In Littlewood, the game starts when your character wakes up after having saved the world. You have to build a new town by gathering resources and constructing buildings/decorations for all your existing and new friends. You work at gathering, farming, mining, fishing, bug-catching, merchanting, cooking, even an in-game card game, but no combat. (That is, you can be knocked out by creatures in the forest and mines, but you can't fight them; you just get kicked out of that level for the day.)
The energy/day cycle is unusual: You can spend as long as you like running around without game time really passing, but actions cost energy. When you're getting low on energy, "night falls"; when you run out of energy, either you go home and go to bed, or your next action makes you pass out where you stand, and you wake up the next morning with less energy than usual for the next day.
The inventory system is very easy -- you gather stuff and you have it. No chests! No trashing goods because your backpack is full! This is probably my favorite element.
Crafting/building relies on acquiring "blueprints". Some are gifted to you at certain points; others are bought with "dewdrops" (money), and the "shops" that have many them work on a combination of level-locking and randomness.
Downside 1: Like Stardew Valley (SDV), this is a ... low-res? ... game, in that the art is very blocky. While I love SDV now, I had a very hard time getting into it because I couldn't make out what was going on. My brain has trouble "seeing" shapes and especially actions in games of this style, and that was very much the case for me with Littlewood. I eventually learned how the tree attacks worked, for example, but it definitely took me a while.
Downside 2: Is your biggest complaint about gathering games that there just isn't enough grinding? Do you wish you could spend literal days passing dozens of game-days just collecting wood or stone? If so, this is the game for you! It's not often I have a chance to 100% Steam achievements, but I could for this game ... except the thought of catching that many more fish and bugs, and especially of having to gather about 3000 more each of wood and stone, makes me want to cry. (One NPC occasionally asks what you're doing today and then notes, "They're putting you to work!" Which ... yes, it increasingly feels like work.) Yet now that I've unlocked everything in the game (except probably some obscure wallpapers), that is pretty much all there is to do. Well, that and raising the friendship levels of about 15 more villagers from around 70% to 99%, at about half a percent a game-day ... and let me tell you, we ran out of new conversational topics a long time ago.
There are a few other minor quibbles (the traveler and flower-picking-when-in-your-town mechanisms aren't obvious; I don't like the cooking system) and a few minor positives (the different fundamental objective is charming, the dialogue is amusing before it cycles too many times). It's a nice game, and I spent 67 hours on my first save. I just don't see any need to play it again.
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