Did you ever wonder what happens to games after they’ve finished? How does the hero live his day to day life once they finished their grand quest? Well, Littlewood is attempting to provide an answer.
Funded through Kickstarter in January of this year, Littlewood has finally been released on Steam as an Early Access title on June 18. The release was announced on May 10 on Littlewood creator Sean Young’s Twitter account.
Littlewood’s main calling card is that it’s “A Peaceful RPG”. Set in the world of Solemn, you play as the hero who has just defeated the Dark Wizard and brought peace throughout the land. After returning home, the hero is left with a world filled with clumps of rocks, trees, and shrubs. Your new goal is to rebuild and repopulate the mess into a quaint little town.
According to its Kickstarter page, Littlewood's influences range from Animal Crossing, to Dark Cloud and 2007 Runescape. It can be described as a mixture of sandbox, RPG, and city-building simulation games. Visually, the game is very cute. The Animal Crossing influence is evident, but not so much that Littlewood loses its identity. Before the game released, screenshots of its gameplay actually took me back to the Gameboy Pokémon days, just with more color and life.
Gameplay wise, Littlewood plays like a standard RPG. Players have multiple skills that can learned and leveled up, such as Mining, Cooking and Crafting. Decision-making also plays a small part, as the buildings you unlock and your town's growth depends on the people you meet and your villagers’ requests.
Banished is a game that I played that holds some resemblance to Littlewood, at least with its gameplay. In Banished, players are in charge of building a town from scratch, with just the banished townsfolk as the main resource in the beginning. Players assign jobs and gather resources until the townsfolk thrive and become self-sustaining. One thing that sets Littlewood apart is its feature to flesh the game out further by adding the ability for players to converse and build relationships with different townsfolks and travelers.
Littlewood is available to play on PC, macOS and SteamOS+Linux. Listed below are the minimum requirements:
- OS: Windows XP, Vista, 7, 8/8.1, 10
- Processor: 2.0 Ghz
- Memory: 1 GB RAM
- Graphics: 256mb Video Memory, capable of OpenGL 2.0+ support
- Storage: 1 GB available space
- Sound Card: Any
