It is safe to say most people are familiar with fairytales, whether it’s the Disney variety, or the much more interesting (and often darker) ones you find in storybooks. Little Goody Two Shoes follows the Grim tradition of the genre, with developer AstralShift spinning a horrific, fantastical tale of wishes and consequences. It was published by Square Enix in November of 2023. It falls into the horror genre with elements of a dating sim, including LGBTQ+ options, added in.

Little Goody Two Shoes is a prequel to AstralShift’s first game, Pocket Mirror. While there is no need to play Pocket Mirror to understand the story of Little Goody Two Shoes, I did play the original game after my first playthrough of the prequel. What can I say? The world and story charmed me and I wanted more. While I believe the two games can be played in any order, there are certain moments across the games that will be impacted by what you, the player, know already. This is not a bad thing, but it is worth noting.

The Gameplay

There are largely two halves of the game: daytime, and nighttime. As silly as that may sound on paper, the divide is real and important. There are 6 blocks of time every day, 5 comprising the day, and the 6^th being the night. During the day, you work and socialize. Talking to the townspeople is not required (mostly), but it is fun and offers the occasional reward or challenge. Working is necessary, as you will need money to buy necessities like food, bandages, and “grape juice.” Trust me, that last one is more important than you might think – you don’t want to be clinging to your sanity by a thread during the festival on the last day. Learn from my mistakes.

When night falls, and our protagonist Elise enters The Woods, things change. The 6^th timeslot is called The Witching Hour, and heralds the horrors to come. Here, the RPG Maker roots are clear to anyone with a fondness for the puzzle focused narrative horror subgenre that bloomed from the engine. Little Goody Two Shoes’ Witching Hour gameplay is a masterclass in how tone and stakes recontextualize fairly simple or straightforward puzzles. Leading moths to a candle? Easy. Leading moths that can and will eat you alive to a candle? Less easy. Running through a forest and avoiding falling debris is not dissimilar from a walk in a park. But that same situation makes your blood run cold when you also have to keep a temporarily blinded child from falling to their death.

The Story

Little Goody Two Shoes follows the story of Elise, a young woman who works as “a maid of all trades” in the small town of Kieferberg. She is prideful, understandably selfish, and dreams of a better life away from the people that don’t appear to value or respect her. Her desire to leave is at war with the ties binding her to the town: the legacy of her grandmother, and her friendships with two other young women, Lebkuchen and Freya. The night after meeting a mysterious girl named Rozenmarine who’d hidden away in her woodshed, Elise is drawn into both the mysteries of Kieferberg and the horrors of The Woods.

Over the course of the week, you will gather Testaments to make into Gifts for a mysterious, inhuman patron. If you succeed in your quest to collect the Tender Flesh, the Sweetest Nectar, and arrive in Good Company, He will grant your deepest wish. All the while, Kieferberg is slowly plunged into chaos. Animals get sick, a child starts having visions. Someone is causing chaos, and it might not be you. Investigating further costs precious time and sanity, and may just end in your death. You don’t have to investigate – after all, you plan on leaving your town in the dust at the end of the week. But it’s not like you truly wish your neighbors ill, so looking into it at least a little couldn’t hurt, right?

The Art and Music

If there’s one thing you already know about Little Goody Two Shoes it’s that it is an absolutely gorgeous game. Every time you open the game, an anime-esque opening plays, putting the art and music of the game on full display, along with setting the tone of the game to come. The art style is proudly inspired by 90s classics like Sailor Moon and Madoka Magica, and the score is equally cinematic and heartfelt.

It is honestly hard to articulate how beautiful it is. The stylization is a marriage of Visual Novels, and top-down RPGs, and every pixel is loving detailed. While the anime inspiration is clearest in the more complex character art like the dialogue portraits and CGs, it is no less apparent in the sprite work of the world and the character sprites. Even the UI is gilded like a special edition of a book of fables. At first, it was hard for me to read parts of the in-game menu. Not due to lack of clarity, but due to being overwhelmed by all the intricacies of its design.

The score of Little Goody Two Shoes is a masterpiece. Each piece on the soundtrack is wonderful to listen to on their own, but their use in the game heightens both the song itself, and the moment in game. Whether I was romancing Lebkuchen, chopping wood, and fleeing from horrors, the music was an active participant in my experience. In any game, the sound and score are highly important, but the balance is difficult to get right. Little Goody Two Shoes gets it exactly right.

Themes and Analysis

To me, Little Goody Two Shoes is about the mortifying ordeal of being eighteen. Elise is in that frustratingly familiar position of wanting respect and autonomy but still being a child in the eyes of her town. She and the three love interests are caught between responsibility and… infantilization, for lack of a better word. The town patriarchs – Father Hans and Gustav – exemplify either end of the spectrum. Father Hans is constantly reminding Elise of her duties and reputation. He doesn’t afford her or any of the other young ladies any grace. Gustav is Freya’s father and the mayor of the town. He would rather his daughter and her friends enjoy a last hurrah of childhood and leave the problems to the adultier adults.

The other major theme of this game is legacy. This is heightened if you’ve played or are aware of the story of Pocket Mirror, as Elise is the mother of that game’s protagonist. However, the specters of legacy, fate, and fantasy haunt the narrative from moment one regardless. The first thing we learn upon starting a new game, is that Elise was raised by her grandmother and that her grandmother is now dead. Granny Holle is constantly in the periphery of the story as you learn about the horrific forces that govern the sinister happenings of the woods, and the town.

My Experience

There were a lot of moments where I was deeply frustrated, but I don’t think that was a mistake. Elise spends the majority game frustrated with just about everyone. The first two days of the game, the story intentionally leads you to empathize with her plight. Her neighbors are demanding and snappy, people are suspicious of her for seemingly no reason. Of course, you, as Elise, decide to take a chance on the promise of the red shoes. If Granny Holle took the deal, surely the terms and conditions won’t be damning. Right?

However, your anger at the townsfolk will ebb and fade. You realize that your own circumstances have blinded you to the fact that everyone else is poor and struggling as well. When you neighbor’s goats get sick, when someone’s horses get stolen, you are suddenly painfully aware that life is unfair to everyone. So how can you justify your choices? Do you follow through with your initial plan? You have until the final day to make your decision.

Final Thoughts

Little Goody Two Shoes is a game that will give you as much as you put in. It isn’t a difficult game by any means, it’s a narrative driven experience where the consequences stem from your choices and not from technical skill. If you are liberal and proactive with your saves, you’ll never find yourself truly stuck. There is only one major glitch: when Muffy demands her daily snack, you’ll only be able to select the item your cursor was on when you last opened the item menu manually. The work around is to simply open up the menu and navigate to the correct option before engaging with her. All other glitches are visual, insignificant, and far between, so they are easy to miss, or ignore if you did notice them.

All in all, it was a fantastic experience with story and gameplay loops that were right up my alley. In my opinion, it is the perfect example of how the RPG Maker horror formula can mature and evolve in complexity while staying true to the roots of the genre. Every character is vibrant, even if they are incredibly minor. The story has a lot to unpack, with many threads to unweave beneath a straight forward surface. I highly recommend it.

Little Goody Two Shoes is available on Nintendo Switch, Playstation, Xbox, and PC via Steam. It released on October 31^st 2023, and retails for $19.99. The OST is also available for purchase.