It’s hard to believe this exists. Its illustrations are straight out of a warm children's book; it's carefully woven to evoke this all-encompassing sensation that you're deep in the throes of a fairy tale, with its most sinister moments only solidifying that feeling. Its effortlessly delightful soundtrack and phenomenally soft, cozy drawings brought such a sincere smile to my face.

Somehow, Square Enix published this dating sim RPG where you can ONLY romance other women. Yep, it’s 100% queer. Alongside its shockingly uncomfortable commitment to abstract horror, staggering production quality, and 90s anime aesthetic inspirations, it is a personal dream game. I cannot fathom how this is actually real.

I’m only just recovering from my first playthrough, but after catching four of the game’s endings, I don't have much else to say except I’m in love with Little Goody Two Shoes. I want to write more about it someday soon, but I am deep in adoration after having finished the game tonight and need to get the word out there.

Please, if you're a fan of 90s anime, love abstract horror, are into magical, fairy-tale aesthetics/music, or are remotely excited by the idea of sapphic love stories, do not miss out on this. Little Goody Two Shoes is wonderful.

Completely captures the feeling of a fantranslated PS2 adaptation of a forgotten 90's shoujo manga. Almost dizzyingly textured & artisanal in its devotion to presenting this kind of rose-thorny traditional German folktale. Feels so genuine, inspired, fully realised in a way I desperately needed as a palate cleanser.

For me to become completely convinced of its gameplay and narrative goals, I’d have to replay it with alternate routes in mind, which I’m not quite able to facilitate with my current limited free time - and Little Goody Two Shoes doesn’t exactly make going down these forks in the story particularly breezy. I don’t tackle games with completionism in mind these days but I find myself a little bummed about how much work I’d need to put into this if I wanted to see the stories I’ve missed. Nothing a timeline/"skip seen dialogue" update somewhere down the line can’t fix, please don’t make me watch a Youtube video.

Elise, my beautiful daughter
You are a woman now, you ought to choose a wife

Will you pick capable and gifted tradwife Freya
Or sharp and intelligent fun wife Lebkuchen
Or homeless hippie from the woods Rozenmarine

...

Ending №5 Star-Crossed

A game clearly made by a bunch of artists and writers who utterly lack the game design skill to actually pull off what they wanted to do. As a lover of adventure games I’m not a stranger to encountering adventure games like this, ones that add mechanics that just drag the experience down because the devs just did not have a good grasp of them at all or were too afraid that their work is not “gamey” enough so they felt the need to shoehorn them in. Little Goody Two Shoes is a life-sim/yuri VN frankensteined together poorly with an RPGmaker horror game and those elements are at complete odds with each other. The aesthetics and atmosphere are phenomenal, merging 90’s shoujo and Grimms’ fairy tales wonderfully. The writing is solid enough too as the main cast of ladies are likable and the mystery is engaging enough. The life sim elements are mostly fine, most of the job mini-games are alright though I’m not a fan of the rat one. The game does a bit of a bad job of pushing the player to overly fear raising suspicion though as it’s usually not hard to avoid or at least drop it down; I can easily see someone screwing themselves if they invested too much stamina and money in bringing Rozenmarine to work with them at all because it’s just not worth it, the villagers can be easily assuaged with the right responses. The night time horror segments is where the game completely goes to shit though.

This game really shows how it’s essentially a bad 2000’s RPGmaker horror game just with an actual budget as the nighttime segments are jank as hell with puzzles mostly relying on trial and error. One night has you run away from a boss who will instantly kill you and the game can’t really handle the chase sequence that well; spike blocks will fall too fast to dodge within a fair window unless you know they’re coming and the second segment seems like sometimes you’ll just get randomly killed even when you’re running full speed. The puzzles gets worse as the game goes on as Thursday has you play floor is lava with phantoms that are attracted to sound, but the camera tends to be too zoomed in to see them effectively at times so you’re probably going to walk your ass into a few of them because the game gives you very little visual or audio cues that they’re coming. Apparently some of the segments were even more obtuse and bullshit before they patched them and that’s just galling to me. The breaking point for me was on Friday where you had to go in complete darkness because turning on your lantern gets you instantly killed by statues. It’s absolutely abysmal puzzle design to the point where I’m baffled the devs thought it was a good idea. It’s not clever or challenging like good adventure game puzzles should, it genuinely feels like a troll. Thankfully somebody on Steam told me the solution so I went back and beat it but man did it still suck. The endings are also unsatisfying because they seem kind of at odds with each other and don’t really give a true conclusion if you take them into account. Just a wet fart of an ending to top off a game that was unraveling as it went along.

