Little Goody Two Shoes (2023)

i'll start off by saying that this game is truly one of a kind. astralshift has a very specific, 90s anime style and it plays like a nintendo ds game. i love the sound effects and the music, especially the opening to the game. i also really enjoyed all of the little arcade minigames for work. the world is gooorg and i truly wish there were more games like it (besides pocket mirror).

it took me an absurdly long time to finish this game. every time i got to the witching hour, i dreaded it because i knew i would have to do some stupid, unenjoyable puzzle. there was one witching hour with moths where i died well over 10 times because i was unaware of a mechanic the game had never even introduced before. it literally was so ridiculous that when i reached the final stretch (friday and saturday) i googled the guide.

the story itself is pretty good imo. it's your average run of the mill female protagonist gets roped into a really messed up scheme orchestrated by the "devil" basically. it's up to her whether or not she goes through with it. it really was just those stupid ass puzzles that were not doing it for me. especially wednesday and thursday's witching hour. possibly the worst experience i have ever had trying to get through a game, and thursday was only unfun because of the fact i literally could not see where i was going.

anyway i'm done with it and i got my happy ending so thank god.

Well, sadly here's another game that I love looking at but don't really love actually sitting down to play. The presentation is easily among my favorites of this year, with some great art inspired by classic anime, and occasional musical numbers or dream sequences that mix in even more visual styles. The music generally is really good, and the dialogue and Japanese voice acting give some of the main characters a charm that lives up to their nice designs. Even something as simple as the game's "press start" screen is a lovely moment every time when booting up the game.

Despite some good moments, especially early on, the overarching story unfortunately didn't really hold my interest. A lot of the appeal ends up being driven by the conversations between some of the main characters, which can definitely be fun. Gameplay brings about as much variation as the art style, mostly a standard-ish adventure game, but also with some time/resource/meter management, more active horror-inspired sections with enemies and puzzles, and even pixel-art arcade minigames. It sounds great, and at first it actually is, but as the game went on, I slowly lost interest in those parts as well.

The horror sections have a lot of frustrating trial-and-error and resource drain, really all I can say there, just not very enjoyable despite containing cool surreal moments. The little minigames force you to repeat them on different days, and while a couple of them were fun the first time in a Mario Party sort of way, none was really fun after those first 1-2 tries. More generally, the day-by-day structure split into these different sections results in pacing that feels too slow despite how short the game is, and some of the daily meter management you have to do is a bit tedious.

I like the game enough that I can recommend trying it out if it looks intriguing. It has a demo that gives a decent taste of the experience, though you should note that the demo doesn't carry progress into the full game. I could see others being more into the actual game and story part than I am. The good things about it are very memorable and make me wish I liked the rest more, but I could tell with how little of the game I got through each day that for me something wasn't 100% right.