“Even if this wasn't my fate, I’d still choose to be with you. ”
My taste in video games has always been… esoteric if I’ll be honest. Sure I enjoy a lot of the simple stuff like some platformers, or a fun first person shooter, but lately as my gaming palette has expanded, I find myself adoring the more strange and out there stuff. I’ve always been of the mindset that I’d rather play a game, try something new and fail, then do something safe, but it is boring because of it. This is where Little Goody Two Shoes comes in, a game recommended by my good friend Mirai, and one that I’ve had my eye on for quite awhile. Everything about it just seemed to scream strange and weird, and its art style immediately drove me in. Deciding it was finally the time, I booted it up and was met with one of the most Susie made games of all time.
Two Shoes places you in the shoes (heh) of Elise, a young woman who resides in the town of Kieferberg. Life is rather boring for Elise, and she dreams for something more, a life where she’s rich and powerful, a life away from her town, but she knows that this will never happen, and has grown to accept the dull monotony of the life she lives now. Things begin to get weird though when she encounters a girl known as Rozenmarie, as her appearance seems to cause a bunch of other weird things to happen, including a presence haunting Elise simply calling itself Him. He promises Elise whatever wish she desires as long as she grants His desires. Wishing for a better life, Elise sets out to fulfill whatever this demon wants, no matter what the cost may be. It’s… pretty simple plot wise, but Two Shoes really had me invested just due to how strange everything gets. I’ve always been a sucker for stories that involve witchcraft and dark rituals, and Little Goody Two Shoes does this extremely well, making you collect objects in order to please an evil spirit. You aren’t given too much info about Him, but it’s enough to make you really curious just what this presence is, and I found myself not wanting to put the game down just to find out more info about this evil being. On top of that, the cast of Little Goody Two Shoes is great, there’s a lot of dates that you can go on with 3 different girls and it’s amazing finding out everything about them, having me genuinely grow and feel for them, making whatever incoming despair happens hurt all the most. This is also backed by one of the most beautiful art styles I’ve ever seen, seriously this game is just gorgeous. It feels so much like an old storybook my parents would have read to me, or an old obscure anime OVA, it’s really striking, and the various cutscenes that happen throughout just look spectacular, it made me forget I was playing a game at certain points. All of this blends together to create a wonderful feeling experience, and it’s backed by an incredibly engaging gameplay loop that, while not for everyone, hit all the right spots for me.
Resource management is the name of the game here, with Lil Goody Two shoes forcing you to manage your health, hunger, and sanity. The way you refill these is by purchasing various supplies from the different vendors, which you get the cash from doing different minigames each day. The issue with these minigames though is that doing them passes time, and if you aren’t careful enough, you can get softlocked and have to restart the entire game. Now truthfully, I don’t feel qualified enough to judge if this is a rather difficult thing to manage, as I have massive experience with games in this genre, but I will say, Two Shoes didn’t feel that bad to manage. You get a rather generous amount of coins from each minigame, especially if you get the higher ranks (which aren’t that bad to obtain), and the game loves to throw a lot of free supplies at you, meaning that by the end I was overflowing with supplies to the point I just had nothing to worry about. It’s still stressful enough overall to be engaging at least, and it makes this a pretty easy gateway to jump into if you’ve wanted to try out a game with these mechanics. On top of that, there are various dates to do with 3 girls, and this is very important to the story of this game. I’ll just be upfront, if you don’t romance a girl enough here, you will be locked out a good majority of the endings, so I really recommend focusing on one to love. You also have a suspicion meter to manage, where if it gets too high, you get burnt at the stake as a witch, and while that isn’t too bad to handle if you know what to do, it can still be a pretty major stress point, and there was a point where I wasn’t careful enough and just had my game ended. I find the witch stuff to be immensely interesting though, especially in regards to its themes of queerness!