This game just utterly frustrates me because this game could have been great but its dogshit design decisions prevent it from being such. The game isn’t completely unsalvageable, a couple patches and overhauling the Friday puzzle to not be so awful and it’d be at a decent enough quality. Gonna be blunt and say they really need to hire a person who actually knows good adventure game design if they want to make keeping games like this. This is definitely the kind of game that you should probably watch an LP of. I’m usually the kind of guy who will readily defend games that have merely serviceable gameplay but great everything else, but Little Goody Two Shoe’s gameplay is too annoying for me to heartily endorse experiencing yourself.

i don't think i liked it :(

a richly illustrated nightmare fairy tale which warns of paranoid infighting and reaching for an unattainable ideal, broken apart by tedious and artificially difficult survival horror segments. i meet each hazard as intended and am often punished with unforgiving damage or by being taken to an instant game over, and while i fully accept that this very well might just be a skill issue on my part, it remains a significant hurdle that's barring me from engaging properly with the unfolding narrative.

i'm not unfamiliar with the death-laden rpgmaker horror-esque titles which preceded LGTS and those it draws its inspirations from, its how it contextualises such flaws that becomes an issue. there are no "skip seen dialogue" options, with the fast forward made available to us after Elise's delayed inputs just slow enough to be annoying. on that note, bosses with instant death attacks have unskippable cutscenes prior making repeat attempts patronising. two core survival systems are made redundant within one of the in-game days. perhaps most tragically, the distinct visual style which once pleased the eye beings to blend into monotony and goes unappreciated after some hours.

and like i'm sad about it! i wanted to like it! i really enjoyed how the story progressed and how my bond with my favourite lady bloomed and i liked the endings i've managed to get, but all these hiccups had me nearly just uninstalling early. it's a beautiful poetic horror title, but so many little things simply ended up overwhelming me.

Something a friend of mine says fairly frequently is that "style = substance," in an active effort appreciate the craftmanship behind developing a coherent presentational voice. This framework is not only correct, but very applicable when talking about RPGMaker Horror titles, the type of game Little Goody Two Shoes (LGTS) borrows heavily from in its design ethos. While not typically having the most riveting gameplay, games like these tend to excel in making a meaningful narrative out of a little. LGTS is no different, and it some ways it even exceeds many of its predecessors and contemporaries.

It is impossible to talk about this game without mentioning the art. You simply cannot do it-- and why the hell would you? The Shoujo anime aesthetic is unparalleled and stays charming from start to finish. It really does feel like you're playing an animated series, and I love when games manage to capture that vibe. While all of this is worth saying, Little Goody Two Shoes' pastiche is not as shallow as it might sound from these high but relatively blanket praises. The game fully understands how to capture the edgier side of the "shoujo" aesthetic and it continually used its fairy tale motifs in ways that impressed me. They drop the word "phantasmagoria" in this game's advertising (and achievements) and make the use of it count. When Elise shows up to the Ceramic Grove of Wheat halfway through the game, I knew I was playing something special.

The interactive elements of the game are also part of what makes LGTS' presentation so great in a multitude of different ways. Kieferberg truly is sold as this small, German town, and you the poor little peasant living within. There's some real community in the way the village is written... or lack thereof, when they start to fight over the potential mysticism causing them issues like the 1800s period piece LGTS is. Relatedly, I respect the hell out of the suspicion system. It may be far too inconsequential in a gameplay sense, but the very fact that you need to pick and choose what you say turns most conversations with folk into a phony hassle that put you in Elise's headspace. It only ever feels like you're not treated like an inconvenience when talking to your (hilariously gay) love interests.

The gameplay otherwise is decent, but where most of the problems lie. The parts of the daily management I have not mentioned aren't great-- playing minigames for food feels like busywork extremely quickly, and this time the narrative implications are not enough to save it. I get Elise doesn't enjoy it either, but I can only play Bomb Rally from Kirby: Nightmare in Dreamland so many times. I have no real issue with the dungeon design though. There's some faux RPGMaker jank in there, and I'm not saying it's even good, but like... it's (mostly) unobtrusive at worst and genuinely solid at best.

Those other problems I have are with the narrative. While very good, LGTS' is the type of story that loves to throw out 14 different plot threads and then resolve like, maybe 2 of them meaningfully. The way so many things are written as indirectly important "lore" to the main plot annoys me because the developers are not good at that type of writing. The last few hours of this game or so feel rushed in general and I found myself incredibly disappointed by how flaccid such an otherwise strong game ends. Multiple "that's it?" reactions were had.

