Little Goodie Two Shoes is a dark fairy-tale RPG game, using ’80s-’90s anime art style to tell its Brothers Grimm-like story. This choices matter horror adventure, developed by AstralShift and produced by Square Enix, will have you question every choice you make and everyone you meet.

Once upon a time, there lived a girl named Elise from the small village of Kieferberg, and she dreams of a better life, full of riches and status. She lives a simple life toiling away and completing odd jobs for the villagers to scrape together just enough to get by. However, unbeknownst to Elise, her simple life is about to change with the discovery of a pair of ruby red shoes, but will it be for the better? Or will it turn out to be a hellish nightmare? Join Elise on this journey of romance, mystery, horror, and mini-games, as you try to make the right choices, if there are any, to make her wish of everlasting fortune come true.

Playing Little Goodie Two Shoes on the computer makes use of simple controls, but it is compatible with controllers as well. I used both types, finding the controller a little easier, but being a story-based game, either option is very capable. Move, run, interact, cancel, and lantern, as well as a menu for items and the map are the main controls you’ll be using, but other than that, you can sit back and chill while being engrossed in a great story. Something that I didn’t expect is a health and hunger mechanic. If you lose all of your hearts you die. Lose all of your food tokens, you die.

It’s quite interesting. To make it even more difficult, every time you complete tasks or certain story objectives, it changes the day cycle, so you’ll experience morning, mid-morning, midday, afternoon, dusk, night, and nightmare, otherwise known as midnight. So, if you do not manage your food properly, and you happen to complete a quest on a near-empty stomach, you could accidentally get a game over. To stop that from happening, you need to buy food, and for that, you need cold hard cash, so you’ll need to get your hands dirty, and the villagers have plenty of work for you in the form of mini-games.

I enjoyed these mini-games, except the rat kisser game. That one gave me a strange feeling, one of unyielding rage, however, it was still fun. To drive home that retro feel, all of the mini-games are styled like old arcade games, like the apple catching game where you move from side to side and try to catch the falling apples but dodge everything else. You can also spend your time romancing fellow village girls, as Elise is not interested in the smelly males, and the cute dates you go on are all heartwarming. You can see Elise’s defences lower the closer she gets to them, becoming more vulnerable, as some might say.

Now to my favourite part – visuals and sound. Happiness can sometimes be hard to come by, especially nowadays. Recession, the cost of living, and war are only a few of the terrible things happening around the world. The intro alone helped me forget about the woes of the world and lifted my spirits. Beautiful doesn’t even begin to describe this game, and the nostalgia hit I received from the cutscenes left a tear in my eye.

Everything screams anime from the ’80s-’90s. I don’t know if they meant this, but there is a watermark line that pops up horizontally on the screen like you used to get on VHS tapes. The whole art style is phenomenal and suits the dark Brothers Grimm vibe perfectly, especially when you do get to the nightmarish scenes. *Chefs kiss* I do wish it was fully voice-acted instead of constant one-liners as they get overused after a while. If I have to hear Elise yell “Miffy!” again, I might lose my mind.

I cannot fault the music at all. It is perfect. The intro has a full anime-style intro song, each part of the day has its very own sound, and even different areas have a separate soundtrack. One moment you’ll be in the village, where everything is bubbly and happy with an upbeat melody, and the next thing, you move to a darker area at midnight and the tone changes to a sinister symphony. It is pretty hard to fully describe the sounds, but the cherry on top is that over the music there are actually singers. Well, not singing, but humming, and it follows along with the music with “Lalalas.” I don’t know what the word for that is, but it somehow adds so much more impact to the music, and if you know what I mean, please get in the comments and educate me.

This sweet yet spooky game blew me away. I had a feeling that it was going to be pretty good, but it smashed all of my expectations. Well done, AstralShift! My hats off to you. This game hits all the right marks with fun and just enough difficulty to keep it interesting, and a story that could be an anime by itself. I would watch it, (hint, hint) and with ten possible endings, it will give you plenty of chances to find the secret that lies in the woods.

Written by: Adam Brasher