Two Shoes is not afraid to hide the fact that it’s queer, it’s very upfront with it, with your only romance options being women, and it's an identity each one takes with pride. For a plot so open about it, I find the connection with witchcraft to be a fascinating aspect, with Elise and Rozenmarie constantly being suspected as a witch just for being strange and out of place. One of the other romance options is also a nun girl, who questions if being a child of God is truly for her considering her position in the church. You have to hide who you really are to a lot of people, you have to bury a part of you deep down even if it hurts in order to be alive, and I think having that connection to its queer aspects really puts into the place the weight you can feel being queer. It makes the witchcraft feel way more then backdrop, it adds a sense of thematic urgency that has you desperately hoping to make that right choice, hoping that people don’t realize what you align with, what you are, what you may be, and with Elise wanting to be free of her mundane life, you can see it as her wanting to be somewhere she can finally be who she is, someplace where she can live a life as her, away from the constant fear, away from the judgement. She knows she’s a witch, she knows that she's a daughter of sin, and she’s just so tired of hiding it, she wants to be free, she wants to be herself with someone that she loves, and you can see that desperation in you in the game, you can see how much she’s willing to sacrifice to get there, no matter how low the odds are, it’s an incredible journey to witness, and I found myself rooting for Elise no matter what, hoping that she finally gets what she desires, even if she has to make a deal with the Devil to obtain it. Witchcraft is as important to the game as its queerness, and this is even prevalent in its gameplay, with each day ending in a Witching hour!
At the end of each night, a witching hour starts, which is where I feel the main meat of the gameplay is. During these events, you’ll be tasked with solving various puzzles in order to obtain one of the many items needed in order to appease Him. It starts off rather simple, just having you gain 5 easy to locate keys in a small room, dodging some enemies occasionally, but by the end you’re sorting out the right code, you’re watching your health bar slowly get lower and lower, and you’re praying that the section ends before you’re met with a bad fate. For the most part, I really enjoy these sections, they are my favorite part of the game, and each one has its own unique mechanic to handle and learn in order to obtain what you need. These can get rather tricky too, you really gotta stop and think on how to progress for some, and some of these enemies can be brutal, it can genuinely be tense as hell, I found myself dying a ton during these segments, and it's here where I found my resources starting to dwindle. I say mostly for a reason though, I wanna call out the one aspect of this game I disliked. Thursday night’s witching hour seems fine on paper, but in practice, it feels incredibly unfair and left me struggling way longer than I should have, making me anxious for any further replay of this game due to this segment. The whole idea of it is fine, you’re forced to contend with an incredibly fast enemy that can only be stopped by standing in specific safe zones, but my main issue was just how suddenly they can attack you? The area can be rather dark and is blocked by a lot of foliage, so sometimes while I’m trying to figure out where to go, I’ll suddenly get attacked with 0 time to react to it simply because I couldn’t see them off screen. It felt incredibly unfair and out of place, especially since no other segment in the game is quite like this, and I just kept getting more and more frustrated the more I died. It’s only one part of the night too, the rest of the night is super simple to get through, so having this one part suddenly be unfair just felt awful, and it left a pretty sour taste in my mouth unfortunately.
Besides that awful part though, I really enjoyed my time with Goody Two Shoes, this felt like a game made for me in so many ways. The way it handles its themes of queerness and how it connects it to the witchcraft, the resource management that, while simple, was still a blast to plan around, having me write down notes on what I should prioritize for each day, whether I should do a task or date, whatever I need to get done. I especially adored the puzzle sections at the end of each night, having me use my brain a little bit in order to move forward, forcing me to adjust to new mechanics that are simple to learn but hard to bypass, it’s a fantastic feeling. Backed by an incredible art style too, Lil Goody Two Shoes is phenomenal, easily one of my favorite releases of the year, and a game I will find myself thinking about a ton. I’m amazed it took me so long to hop on it. It really feels made for me, and I can’t wait for the various replays I’ll do of it in the future, this game is simply incredible. It may not be for everyone, it may scare off a lot with just how strange it can be, but this game just hit all the right notes for me, and that’s what ultimately matters at the end of the day. Despite everything about it, I’ll keep recommending it until the day I die, and it’ll stick in my mind as one of my favorite gaming experiences this year. I’m so glad I got to play it!
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