Again, though, Little Goody Two Shoes is a testament to how difficult it is to create a work with standout presentation. Not only is it able to successfully achieve this, it flourishes doing so. A fine addition to the RPGMaker Horror canon, indeed.

As someone who adores Pocket Mirror, it is incredibly hard for me to say that this is a million steps upwards from it in every way but...I think it is without a doubt. LGTS is beautiful. That much is clear from even a quick glance at it. There's the 90s anime aesthetic, but it grabs from a ton of other styles and will constantly introduce newly themed sections. Crude drawings, the main character portraits, sections focused on the folktale theming, there are quite a few genres and design styles celebrated and I loved every minute of it.

I also found myself enjoying most of the puzzles significantly more than in PM, though I'm not confident that I'd be able to give a specific reason why. Some of them felt more cleverly thought out, but also easy enough for my dumb brain to comprehend so that I won't be wandering through the same area for hours. Then the implementation of strategy, managing hunger, romance, suspicion, etc...it was all very good at keeping every day engaging.

Same for the story, which is absolutely miles better than it was in Pocket Mirror (at least in execution). I'm glad for it, too. Gone are the days where you would have to read into every piece of evidence before being explicitly told what was going on at the very end of the game. There was a steady pace, characters I enjoyed seeing interact (the romance is peak btw), and both the options for a very depressing conclusion/bridge into Pocket Mirror, or a much brighter new world alongside one of Elise's partners. I think this game was well worth the wait and I'm glad to have experienced it. To be honest I reaaalllly hope they revisit Pocket Mirror a THIRD time...or at least do something with the characters in it (perhaps another sequel?) because I think they would absolutely thrive in an environment like the one LGTS has.

Elise, you have GOT to get your gay witch girlfriend a job or she's gonna start doing alchemy in front of the normies. We can't have that kind of rowdyness around here.

I think it's cool to mix and match so many artstyles. Grimm fairytales, madoka witches, Rozen Maiden, analog horror and arcade cabinets all executed very well. Sometimes it becomes a bit much though. I think the same goes for the RPGMaker-esque gameplay. It's very cool and interesting but occasionally it just feels a bit like they either threw the game in a blender or they wanted me throw the game in a blender if I have to reload one more time on this stupid fucking retarded darkness puzzle what the fuck am I supposed to do here I can't see anything for fuck sake ass bullsh--

... ENOUGH! CHICKEN FRENZY !!!! 🐔🐔🐔🥚🐔🐔🐔🐔🥚🥚🐔🐔🥚🥚🐔🐔🐔🥚🥚🐔🐔🐔🐔🐔🥚🥚🥚🐔🐔🐔🥚🐔🐔🐔🥚🥚🐔🐔🐔🥚🥚🥚🥚🐔🐔🥚🐔🐔🐔🐔🥚🐔🐔🐔🐔🐔🐔🥚🐔🐔🐔🐔🥚🥚🐔🐔🐔🐔🥚🥚🥚🐔🐔🥚

I think, for the most part, it is reasonable to expect (or at least hope) that a studio slowly improves their game-crafting skills with each new release, ideally making them better and better. Of course, that can't always be the case. Some games are good enough to beckon the question "how the hell are they supposed to top this", and which follows the acceptance that it'd probably be okay if what follows is comparatively as good or even a little worse. AstralShift's Pocket Mirror ~ GoldenerTraum (a title I will always type out in full out of sheer amusement) from earlier this year, for as much obtuseness and opaqueness as it relished in, was a pretty good game! Then apparently, they already had their next game right around the corner: a step away from RPG Maker, an incredible looking artstyle, more meat added to the gameplay, and being a prequel to Pocket Mirror ~ GoldenerTraum? It felt like this game had the potential to be something really special!

And now we're here... and now I've played it... and it's... fine.

The biggest up-front appeal here is clearly the visuals, something the game is completely unashamed of. Of course, the game is drop-dead gorgeous, almost every frame of it looking like 90s anime eye candy. In motion, it looks even better, with well done animation and a really subtle static-y noise filter at night that adds soooo much to the vibes. The dungeon areas you go through every night double down on the wonderful aesthetics, with so many little visual effects and setpieces that love to mesh together different artstyles in ways that are a sight to behold. Shoutouts too to the minigames, presented as fancifully-decorated arcade machines that really sell the experience. I do think Pocket Mirror ~ GoldenerTraum ultimately went further with its setpieces and playing with different artstyles, but this game still manages to impress all the same.

Funny anecdote: the game's credits are split between the art team and the programming team for the game. You're only able to skip the later one for whatever reason. I don't think it actually means anything, but its very clear how (rightfully!) proud they are of the aesthetic work put in here.

