Corpse Party, 2Dark, Tokyo Dark and Yomawari: These titles tend to come to mind for lo-fi horror games, where the pixelated look produces imagery and a vibe that may not be piled on with realistic gore but remain very unsettling experiences nonetheless. The horror is readily apparent, while the tone starts off dark and never offers any reprieve. Like those aforementioned titles, Little Goody Two Shoes is a horror game, but it employs so many other disparate elements that the overall game feels distinct.

The game is set in the small German village of Kiefelberg, and the story starts off like a fairy tale from The Brothers Grimm. One day, an old woman was out picking mushrooms from the nearby forest when she heard the cries of a baby girl. There's no parent in sight, so she raised the child as her own. Time passed, and the relationship between the old woman and the little girl, now named Elise, was happy. Time would eventually claim the old woman's life, leaving Elise alone and forced to do odd jobs to survive. One night, a strange woman breaks into Elise's home, but our protagonist decides to house the trespasser — a choice will alter Elise's life in unexpected ways.

The gameplay is a mix of different genres. A good chunk of the game plays out like a life simulator. Elise can spend her day wandering in or around the outskirts of the village, talking to various people or buying things like food and matchsticks. She can also try to discover certain things that will advance the story, such as a note in the town church or a pair of ruby red shoes hidden in her backyard. Some events that you can participate in will advance the day, and that's important since there are six segments per day; some events will become unavailable once a day's segment has passed. With the inability to do everything at once, the game forces you to be choosy about what you do, especially with the tease of 10 different endings. Each playthrough clocks in the low double digits.

The activities are pretty varied. Choosing to do odd jobs for the villagers takes you to an arcade cabinet that's stylized for the time period, where you get to play a number of minigames based on chores. One game may have you fetching eggs from a chicken coop. Another game has you catching falling apples; you try to get the good red ones while avoiding the bad purple ones. Yet another game has you chopping wood, and you need to be careful to chop only wood while kicking away any stray animals or objects that aren't timber. Each game gives you a number of coins based on your performance, and that seems trivial since it takes some effort to botch the job and get a low score. It feels pretty easy to get an A rating and a substantial number of coins for your efforts.

Aside from doing menial tasks for other villagers, you can also spend your time trying to romance one of three girls in the game. Lebkuchen is the devout servant of the local church who tries to playfully rile up Elise. Freya is Elise's friend and is fond of giving her gifts, while Rozenmarine is the person who broke into Elise's house and serves as her pseudo-maid for her transgressions. Each date is simple, as you head to the appointed place at the appointed time and watch the equivalent of a visual novel scene until the end. The scenes are cute thanks to everyone's awkwardness or obliviousness to what's going on, and they provide another reason for multiple playthroughs since it's impossible to fully woo more than one girl at a time.

While this all seems like the makings of a cozy little adventure, certain elements pull you away from that notion. For one thing, you have a hunger meter, and letting any segment of the day pass will always take away one of the five loaves of bread that represent your hunger meter. The screen pulsates white when you're down to your last loaf, so you aren't suddenly caught off guard if you die from hunger. You must have a cache of food at all times.

The characters signify that the game isn't saccharine sweet. Elise isn't exactly a likable heroine due to her crass nature and desire for wealth at the expense of her fellow villagers. Her behavior would make her more like a villain if it weren't for the fact that the villagers remind her of how grateful she should be for any pittance that she receives. It makes you choose Elise's stance as the "lesser of two evils"; it isn't what many people would expect when thinking about a modern fairy tale.

The icy relationship between the villagers and Elise fuels the suspicion meter, another gauge to pay attention to if you want to survive. The village is full of superstitious people, with a few being more fervent than others. It's a big belief that there's a witch in the woods who's ready to strike at any moment. They are immediately suspicious of strangers, and you housing Rozenmarine tips things against you when they discover it. Dialogue choices become important, as you don't want them thinking you're housing a witch. Maintaining a consistent lie about her origins is necessary to keep this level high. The same goes for a certain character, Muffy, who stalks you to no end and knows what you're doing but will keep quiet if you bribe her by fulfilling requests. Letting this meter deplete will send you to a "game over" screen, where the villagers tie you down in the forest so the elements can kill you.

