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.

Little Goody Two Shoes feels like a lost cult gem from the SEGA Saturn era, with its hand painted backdrops, pixel art & somewhat obscure game mechanics

Part life-sim, part witch dating simulator and part survival horror - the game blends all three into something larger than the sum of its parts. This is mainly due to the overwhelming atmosphere of nostalgia - if you’ve ever watched 90’s anime.

It can feel like the games controls / engine can’t quite live up to what it expects you to do in the “nightmare” sections - but if anything, this almost adds to the feeling of playing an older gen game

An amazing lesbian dating sim with great characters, a pleasant 90s anime artstyle with beautiful environments that made me appreciate the love this game has as I acquired all achievements, and that horror aspects that really rubs in that "doomed by the narrative" aspect as Elise pushes herself into a situation she may or may not regret dearly. Another thing this game is majorly held up by is the atmosphere, sprinting through the day and being apart of a small, anxious village that strongly hold religious and cultural beliefs. The endings are powerful, tearjerkers, and showed how real the relationship between Elise and her dates are. 10/10 artistic masterpiece of a horror game for 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.

Girlie Game of the Yuri.
This game is a mishmash of so many different influences in both its gameplay and presentation that it's amazing how well everything meshes together. You might think it would be a mess or they would need to sand down the different parts to make it work, but everything sticking out works to make it so unique.
The gameplay is a mix of dating sim and stat time management, minigames, and elevated RPG Maker puzzle & exploration moments. It all mostly meshes well together, technically I'm mixed on the RPGM segments, though. They do seem a bit unfair and trail and air with their puzzles, but the damage is easily heal-able and plays into your health being another state to think about.
The presentation is so immaculate. You'll have fairy tale book cutscenes and areas along with full motion anime cutscenes and stop motion dolls. The character art and cgs are all in a shoujo style I've never really seen replicated anywhere else. Did you know there's multiple musical segments?
There's so much craft and vision put into this game, I Love It.

I LOVE THIS GAME…

…but it also pissed me the hell off kinda.

I don’t typically do dating sims (because i’m not a freak) but I’m realizing the dating system in Persona has really spoiled me. Leveling up relationships being entirely dependent on dialogue choices really screwed with me here, because Elise is a b-word either way, so how am I supposed to know which choice is the “good” one. I couldve definitely just save-scummed it, but I really thought it was Persona style dates where picking the right dialogue levels you up a little faster, but you will level up regardless just by choosing to go on the date. I try not to rely on guides too much these days but there is a guide for this out there that I wish I had used.

I have some other little grievances but they’re less significant and I don’t want that negativity clouding my review anymore. This game is so gorgeous and warm, I haven’t wanted to live in a game world this much since Gravity Rush 2. A lot of games have promo and concept art that is packed with detail and care, but the game itself has to sacrifice some of that for various reasons. Every frame of this game feels so lovingly crafted, I could spend hours pouring over it. The soundtrack really sells the fairytale picture-book style. I don’t know know if I would say the game has a strong narrative, but there are so many great moments and the characters were likeable enough to carry me through.

Suuuuper pretty. I want the art book for this game so bad but it doesn't exist. Interesting story. I loved the time management aspect even though it stressed me out (and in hind sight I made some dumb decisions.)
Unfortunately the action sections are so bad I have to knock off a star. They're all so hard in a BS way, not just a challenging way. Also they are all after unskippable cut scenes, so every reattempt is agony.
There are 10 endings, but I won't even try to get them because I will be forced to play this game again which I liked, but also hated.

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.

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.

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’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.

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.

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.

Very engaging horror/adventure/romance experience. This game makes the simple act of running around talking to NPCs feel exciting and intriguing throughout. The presentation is also top-notch, with a gorgeous soundtrack and art style that combines hand-painted backgrounds with 2D pixel-art sprites. It all comes together quite nicely.

There are maybe a couple minor nitpicks I have - mostly connected to the way the witching hour segments work (it can be annoyingly vague to figure out how to proceed at times, as well as irritating to deal with certain enemies - thankfully a recent patch made this less painful to deal with), as well as how the overall collection of endings are grouped up/constructed. I also wish the game let you fastforward text more consistently.

But really, as an overall experience, I had a great time going through this. It weaves both charming, uplifting moments together with truly horrific, disturbing scenes, and keeps you guessing what will happen next. I think it's well worth giving a shot, if you're prepared.

(I got 100% achievements/all endings)