Yet, under the veneer of these fanciful graphics, the underlying game is kinda lacking? Focusing on the gameplay, it's split between its time management-y social sim elements during the daytime and going through short dungeons more reminiscent of Pocket Mirror ~ GoldenerTraum at night, and both are unfortunately pretty rough around the edges.

A lot of the game focuses on meter management with your health, hunger, sanity, and suspicion meters. The cycle is pretty simple: various things in the game lower these meters (raise in suspicion's case), you get money by selling items/playing minigames, then use the money to buy items to rectify those drops. If you don't, you die. On paper, a fairly simple system to add stress to the player, as one does in a kinda-sorta-horror-y game. However, the scope of the game is small enough that it basically throttles you into playing just enough minigames that you have enough money to get all the items you need to survive, but not much more. When combined with how relatively-consistently these meters drain, buying items to manage the meters becomes more of a chore than anything, ESPECIALLY with how overbearing the UI becomes when you're low on one of them.

Shoutouts to when I had to go through half a dungeon with low sanity while the edges of the screen were covered in dark tendrils and the music was muffled by the constant murmuring of ghosts. It wasn't an issue of "oh do I have enough money to survive???", but "oh I guess I'm stuck dealing with this until I can reach the next shop". I wasn't under threat, I was just annoyed.

Speaking of the dungeons, they're the classic RPG Maker horror game mechanics: enemies to avoid, fairly simple puzzles to complete, and a good few chase sequences—as one does. For the most part they're alright, with some interesting puzzles here and there, but as you go on in them they start to get a bit unwieldy. The second-to-last one stands out as the biggest offender, asking you to wander two large lake areas fairly aimlessly while high-damage ghosts chase you down as long as you're not standing on land, which sometimes is just impossible to reach in-between first seeing the ghost and it hitting you. There's a reason the first Steam guide for the game was made specifically for getting through that dungeon. The final chase sequel also to throw out obstacles that are impossible to naturally react to (including one that appeared while i was in the middle of an animation and killed me) while the camera loves to barely show what's in front. Not to mention the door shuffle puzzle you have to repeat THREE times over the course of this sequence that instantly kills you if you get it wrong. The dungeons have just enough moments of bullshit to them, it was hard to look through to their good, largely aesthetics-based, elements. There was also the forbidden fruit of puzzle design: a SLIDE PUZZLE. It was optional but still. What the fuck?

Don't think I forgot about you putting one in, Origami King. Fuck you.

ANYWAYS, aside from all of this, the rest of the game comprises of dealing with an increasingly paranoid village who might or might not think you are a witch, while courting the girl of your desires. Both of which are fairly interesting and well-done! I personally chose Freya as my bride-to-be, and it was all really sweet, fluffy, gay as hell romance. I loved all of the adorable portraits that popped up during their dates, showing them gingerly grow close together. In contrast, the village was a really compelling showcase of mass paranoia and how it overtakes communities. The dynamics of the various villagers as various blights infect the town were simple, but still engaging. This is where the suspicion meter comes into play, gauging how close you are to being hung by the townspeople or something along those lines. I never got close to filling up the meter, and I don't really know how you can even do so unless intentionally seeking it out or being really really stupid, but I still can appreciate the ludonarrative element to it.

All of this dialogue is nicely written and such, but even that gets a tad dicey when having to often replay segments and, in one of the most baffling things I have seen in a videogame recently, it's a total coinflip whether or not you can skip through dialogue! Seriously! There is a fast forward button that only appears during certainly dialogue sequences and cutscenes for reasons totally beyond by conception. It's awesome to go die in a tough boss-like segment or accidentally choose a dialogue option that instantly kills you/locks you out of something (the game loves to do this), multiple times, then the cutscene you're booted back before is—of course—unskippable!!!

And all of this to experience a story that's... pretty straightfoward. While Pocket Mirror ~ GoldenerTraum forced you to pull the story out of it like you were desecrating a corpse, that mystique to it was a big reason as to why I liked it as much as I did. Being a more mainstream-targeted game, especially published by Square Enix, it makes sense that this game's story is a lot more outwardly comprehensible, and really I have no issues with that. For what it is, the story is still fairly well done, enhanced a lot by the aforementioned dating and town paranoia elements. Yet, as someone who had already played Pocket Mirror ~ GoldenerTraum, I was hoping I wasn't able to intuit the entire story from the very beginning of the game. Hoping for some twist that shaked things up while still keeping up continuity with the game prior, but then I reached the end and everything rolled out... exactly as I expected. That said, I was waiting the entire game for Him to finally appear, and then He did appear and I Leonardo DiCaprio pointed at the screen and it was awesome. So who can say if it was bad or not?

