, You can enter an animal for a pet/dog/cow/chicken/sheep show and you get rewards based on how high your affection with each are. Rewards include themed wallpapers, flooring, furniture items, and a golden animal statue, which can just be for aesthetic or make it so that you consistently get ribbons as a bonus item. That's all off the top of my dome!

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My partner and I have been slowly watching each episode of Mr. Villain’s Day Off and its such a delightfully cozy show… i can’t help but love anime like this. It’s so short though, I don’t wabt it to be over so soon!

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Littlewood Review - July 18, 2024

Developer: Sean Young | Publisher: SmashGames

I'm a lover of farm and lifesim games. I first played this a few years ago on Switch in between a move- I was transferring colleges and living with my parents, and had to spend a whole summer living at my older sister's home in the middle of bumfuck nowhere while waiting for our new home to finish being built. I am a completionist at heart, and this game was light enough to complete without wasting my life and chill enough to listen to some video essays or watch some shows while I did it. Now it's 2024, so I decided to give it another go. Let's dive into what Littlewood is about, why I love it, and why I find it underrated... but far from perfect.

What It's About:

This game is an extremely lighthearted, chill, and cozy world directly an apocolyptic scenario where you, the hero of Solemn, have single-handedly defeated an evil dark wizard. The world is saved but fragmented, and everyone knows who you are... except for you. You see, you lost all of your memories of the battle before and you no longer have any of your magical powers or your trusty sword. So what do you do when you no longer have any ultimate goal and the world is broken apart? Well, build a new home, of course! Two of your trusty, ragtag friends and a warm fatherly figure from before your lost your memories are here to help you start your new life as a mayor of sorts for your town in which you will reside, grow, care for, and customize to your heart's content. The Game: I'd say this game is like a lite and easy-to-digest version of games like Animal Crossing (New Leaf and New Horizons, to be specific) and Stardew Valley, but it has its own identity and unique mechanics that stand out from other "cozy family-friendly farmsims" on the market. The main mechanic that I find a breath of fresh air compared to real-time progression and set in-game clocks is Littlewood's time system. All of your choices in the game are revolved around actions that take energy to use, and you have set amount of energy to spend each day. The amount of energy you spend fishing, cooking, gathering, crafting- almost everything in the game, in fact- progresses the time and once you have completely depleted all of your energy in the day, the day ends. As the leader of your town, you are free to do virtually whatever you want and whenever you want, so the player is incentivized make all of their energy spent per day feel worth it. As mentioned, the player can do a myriad of things such as watering and collecting flowers, picking weeds, talking and hanging out with townsfolk, getting closer to them, growing crops, mining ores, chopping wood, creating furniture, catching bugs, upgrading their town amenities, and even (later on) playing a card mini-game that's easy to understand but takes a bit of practice to master. Progression in Littlewood, I'd say, strongly involves growth of the town amenities and making your little villagers happy. By talking to your villagers and making their homes more comfortable, they will incrimentally provide you more blueprints and unlockable tools and items that are critical for you to make money ('dewdrops') and increase you rate and efficiency of the things you produce or catch, such as building materials, crops, fish, and bugs- all that you can use to get even more dewdrops or craft furniture, homes and buildings. As per the nature of these type of cozy games, there isnt a very primary goal that you're encouraged to reach or complete. By naturally engaging with the game you will come across most of the villagers you can unlock eventually. But this game is really great for people that want to catch EVERY bug, breed EVERY variety of flower, and donate EVERYTHING they can to complete their museum for no reason but the satisfaction of seeing a job completed. The Positives: If you want a comfortable game to kill an afternoon or hunker down in bed with every now and then, i'd be hard-pressed to find something as cozy and easy to pick up and put down than Littlewood. The gameplay is stupid simple (did I mention you only really needs three buttons and a d-pad to play this game? So it's extremely accessible), and the collection aspect can get pretty addictive, especially when each day ends with a barrage of exp being gifted to you for all the work you did and all of the affection meters for the villagers you've interacted with that day shooting up.

