Little Big Workshop

Genre: Management Simulation

Players: 1

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Review:

Little Big Workshop is a Management Simulation released in 2019 on PC and ported in 2020 to PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch. This game has players managing a multi-stage workshop constructing goods to sell on a shifting market while managing their layout, workflow, and employees.

The presentation in this game is generally quite good, going with a 3D miniature/toy aesthetic with the game taking place on a tabletop, with the area outside of the play space filled with tubes of paint and art supplies, while the workshop itself sorta’ grows organically out of the table as you construct it, with your workers plopping down out of the sky when you hire them, as if you just dropped a wooden figurine on the table from above only to see it come to life. Add to this a relaxed soundtrack and cute sound effects for everything, and you have a game with a lot of personality.

This game also gets another important element of Management Simulation games right – players have a ton of freedom to choose how to build up their business. Every item that needs to be built requires a multi-stage process, and you can choose which task-appropriate workstation is used for each step of that process. Not long after, you can build out your structure, designate areas for storage or worker breaks, and choose which orders to place based on market demand, price, and the limitations of your own facilities.

There are little things that make a difference here too – make workers walk convoluted paths to get parts from one step of a construction process to the next, and the build time will escalate, costing you more and taking you closer to delivery deadlines than you may like. And you’ll need to keep an eye out for malfunctioning machines, or suffer reduced efficiency when you ignore them.

All of this is wonderful, exactly what I would look for in a game like this. However, there is a major problem here as well – the menus are unintuitive, and trying to find information is a pain. For example, when looking at products you can potentially construct, you can’t see what machines are needed to make the parts, meaning you won’t know if you can actually build those products until you look closer at them upon selecting them to build them… but if you discover they do use machines you don’t have, and exit back out, it takes you out of the menus entirely and forces you to enter back into them after the fact.

However, even worse, I discovered at one point that I bit off a bit more than I could chew with a large product order, and I was going to risk running out of funds before I completed that order. A helpful pop-up came up notifying me that if I ran low on funds I could always sell off some of my stock… but it didn’t explain how to do this, and try as I might looking through my menus I couldn’t find an option to do so.

I ran into multiple confusing moments like these as I played, and it was frustrating because most of the time when playing Little Big Workshop, it’s a delight to be able to control every step of the process of your little business. But every now and then you run into one of these walls where you’re not sure how to do something that the game does a poor job of explaining, and all those great feelings of agency give way to frustration, uncertainty, and helplessness.

Despite this flaw, overall I really enjoyed Little Big Workshop, and with a bit more streamlining (or playing with a FAQ open), this is a really enjoyable Management Simulation that gives players far more freedom to control things than many games in the genre. Just be prepared to find yourself confused and unsure what to do every once in a while.

tl;dr – Little Big Workshop is a Management Simulation where players control a business that builds products in multiple stages and then sells them on the market. This is mostly a delightful entry in the genre that gives players an outstanding level of freedom to choose the direction their business takes. Unfortunately, this is balanced out by an unintuitive interface and numerous moments of confusion due to the game poorly explaining things. However, despite these flaws, this is still a solid entry in the genre well worth playing.

Grade: B

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