There are so many other smaller things that prick me with the game I could delve into, like the map design basically being a straight line that you walk back and forth across WAY too much for there to be no fast travel system. A lot of these things could probably (hopefully!) be rectified in a few patches, but it's a bit too late for me now. By the end of it, going through that last chase sequence, I was pretty ready to be done with the game. Yet, looking at the amount of time I put into it in a mere 4 days, only a bit less than I put into Eastward for what was still a much less frustrating experience. Getting through all the gruff the game has, there's a pretty decent experience underneath!

I kind of feel like if I went into this without having played Pocket Mirror ~ GoldenerTraum and the world had more mystique to it, I probably would have had a better time. Conversely, if I played Pocket Mirror ~ GoldenerTraum after this, I probably wouldn't have found that game quite as engrossing as I did at the time. It feels weird and a bit bad bad to feel like the games are stuck in this zero-win situation together. I would love to talk to someone who played the games in reverse order to me and how it affected their thoughts on the game. If nothing else, its a really interesting duology for every interesting decision they do, and its hard not to respect them.

A wonderful little romp that reminded me of my times playing RPG Maker games like Mad Father, Witches House and Ib only with RTX enabled. Little Goody Two Shoes has the most incredible artistic style and direction that I've seen from the genre with every set piece, sprite, cutscene and goofy little minigame dripping with personality that really makes it feel like a story book turned video game that feels inspired by early anime and Disney and I've found myself rewatching the opening cutscene several times just because of how fuggin good it looks.

The sound track as well is also phenomenal with some wonderful variety, I'm especially fond of some of the songs that play just while you're walking around town or interacting with characters that really add to the small town feel, with some tracks even reminding me of Stardew Valley at times.

I also like that the game is very gay, incredibly gay, the mostest gay where every romance option is exclusively lesbian, and that warms my little gay heart. Lebkuchen best girl.

Uhhhh yea gayme good, play it, bye :))

People are so creative these days...

One of the most visual appealing games out there, the music is awesome (the opening is stuck in my head), and the gameplay is so damn fun. I just feel like the game could be a looot more faster, knowing that we have to replay at least 3 times to get all the 10 endings.

In the end, I'm glad I spent 10 hours in one sit in this, really, such a charming and wonderful game that I found by chance. I hope this gets the love that it deserves.

LEBKUCHEN BEST GIRL

my inclination when faced with writing about this thing is to shovel hyperlinks of images, gifs, and cutscenes into a giant mound and call it a day. I can't think of a more brevitous or appropriate solution to the impossible problem of translating its astonishing presentation into words, and if that doesn't convince folks nothing will. they are men and women of unflinching granite; golems or homunculi or some unfeeling other. it is not my problem if they remain unphased by true beauty, they can blame themselves or god

in a medium where Best Looking discussions often come down to how many pores you can see on a gruff white dude's nose or how many subdermal triangles he has beneath it, this shit is transcendent; one of those reminders like okami or killer7 that going for SSS style ranks is what it's all about. I don't care about horse testicles shrinking in cold weather, I don't care about HairWorks, I don't care about RTX bullshit — I want this

I want goofy minigames, I want somber paintings, I want cute chibi spritework, and seedy VHS filters. this thing looks amazing, and not a single menu, loading screen, animation, or scene transition shows its face without some unique detail or stylistic divergence. there are AMV interludes, buddy — everyone else needs to pack it up and hit the showers, it's OVER

rarely are visuals this striking leveraged with this much grace and consideration; rarely do aesthetics slither and shapeshift so confidently in aid of such varied goals and tones. that it looks incredible is one thing, but that it's elevated so substantially by its employment is another thing entirely. it takes great pains to bring a work that's equal parts German Folk Horror, Lesbian Dating Sim, Resource Management Plate Spinner, and RPG Maker Adventure to life, and it does so to fabulous results

a fable of desire and longing fittingly made as sumptuous as possible

QUE JOGO FANTASTICO
Preciso começar falando do quão lindo é esse jogo, a arte se remete muito a animes shoujo dos anos 90 se eu estiver errado me corrigem, serio esse jogo é muito lindo não só nos traços mas na gameplay
E não posso esquecer da trilha sonora q é uma das melhores q eu ja ouvi, é muito boa PQP
Pontos negativos pra mim só vi uma pequena mecânica q é bem confusa q envolve pássaros, de resto pra mim é um jogo perfeito no q se propõe
Recomendo demais a todos mesmo aqueles q não curtem esse genero(eu mesmo não curto) e de uma chance.

