WARNING: This blog features some spoilers! You have been warned!
Preamble
A handful of Giant Bomb Game of the Year staples returned with "Best Debut" and "Please Stop!" gracing the site's 2023 roundtable GOTY discussions. A personal favorite of mine, "Best Styyyyyyyyyyle," was not so lucky, but that's not to say what the site and the current staff provided and made wasn't in and of itself tremendous or entertaining; it indisputably was. Nonetheless, many other sites have taken it upon themselves to discuss the best technical and artistic video games of 2023. While these lists and discussions have done a decent to excellent job of bringing some genuine candidates to the forefront, one game has slipped to the wayside. That game, which should be evident from the title of this blog, is Little Goody Two Shoes, a video game outing I have been slightly surprised to see utterly unmentioned by virtually every major publication. Little Goody Two Shoes doesn't just have "style." This game is one of the greatest homages to a myriad of animation and artistic eras.
However, before we get into my "pitch" on why you should give this game a cursory look, let's talk about what Little Goody Two Shoes is on paper and execution. Little Goody Two Shoes is a horror adventure game and visual novel from Portuguese developer AstralShift. The game was published by Square Enix, which likely allowed the indie firm to bolster its budget and nab some incredible art leads and voice-acting talent. In the game, you control Elise, who was found abandoned in a forest by an elderly "maid of all work." Elise lives on the outskirts of a Germanic-inspired township from the post-Reformation. After a lengthy introductory cutscene, WHICH IS INCREDIBLE, the game plays out similarly to a traditional Japanese otome or 5pb/Mages-inspired visual novel. The game takes place over a week, with the town Elise inhabits preparing for a yearly festival. However, as the week progresses, suspicious things start to crop up. Elise realizes she must be careful in interacting with her surroundings or risk being accused of witchery. I want those of you interested in playing this game to know this blog will be mostly spoiler-free, and at most, all I will discuss are the game's thematics and structure, which it reveals to you in its opening act. This game starts as a vivid retro throwback and becomes darker in record time. The fact it is about witchcraft and delves into horror themes is no secret.
The term "vibe game" was thrown around in 2023 to describe major AAA productions and cult indie releases. The term has been applied to Little Goody Two Shoes because as you play it, you feel like you have fallen into a nostalgic time capsule to 90s-era anime (i.e., Slayers, Rurouni Kenshin, City Hunters, et al.). That is true to a certain extent, but it also undersells the absolute creative heights the game reaches and the wide breadth of artistic ambitions developer AstralShift aims for. When you press me about the term "vibe game," I'm more or less inclined to think of a game that doubles down on one singular aesthetical choice or direction rather than seek to represent a kaleidoscope of styles from an entire decade as Little Goody Two Shoes does. Likewise, its ever-evolving story takes some stark turns, and the art direction morphs to communicate that. To me, that thoroughly cements it as more than the year's best "vibes" or a meme game pick for silly laughs. This game achieves so much with such a tiny team, and it is by FAR one of the most underrated new titles from 2023.
The Blending And Mixing Of Style Is The Best Part
The first thing that fans of Little Goody Two Shoes bring up is that the game utilizes over a dozen animation styles and mediums. It is an important point to bring up as the start of the game lays out all of its cards in fantastic fashion. The cutscenes in the game employ an expressionist painterly style meant to evoke memories of childhood storybooks. The character portraits and the in-game story moments use static character portraits, but they are in the style of 90s-era anime and old-school PC-98 visual novels. You complete tasks in the form of minigames, and these use a deliberately retro pixel-based art style. When you collect items, some of them are real-world physical objects or even puppets. There are musical sequences that come out of nowhere, and the game is forced to contend with all of these disparate art styles and aesthetical choices working together, and probably through dark magic or witchcraft, it works. Below, I will link the first of these musical bits when the protagonist discovers shiny red slippers in her garden, which still stands as a fantastic opening salvo.