Despite the presence of enjoyable minigames and dating, Little Goody Two Shoes is still a horror game, and you get hints of that beyond the aforementioned suspicion meter. Some hints are subtle, like moving to certain spots and seeing the screen emulate the old VHS effect of a tape hitting a bad spot. Others have you encounter characters that only you can see, or you could have brief encounters with monsters. The segments are brief but are a good preview of what to expect later on.

The final section of the day, the witching hour, is when the horror element really kicks in. The environments vary greatly, from the inside of a dilapidated mansion to sections of the forest that have been warped and twisted in different ways. You may encounter scenes resulting from your actions, some of which you have to do since you are trying to fulfill the wishes of a demon. As in some horror games, your protagonist lacks the ability to fight back. You're going to focus on avoiding enemies or trying to duck out of their way when they attack. You have a trusty lamp powered by matchsticks to navigate the world, and while letting the light die out won't instantly kill you, the environment becomes almost impossible to see. You will succumb to death fairly easily without a light source. The witching hour also introduces two new meters: health and sanity. Like the other meters, letting any of them go empty results in death. It might seem like too many meters to juggle, but it works fine in practice since enemies don't take off a chunk of each meter when you get hit. The lack of stealth mechanics means that you aren't fumbling around with the controls and accidentally getting yourself hurt.

These elements create a deceptive horror game in the same vein as titles like Pony Island or Doki Doki Literature Club. The wild tonal shifts keep you uneasy as you go from laughing at the absurd minigames to being disturbed by the imagery and story. It works quite well in keeping players interested in what's going on. You'll get curious about what macabre situation you'll encounter next, which makes for an overall great horror experience.

There are a few issues that players will have with Little Goody Two Shoes. A good deal of the dialogue can't be skipped, which may be fine for an initial playthrough but can get annoying if you're replaying it for the other endings. Item use isn't automatic, so expect to go into menus often to do mundane tasks like using items or refilling a meter. A good chunk of the puzzles require trial and error to solve, as the solutions are simple but spread out or too obtuse to understand. The same can apply when trying to traverse some environments unscathed, as it sometimes isn't clear why you can dodge enemies in one moment but still get hit at another moment while using the same technique. You'll be glad that the game has multiple save slots, but you'll still be annoyed by the fact that all saving is manual, especially if you neglected your meters at an inopportune time.

The presentation is both excellent and quite varied. The overall style is reminiscent of the sprite-based titles of the 32-bit era, especially given the viewpoint, loads of foreground elements, and a rich tapestry of colors. The animations aren't ultra smooth, but they are good and fit in well. Go to the cut scenes, and the graphical style varies quite wildly. The fully animated scenes go back and forth between a 4:3 aspect ratio to a 16:9 one, and the animation style feels like anime from the '90s, with characters being done in sharp angles with pointed noses, large eyes, and hair of ridiculous lengths. Some scenes go from chalk-drawn characters to live action puppetry, which may remind some of the scattershot style of cut scenes in the likes of Amped 3 and Crash: Mind Over Mutant. It's jarring to see the shift, but it also matches the game's tonal shifts.

On the audio front, the game features both Japanese and English voice-overs, but the amount of speech being delivered is limited to key phrases and a few cut scenes, making the choice more trivial compared to other games with a vocal multi-language feature. The music is also quite nice and does well in matching the mood for the given day without feeling overwhelming.

The title was already marked as Verified for the Steam Deck prior to its release, and owners of that device will be glad to know that the game works without any real compromises. It runs at 1280x720 instead of the device's full resolution, but you'll barely notice since the game likes to change aspect ratios or go into cut scenes quite often. The frame rate is locked at 60fps, which is excellent. On a full charge, the battery life hovers close to four-and-a-half hours, which gives you a good deal of gameplay time.

Little Goody Two Shoes works well because it incorporates many different elements while still being engaging. The humor contrasts well with the horror, as do the visual novel dating elements when combined with the survival, horror, and puzzling-solving sections. The story is both horrifying and entertaining, making it a perfect fit for those who favor moody unease instead of gore. Genre fans looking for something wildly different from other entries in the genre or who want something subversive would really enjoy Little Goody Two Shoes.

Score: 8.0/10