I'm in love with this game. Absolutely enchanting.

Elephant in the room, this game is gorgeous. I can easily say it's the prettiest game I've ever played. I was taking screenshots constantly of anything and everything. Gorgeous 90s anime aesthetic, and I love how it communicates that this is a prequel to Pocket Mirror which has a more modern style. Also gotta throw in some love for its soundtrack!

Even beyond its aesthetic, Little Goody Two Shoes has a lot going for it. The characters were all easy to get attached to. Elise is such a fun protagonist; she's rude and selfish, but her kindness and ambition make it easy to love her despite her flaws. The three romance options are all interesting and I do expect to replay this sometime, but I gunned for Rozenmarine in this playthrough and didn't learn much about Lebkuchen and Freya. I loved Elise's bond with Rozenmarine, and the explicit queerness was so refreshing.

I can see the gameplay not working for some, but for me it hooked me in. Love the time management aspect and gamifying chores by making them minigames was a nice change of pace. The puzzle segments are what you'd expect from the "RPGMaker haunted house" genre. As a fan of that genre, I love that! It's janky, so expect to die a lot. For me, that was a huge source of the game's charm. Other than a specific segment in the snake dungeon, I had a lot of fun with the puzzles and didn't find it too frustrating.

Everything here worked really well for me! Gorgeous aesthetics that make it stand out and plenty of charm to keep me engaged throughout. Little Goody Two Shoes is one of those games that nothing will be able to match.

lots of games these days look great, but this one is a huge example of the difference between "good graphics" and the beauty resulting from a deliberate aesthetic effort, style and vision.

also, if you were ever wondering how pentiment could be improved upon, right here is your answer: make it more gay and anime.

i can't in good conscience give it 5 stars because i had close to zero fun with any of the actual dexterity based gameplay and i think it's just no good. but i love the game anyway. what a treasure.

I cant stress this enough but this game is a masterpiece,
if i could i would put it in a museum lol. everything is so beautiful, the art, the story, the music, I had so much fun playing every hour of it its soo worth it the story and characters are so amazing and well written i would (and i definitely will) replay this so many times. It has good amounts of cute, fun and scary and they complement each other, even when i got stuck in some parts it didnt feel like a shore it was still enjoyable!
and what makes me even more happy is that the game was made by people from my country and that's something i rarely see!! AstralShift never disappoints :) looking forward for more projects <3

This game is full of things i didn't expect but the biggest are how earnestly and boldly it leans into its yuri and horror aspects. It pulls no punches when it comes to these girls being textually gay as well as having , while not downright disturbing, very good horror scenes.
the level design is really bad like not even rpgmaker bad but it seems to have been made in a nightmare world where iterations of "get to place in time" are things people look for in games. I think it inflated my play time by actually 3 hours and is the reason that as much as i want to i will not be going back and getting any of the other endings anytime soon (i looked them up on youtube)
i kept trying to formulate excuses for the game but i think maybe astral shift needs to hire an actual game designer.
The only other games I can compare this to design wise are "classic" rpgmaker games but those are excused by the fact that they are free, often short games. I payed money for this so yeah there is an expectation there that it would not employ this shit to artificially make the game longer? scarier? more dificult? I actually don't know what the fuck its trying to do.I compare it to rpgmaker horror games because it is clear (almost textual) that it's where this game comes from, but it really irks me when people call it an rpgmaker game, there is a distinction between aligning yourself with that legacy and literally BEING MADE IN THAT ENGINE. There are idiosyncrasies that rpgmaker has that this game surprisingly captures but its not made in the fucking engine. I dont want this to just become a catch all term because i am a huge fan of things made in the engine and as not all games made in it are horror games starring girls not all games that share its aesthetics and mechanics are.
There is however one thing this has in common with "rpgmaker horror" games : theres something about rpgmaker games and the like being so fucking into their own shit that they forget to think of the player. like this game and so many before it will just have actually hard chase sequences right after cutscenes w no checkpoint in between like yeah fuck it get trapped in the time loop nightmare dimension untill you figure out how to do this very specific movement, bitch. its admirable and in this game has to be intended because no way have 10+ years of rpgmaker horror games passed and no dev has thought hey maybe this is infuriating,lliiiike theres something there right? the games not scary but its oppressive its annoying it makes you feel trapped and i think thats kind of beautiful
maybe im just bad at playing games? But it almost feels like getting 100 game overs is part of the game design
esp on parts that seem like they have no way to predict where hits will come from
and every time i finish a night segment and get back into the main game the comical vein that has been pulsating on my forhead retreats and i enter a state of bliss untill the inevitable next night when i will actually take a bite out of my switch.