It's also more than just that the game has attempted to emulate many disparate mediums like traditional animation, fancy digital paint, and even puppetry in a single package. At its heart, the game is an homage to the classic horror visual novels of yesteryear, like Ao Oni and Corpse Party. To make its slow but inevitable descent into lurid horror all the more authentic its cinematic transitions become more stark. If I told you a game from any given year juxtaposed from 90s-era anime homage to Claymation ala Neverhood, I think you get where I am coming from when I say I'm surprised more people are not talking about this game. Every time you go from the pastoral vista shots of the game's standard levels to its terrifying dungeons, it is SOMETHING, and the game manages to make those tonal and artistic shifts surprising and impressive even after the sixth or seventh time. This point highlights why Little Goody Two Shoes is much more than a game about incredible visuals. Its different styles convey narrative shifts and allow the game to make its mood and tone all the more intense. Trust me, as you progress in some of the longer dungeon sequences, Elise's return to "normalcy" doesn't just make Warren Harding happy; it leads to you taking a sigh of relief along with her.
Then there are the dungeons themselves. They represent the lowest point in the game from a purely mechanical sense, but there's no denying that they accomplish several artistic goals. To highlight that Elise is being pulled in several directions by fantastical forces, her follies to meet with these forces feel as if you are transitioning into an entirely different game, and in many ways, you do. Nonetheless, the game tests itself in these dungeons and showcases an even wider breadth of art styles. The second dungeon is done entirely through a claymation-inspired style with enemies and foes that animate like stop-motion figures in a Wallace and Gromit film on acid. After that, the third dungeon utilizes a paper animation-like aesthetic in the style of Terry Gilliam's days during Monty Python with Astor Piazzolla-inspired bandoneon-based music to boot! The one after that has an ice and winter motif and uses an incredible painterly style wherein you can see the brushstrokes to make its background. Many games promise to take you off into alien and foreign worlds, but Little Goody Two Shoes is one of the rare examples wherein doing so furthers both narrative and artistic purposes and doesn't come across as a vain strut.
The Style Makes The Character Relationships Better
When you are not helping Elise harrow through trials to satisfy evil spirits and forces beyond her comprehension, you usually live on the fat of a happy and merry land. Like several games in 2023, a VHS-inspired filter occasionally plays to harken back to when animation was done on film rather than digital paint. I should note that the game's final build uses Unity, and while it emulates traditional animation styles, it does not actually engage in their processes. Nonetheless, your activities in the game's central hub, a quaint Germanic township, are a complete visual treat. There are a handful of minigames to increase Elise's coffers, and these pixel-based microgames harken back to the first few WarioWare titles. The production values are equally impressive when you uncover new locals or explore environments as the game rotates through its day-night cycle. The soundtrack in Little Goody Two Shoes peaks when it breaks into verse or shares a stellar J-Pop dance piece, but the rest of the game's soundtrack is no slouch either. The almost Persona-like day-based progression format means you must be especially careful about what you do and who you spend time with, as there's only a limited amount of time to see what the game offers. If that sounds frustrating, know that this game tops out under twenty hours and actively encourages you to save scum, which is a visual novel tradition at this point.
Little Goody Two Shoes is also unabashedly gay. I probably should have said that during my introduction, but the three relationships you can opt into pursuing are women, and the game is obvious that these relationships are not just hand-holding USA Sailor Moon nonsense. There's no explicit sex in the game, but these girls love each other. Each romance option (i.e., Rozenmarine, Freya, and Lebkuchen) evokes a different crease or subset of gay or, in this case, yuri media. There's something incredibly nostalgic about the innocence of these relationships and seeing them evolve and represented in evocative imagery. The visuals feel entirely earnest, and so are the game's core relationships. Nothing progresses too out of the ordinary, and the emotional heart-to-hearts the datable options have with Elise feel unpretentious. And Lord have mercy on your soul if you opt for the game's bad endings because those are where things get especially emotionally charged. Whether it be acceptance, betrayal, or sadness, they all play into the game's strength of this being a dark journey that you and Elise all understand how to avoid its worst conclusions.
Likewise, as Elise gets pulled between honoring her love interests and the dark forces in the story's background, Little Goody Two Shoes becomes one of the best tragedies of the year. As you uncover more about the story's core mystery, you are presented with heavy choices that unlock even more lurid cinematics and cutscenes, ranging from horrifying to melancholic to joyous. When I concluded the bad ending for Rozenmarine, I was left speechless because the game visually and audibly made me regret my decision. The epilogues you uncover are vivid reflections of your choices, which likely required a lot of planning and foresight on the part of AstralShift. Yes, their previous title, Pocket Mirror, is a prototype of Little Goody Two Shoes, which lends some credence to the claim that there's nothing too out of the ordinary in it. However, Little Goody Two Shoes' scale and production values dwarf AstralShift's past projects, and it is not fair to say it is entirely beholden to their previous works. Unlike The Quiet Man, this is a perfect example of Square Enix helping out a smaller developer to get more funding and better contacts to make their passion project shoot for the stars.