The setting isnt super unique, but the way in which the world is introduced to you incrementally is something I wish more cozy games did- I love that the world is broken up in such a way that the major mode of transportation is by hot air balloons, I love the quirky characters you can find, I love the lore about the world you can unlock through books and little pieces of conversation, and I just adore the tiny itty bitty sprites. Animals look so tiny and adorable you want to pop them in your mouth like tic-tacs, and the character profile sprites are expressive and a joy to see. Each character also has their own unique 2-frame animation. And like I said, there's plenty of things to upgrade and collect.

The Negatives: The game doesnt really give you much reason to pay attention to what the characters are saying to you. My biggest problems with this era of "cozy" games is that I feel like sometimes writing and character development is left to die in a ditch, and you can sort of feel that in Littlewood. Yes, each villager is charming and cute and have their own quirks and personalities, but theyre all so extremely 2 dimensional that it's hard to really feel anything for most of them. But this is kind of a big deal when you're playing this game blind for the first time- because the characters actually occasionally tell you very important information! In my first playthrough, I got several hours into the game (almost giving up) before getting some really helpful tools that are intrinsically tied with building a desk in your villagers' houses and accommodating their home requests- especially the beginning handfuls of characters you recruit to your town. I feel like if the tools are going to be tied to making your villagers furniture, it should be made way more clear, and the things the characters say to you should be more engaging so you're not just mashing through everything they say. Additionally, due to the lackluster writing combined the entire setup of the game- you being the Solemn's savior- leads everyone to just put you on a pedestal and stroke your ego all the time for something you never did (in game). You can never do anything wrong and you're automatically cool and attractive and amazing to everyone, no matter what. It kind of makes romancing characters feel extremely forced and imbalanced, like many characters are only interested in you because you're the Hero of Solemn. One really important aspect of this I want to discuss is with one NPC in particular that sours the whole game for me SO much that i will actually mash through their dialogue or intentionally ignore them outside of completing tasks... maybe I should say her. It's Willow, I'm talking about Willow. Now, im sorry for all of those out there that may actually really like Willow. But the game strongly communicates that the player and Willow were in love before the game began. It makes talking to her when you're not particularly interested in her in the first place really awkward, and even moreso when you're much more interested in ANY of the other characters over her. It'd be one thing if it was just coming from her, but Dalton and Dudley also frequently bring it up and it's really distracting and uncomfortable. And even though i'm bisexual, i (usually) tend to favor bachelors in games whenever there's any sort of romancing element, so it adds another layer of uncomfortability in an otherwise cutesy-cozy-soft-power-fantasy game. I wish that the developer instead just made it so she had a crush on the hero before losing their memories or something, because my mind cannot help but think about how devastating it would be if my partner were to lose all of their memories and wake up one day with them marrying someone else and forgetting everything about me and the things we did together. It's not that I absolutely hate the idea, but with a game of this tone, it really puts an awkward damper on what is normally a fun self-indulgent mechanic. Willow having had a romantic history with the main character prior to the game up until the moment they lost their powers makes the player feel guilty for not choosing her, and makes the player's choice to marry anyone but her feel less "meaningful" as a result. Maybe that’s just me, but it really feels mismatched with the purpose of the game. Additional Thoughts: I really think this game would benefit significantly from even a minor update or DLC. There are a couple tiny graphical bugs on Switch (doors open for some reason, and you can really easily go OOB in the town hall) but there's honestly a lot more that can be added to add in more customizeability to the player and the town, but I can make a whole separate post on what I think would make for GREAT Littlewood DLC (and I probably will)! Personal Rating: B

💚 Unique time-progression system

💚 Chill, cozy collectible game.

🚫 Interesting lore, but too little of it shared or explored

🚫 Villagers are pretty one-note, any depth they have is left unexplored, and they all put the player on the pedestal so it makes interacting with them sometimes uncomfortable if you think about it for a little too long.

🚫 Important Tools and QOL features should be tied to other systems, not how comfy or aesthetically pleasing your villagers's homes are.

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