My favorite thing in this game is the art and insane creativity in presentation. I audibly gasped when I saw the handmade assets. Not gonna say anything else about the art because its actually perfect.

Coming off the heels of Pocket Mirror GoldenerTraum earlier this year, I was very excited to see that LGTS would be releasing so soon after it. I quite enjoyed my time with Pocket Mirror. It wasn't my favorite RPG horror game, but it did have a lot of what I was looking for from the genre, so it quenched my thirst for a time.

That being said, Little Goody Two Shoes is LEAGUES better than Pocket Mirror ever was. I had only found out recently that PM's story was written on the fly as they developed the game, and while that method can work in some situations, I don't think it quite worked for Pocket Mirror. It did, however, do wonders for Little Goody Two Shoes.

Somehow, the lore they crafted specifically for Pocket Mirror works a million times better in LGTS. Rather than being drip fed Elise's story in Pocket Mirror, you get to play out her journey—see everything she went through, and it's just so good.

The overall gameplay is a huge step up as well. There's a whole life sim aspect during the day, with people to talk to, mysteries to solve, and minigames to play. During the night is when the game most closely uh...mirrors Pocket Mirror. It's you usual RPG horror game—something I'm quite fond of—with puzzles, enemies to avoid, and things to collect. It's still a formula I quite enjoy, even long after the RPG horror craze has passed. But there was one "puzzle" in the crow woods that I just fucking LOATHED. There were these shaking trees and birds that would pop out and peck you if you did the wrong thing. But I never figured out what the "right thing" was no matter what I tried. So I just ended up bolting through and tanked the damage. Terrible. I hated it. Thankfully that's the only part about the game I genuinely did not like.

The game isn't really all that scary (barring the serpent woods), but what I felt beyond that was this deep-seated dread. I knew what happened in Pocket Mirror, I knew what was coming, and yet I was powerless to stop it. I just had to sit and watch as Elise ventured further and further into the woods... Okay well there's some alternate good endings as well, but we all know what the true ending is.

The addition of the dating subplot is actually ingenious. You get to know these girls, really understand them—all while you watch their romance blossom. But you still know what's coming. You know what you'll have to do. It really gets you to care about each and every one of them, to really savor every moment you get with them.

Also can I just add how funny it is that there are no male suitors? Like, that kinda shit never happens outside of yuri VNs or lesbian dating sims. Elise is a LESBIAN and there's nothing you can do about it.

Little Goody Two Shoes is a wonderful return to the classic RPG horror genre, with some modern touch-ups, a fantastic story, wonderful characters, GORGEOUS artwork, and a killer soundtrack—anime opening included! (More games should do that.) Absolutely recommend to those who love horror games, lesbians, or Pocket Mirror. Hell, even if you haven't played Pocket Mirror, it works very well as a standalone title.

I initially only played this game because my sisters were talking about it, but I enjoyed this game a lot more than I thought. Visually a feast for your eyes and I was a big fan of the multiple art styles in the game ranging from 90s anime to gilded fairy tale art. It's also my first entry into the horror RPG maker genre of games so I was very intrigued by the playstyle of this game also being a yuri otome x slow life RPG. I actually believe the true horror of this game is living in a society where 'lebkuchen' bread is worth a whole afternoons work (capitalism horror). Keeping the balance between hunger, sanity, and your social reputation and relationships was much scarier than the actual horrors within the game LOL. I can tell a lot of love was put into this game and I will be tuning into astralshifts previous game 'pocket mirror' and their future games

I’m so torn on this game.

On the one hand, the art design is gorgeous, furthering the horror story at its center. It makes fantastic use of the fairy tales that it draws inspiration from, as well as the aesthetic of 80s and 90s shoujo anime. There’s even bits of analog horror in this game, with a CRT scanline filter over the gameplay. This feels like the game version of picking up an anime VHS with a cute cover from your local Blockbuster, loading it into your player, and then realizing you’d accidentally rented a horror OVA instead. I love everything artistically that Little Goody Two Shoes is trying to do, and I’d like to play it again to get more endings and compare notes on how much more sapphic or horrifying the other routes are.

On the other hand, replaying the game would mean that I would have to once again go through what I can only call RPG Maker Horror Game Jank. Despite not being made in that engine, it has all the hallmarks of that style of development with under-explained game mechanics that will kill the player instantly for not understanding them. There’s the puzzle where you get an instant Game Over for not running, despite the game never indicating that you need to run. Or the puzzle where the key to progress is actually in the previous room, despite all other solutions being in the same room up until this point. Or the puzzle where you are killed by birds for not standing under the right tree, except the hitboxes for the death birds are so wide that they’ll kill you for being right as well.