You Can Tell This Was A Pashion Project From A Small Team In A Good (And Bad) Way
We now need to transition to something slightly different, which are some words of caution to those interested in playing Little Goddy Two Shoes. As suggested earlier, this game is part minigame collection, part puzzle game, part adventure game, part visual novel, and part dating sim. That sounds like a lot, and it is. The visual juxtapositions are fantastic and impressive; the gameplay juxtapositions are often clunky and awkward. There are four minigames, two of which are acceptable (i.e., catching apples and chopping wood) as they harken back to WarioWare, but the other two are among the most frustrating things I played in 2023. One of them is like a baseball microgame wherein you need to time your button presses to bat an object between two children, and the timing for it is incredibly punishing. There's another one wherein Elise needs to collect chicken eggs, and it is the worst variant of Tapper I have ever encountered. These minigames are unavoidable as they are your primary source of income, and not having money might cause you to enter a weird fail state where you cannot progress through the game's dungeons. All that aside, the visual presentation of these minigames is outstanding, and how the game cleverly uses them during the story is a real treat.
The traditional visual novel trappings are trickier to assess. Your tolerance of these mechanics will depend on your experience with more orthodox Japanese VNs. Depending on your actions, Elise has three meters for you to worry about that can decline and result in a Game Over. The first is her health, which whittles away during the puzzle dungeons, which are every day's capstone event. Plenty of lethal traps can cause her health bar to drop dramatically when you least expect it. The second is her "Sanity," which you only need to worry about if you choose to interact with looming specters or ghosts that let you in on some of the story's secrets or decide in favor of tackling the game's optional dungeons and puzzles, which unlock a secret ending. Finally, you have her hunger meter, which loses a whole point every time you complete an action during one of the phases of every day (i.e., dawn, morning, afternoon, dusk, and night). Needing to worry about three different item types to guarantee that Elise doesn't meet an untimely demise is undoubtedly overwhelming, but again, one of those three is entirely optional.
The structure of the days is one of the game's best parts, as it allows you to plan your activities and character-based pursuits more freely, but it is also a slight source of frustration. Again, experience with more traditional visual novels might cloud your adventure here, but Little Goody Two Shoes incentivizes and punishes you for exploring its world and interacting with NPCs. Some of the town's citizens suspect, and correctly, for that matter, that Elise is up to witchery, and if you spill the beans, she's toast. As such, attempting to strike up conversations with NPCs will prompt dialogue choices, and either you select the correct option and maintain Elise's low profile, or you pick the wrong option, and her "Suspicion" meter increases. I like this design choice partly because it makes exploring your surroundings a risk-reward proposition, especially during your first playthrough. You want to know the gossip going around town as it clues you into what to expect at the end of the day and what to expect in the future. Likewise, even if you fail a few at the start, you learn the character-specific techniques for brownnosing your way out of these sequences. What is more frustrating is when the game punches above its weight class in structuring multi-day-spanning missions. There's one, on Wednesday, where if you fail to interact with a half dozen NPCs by a barn during three specific day phases, and if you miss even one, you fail that entire day and have to load up a previous save! The game is downright terrible about communicating what you need to do at times and instead keeps its directions and signposting vague to a fault. As I mentioned earlier, there are three romance options. However, somewhat frustratingly, the game doesn't tell you that failing to attend two romantic events for a specific character in a row will lock you out of their relationship entirely.
I also mentioned that this game is interconnected to a previous work of AstralShift, Pocket Mirror. While I would LOVE for this write-up to end with me imploring you to check out not one but TWO high-concept indie titles, that's not the case. While the idea of AstralShift having this related metaverse is quaint, you can play Little Goody Two Shoes and call it a day. Seriously, you're fine. Regardless of the version you play, Pocket Mirror is a fabulous concept that developer AstralShift fails to deliver upon. The bones of a compelling story about generational or shared trauma are there, but more often than not, the game doesn't have all that much to say beyond its spooky visuals and darker moments. Also, lacking Little Goody Two Shoes' respits from the traumatic sequences means it is a much more emotionally draining experience, which I know is not everyone's cup of tea. Likewise, while there are only a few hints of Little Goody Two Shoes starting as an RPG Maker joint from time to time, the telltale signs of that architecture are way more overt in Pocket Mirror. I swear to God, platforming in RPG Maker games has always sucked shit, but people keep trying, and it drives me goddamn up the wall every single time. Nonetheless, my point is that the promise of Little Goody Two Shoes' story triumphantly carrying on elsewhere is not worth the time investment it entails.