The worst of the bunch is a puzzle towards the end of the game, where you have to walk through a maze in complete darkness because if your lamp is on, you will be killed by statues. However, there are no cues, sound or otherwise, to indicate where you are in the maze, or even if you’re going the right way. According to the official guide from the devs, you’re supposed to quickly light your lamp to get your bearings, but that does not work in practice. No matter where you are, if you light your lamp, the statues find you and you’re dead. There’s a balance that has to be struck between explaining game mechanics and giving the player enough room to figure it out for themselves, but this game does not have that. You either know the solution beforehand or you’re out of luck.

To be fair, the PC version has a patch that addresses a lot of these complaints, but since my version is on the Switch with no update in sight (as of the time of this writing), any replay would mean going through Bird Tree Hell and Total Darkness Death Maze once more. This also makes it hard to recommend.

I love the story - it strikes the perfect tone with this claustrophobic small town, where people will judge you in the same breath that they ask you to do their menial chores. I feel for Elise and her desire to break free from her minigame-ridden life. She can barely scrounge together enough money for a piece of bread at the end of the day and has to rely on the charity of her maybe-girlfriend the nun. She’s alone in the house she used to share with her grandmother, far enough away from the town to not really be a true part of it, but close enough that she has no choice but to put up with them to survive. All of this while a castle is always in the background, her greed always staring her in the face, but her dream far enough away it might as well be on the moon. Of course she takes a Faustian bargain, because all she wants is to get away and be rich, but Elise hasn’t thought through what she needs to give up to achieve that. And then there’s the role of the player. Will we let her go through with this? Will we accept Elise’s choice even as it becomes increasingly clear that she’s reaching a point of no return? Or will we have her turn away at the last moment, perhaps towards something better?

I just wish that this game had a bit more time in the oven before release, so to speak. If the Switch version gets the same updates as the PC version and the darkness maze gets a patch to work as intended, then maybe I’ll feel better recommending it to people. Right now I’m happy that I played this if only for the story. But I sure am sick of walking into instant death traps.

Aesthetically, this game is unmatched. Every moment of the game is an audio-visual feast that I can't help but love, easily the best of the year, and narratively its well-trodden ground but "good enough". If this was simply a visual novel or walk-around-simulator, I'd give it much higher marks.

The issue is that behind all that gloss, this is a really mediocre RPGMaker horror game. Janky hitboxes, unclear uninteresting puzzles, absurdly dull and frustrating mechanics hinder the actual playing of the game. But, what really gets me is one specific mechanic--sanity.

The non-horror segment gameplay revolves around managing your various resource meters, one of which is sanity. Now, sanity is funny in this game, despite the main plot resting on you trying to serve a sort of spooky elder god figure, that doesn't effect it. If you follow the main story only, you can go the entire game never interacting with sanity at all.

No, what effect sanity is every piece of optional content in the game. The various "golden girl" collectibless and the sidequests for the alternate ending being the main two. The game is pretty clearly balanced around having high sanity, so this means trying to interact with the game, well, at all, punishes you. Which I don't actually hate--"you want the golden ending? Play the game a bit harder." is a good tact, I think. BUT, what bothers me is the implementation. See, sanity doesn't actually effect anything mechanically--as long as its not zero(instant loss), you're good. What sanity actually does is darken the screen and give it an annoying border of dark tendrils blocking the screen and more egregiously--it plays this loud spooky chanting over the rest of the audio.

So, as a completionist, I ended up playing the entire game like this. Resource management is rough in the game, so if you're doing the side content sanity naturally ends up being a "dump stat" by its pointless nature, but in doing so you don't get to actually enjoy the game--as I said at the outset, this game sells itself on its audio-visual aspects. This came to a head in one late-game horror dungeon segment that involved every bad rpgmaker cliche you can think of--enemies that spawn randomly, walk faster than you, involve you walking around a very dimly lit area with little landmarks looking for keys, on its own it wouldn't pass muster in any random dlsite game let alone a full-budget title financed by Square Enix. Then you throw on the fact I was doing this while also not being able to see or hear shit due to the sanity and you can imagine.

I didn't touch the game for a month after that. I think if they had made sanity's penaltiy mechanical instead of aesthetic, itd fix the issue a lot, and it was clear an issue because they've apparently patched the game to make sanity more lenient in a patch late last month, but the damage to me at least was done.

Anyways, I look forward to what this studio does in the future, because with some tuning I think this team has potential to make a true masterpiece with some more experience.