Unfortunately, Little Goody Two Shoes Has An Undeniable Achilles' Heel
My previous cautionary criticisms are quibbles compared to the real issue plaguing Little Goody Two Shoes. I already mentioned that Little Goody Two Shoes ends each day with puzzle dungeons. The problem is that almost all of these dungeons are a complete pain in the ass to play. The first one immediately highlights the game's issues of being too obtuse with its clues and overall design. In a royal library, you need to find four keys, and while there are visible blue chests to open, one of them, instead of providing a key, shares a note that says to find something glowing the color gold. The issue for me was that the environment was so visually busy that finding the one shelf with a faint golden hue was challenging. However, things are all downhill from there as the dungeons become even more punishing and trail-and-error based. There are a handful of chase sequences wherein you instantly die if you let a giant lumbering monster or threat catch up to Elise. There are sliding block puzzles that are either poorly mixed or feel impossible.
The most notorious puzzle in the game comes near its end, wherein Elise finds herself in a predominantly black room with statues and broken checkerboard tiles. It is an incredible-looking environment, but the puzzle requires you to know moon phases, and if you don't know the difference between a waxing and a waning gibbous moon because you forgot that part of middle school science, you need to look up the answers. Also, in that environment are evil specters that will hit Elise, thus draining her health, but more distressingly, respawn her in a location sometimes far away from where she got hit, which makes establishing her bearings a chore. There are not a ton of boss fights in the game, and two of the three that come to mind involve you completing the minigames that typically reward cash but, in their cases, have a more demented bent. The game's only "true" boss is an absolute piece of shit. It is one of those bosses that reverses your controls from your established preferences for shits and giggles and even will invert the screen and camera while you need to complete precise dodging and platforming. It's a complete dick move by the design team.
It's weird to praise a game when almost one-third of it is not fun. The worst part about many of these puzzles and dungeons is that they are a cinch once you figure things out. These dungeons are not dynamic, which makes the repeat playthroughs the game actively encourages a complete slog. Playing the puzzle dungeons a second time made me realize how irrelevant Elise's health meter becomes when you "solve" these puzzles and know precisely where all the traps are. The problem, as I highlighted with the moon phase puzzle, is that the game gives you almost none of the tools necessary to figure things out naturally. On top of that, it ramps up the instant death bullshit, which is infinitely not cool. However, there's more to these dungeons than just eye candy that makes me slightly understand their sometimes punishing design. When you reach the end of the game and are presented with its ultimate choice, you hate these dungeons. So, when the game offers two paths for Elise to take, one of them opts you into ANOTHER punishing dungeon that is a complete chore to complete. There's a narrative reason for that: the game wants you to know that path is THE BAD ONE! It is a clever inversion of the visual novel standard of the good paths and endings always being arbitrarily challenging to unlock.
Even here, I must concede that AstralShift is not technically committing a grave sin in the arena of visual novels with its dungeon design. This topic is ultimately one for a different blog. Still, AstralShift is one of MANY horror outfits that pay homage and pull notes from indie self-published horror classics like Ao Oni and Corpse Party. While those games continue to be profoundly influential and still direct hundreds into game design and horror storytelling, they were never good. They are both terrible games. Corpse Party might be the video game industry's closest equivalent to Leni Riefenstahl. It is a profoundly problematic work that depicts certain groups of people heinously and has led to some nasty habits from indie developers who should know better. Nonetheless, it is a game that proves less is more and that you don't need the best engine or biggest name to make something that gets the internet buzzing. It was also an early pioneer of a work that taught people interested in game development that self-publishing was an entirely worthy and worthwhile route to take one's game.
To Little Goody Two Shoes' credit, nothing in it is deeply problematic. It is a game with wholesome and naturally evolving lesbian relationships that are a true highlight. The game is packed to the gills with style and utilizes many disparate artistic mediums and aesthetical choices to create a picture book-inspired world. It promises to transport you to far-off and alien worlds and does so magnificently. If the tax I need to pay is some crappy dungeons for heartwarming lesbian witches in the style of 90s anime with puppets, then so be it. I will gladly pay that tax.
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