Little Red Riding Hood Goes Shopping is an adult-oriented 2D Platformer. In it, we play as the titular Red Hood on a grand quest to deliver a vibrator to Grandma. All of the story is told via a Prologue option in the main menu. It is shown via child drawings that have a real fever dream/serial killer vibe to them and are fully voice acted in Japanese. This is not your toned down children’s version of the tale. Remember how the original tale had cannibalism and Red was forced to get naked before climbing into bed with the wolf? It mirrors that kind of old-timey debauchery.
The story is far from important. We could simply jump straight into the game and be greeted with the Mario themed aesthetic. Anyone could pick this up and play due to its simplicity. You move with the cursor keys and you jump with the spacebar. There are no more actions to perform or keys to remember. If you have a Dinput controller, you can press the E key to switch to gamepad mode and play that way. It will not work with the Xinput Xbox controllers, sadly. As you get used to the controls, you will notice something curious. If you do not move your character for a few seconds, she will start having lewd thoughts.
Your first stage is set in a lovely green zone and your enemies consist of mushrooms & turtles. It has a relatively innocent mood to it, barring Red daydreaming about taking a penis every time you stop moving. That is until you run across a living tree that wouldn’t look out of place in a Kirby game. If you get hit with its spit attack, you will find Red dissolving under its acidic nature in a violent manner. This title does feature some light Ryona. Many of your deaths will be quite violent. A few examples are a ghost will enter your body and inflate your head until it explodes, or a clown will twist off your arms then eat you. They are over quickly, though it may disturb some people.
While it looks like Mario, it controls closer to old DOS platformers. I attribute that feeling to the large sprites and the lack of being able to build up any movement momentum. You will always move at the same pace and the challenge comes not from landing jumps, but dealing with enemies or other hazards. There are two ways to deal with an enemy. The one you will be largely using is the ability to jump on their heads to defeat them. Some are immune to this, however. In those cases, your only ability to defend yourself is from stomping on a turtle and then jumping on its shell to fling it toward your foe.
A good portion of the time, there are no turtles around. You will then have to figure out a way to lure it into a position where you can jump over and avoid it. Easier said than done in later stages. It starts off easy enough, yet the gloves will be off soon enough. Having just been melted apart by a cheery-looking tree, you can just sense that foreboding atmosphere as you progress further. By the second world, the sky will turn crimson and it will start to ramp things up a bit. The third world is when it starts to get serious. You will find yourself underground with a freakish face in the background and a bladed pendulum a couple of feet from your face. This is the point where I imagine most will decide whether they want to continue or not. In terms of difficulty, it leans far closer to Mario hacks like ‘Kaizo Mario World’ than any actual Nintendo release.
Everything is placed in such a way as to be a hindrance to the player. You will always feel like you are one wrong movement away from death, yet it is the type of challenge that provokes that ‘one more try’ sensation. It is not the trollish, sucker-punching type of cheap manual placement of hazards. The keyword there being manual. Some levels feature infinitely respawning enemies that spawn relating to your location. Depending on where you are standing, some situations are flat-out impossible to survive. This is also largely due to how zoomed in the camera is. You often can’t see ahead of you and are forced to take leaps of faith, only to find yourself in said impossible situations. It mostly occurs in later worlds, starting at around world five.
That picture up above perfectly showcases this issue. You can’t see a thing. With enemies spawning in relation to you, me standing on that ledge often resulted in a certain flying enemy type floating above the viewable play area, and insta-killing you when trying to jump across. Quite a few of the later stages felt like I beat this game via learning its technical aspects, rather than conquering the stage itself. You got to learn where to stand and how fast to move forward, as well as have a good amount of luck. That is in addition to dealing with all the hand-placed hazards, which are likely the ones to do you in while trying to avoid a near sure-death collision course with a spawned in foe. It desperately needed one of two things. A: To have fixed spawn points instead of spawning foes directly across whatever elevation you happen to be on. Or B, a zoomed out camera that reveals more of the screen so you can plan on how to deal with it before it’s too late.
This isn’t the type of game able to have those types of flaws that leave so much to luck. You only have five lives to get through all 31 of the levels. Once you lose them, it is back to the beginning, no continues. Every life is invaluable and risking your survival to collect another one precariously placed in a stage is very satisfying. If you manage to stomp on eight foes before touching the floor, you get a one-up as well. Both feats are usually pretty difficult and there is no going back to prior levels to farm for more. The later levels do feature a ton more opportunities to gather lives to counteract their sheer difficulty. An interesting thing to note here is that if you die in a none violent fashion on your final life, you will get an H scene. It is unlikely to happen, the most dangerous hazards and enemies will leave you in pieces. Even a death pit you fall into doesn’t activate it.
Speaking of the hentai aspects of this title, they are not implemented well. Aside from that previously mentioned death sex scene issue that is fairly harmless, the other ways they implement them are counter-intuitive to the gameplay. Recall how Red starts thinking lewd thoughts when you stand still for a few seconds? That thought bubble obscures a sizable portion of your already limited view. Worse still, is that it activates to the right, where enemies or obstacles you need to get past likely are. To add to its current problem pile even further, her thoughts are pretty much just spoilers. There are eight unique short CG animations in this game. All of them are showcased via Red’s thoughts, making it a “meh” moment when you get to the limited H content properly. Sure, you see more of the picture, but you’ve already seen a sizable portion of it containing the important parts.
All eight of the sex scenes are animated and voice acted, both in Red’s thoughts and their actual appearances. They are very short, however. Each have a few seconds of animation put on loop and there is no finish state i.e ejaculation. It is the same image from start to finish, making the decision to spoil them all rather stunning. The final inclusion of hentai is found in the ‘boss battles’ against your nemesis Black Hood. This is the part where it severely hurts the gameplay, and immediately lead me to the decision there was no way in heck will I be playing through this game in a legit manner. Black Hood challenges you to a picture matching mini-game. You have to randomly pick two cards, try to remember what they are, and then attempt to match all of them with their respective symbols.
If you win that challenge then Black Hood gets sexually abused, if you lose then it is you that suffers that fate. Sure, fair enough. The problem here is that it doesn’t matter how many lives you had or how far into the game you are. If you lose this random challenge, it is an instant game-over. That is absurd. Nothing else in the game instantly ends the game. Why they decided to make it this way I can not fathom. This sudden mini-game, that isn’t even in the same genre, would have been enough insult to injury even if it were to take a single life and had you make your way back to the end of that stage. But ending your entire run despite how many lives you tried to collect in an attempt to persevere until you manage to reach the credits? Just no. That goes far past simply trying to offer a challenge and is plainly cheap.
I honestly would have dropped the game right there if they didn’t offer an easy way to cheat. If you press the Tab key on the main menu, you can open a level select screen and return to the stage where you left off or anywhere else. You can also access the Memory mode to view all the H scenes when you press Tab, even if you haven’t beaten the title to properly unlock it. I did this repeatedly. I am dreadful at that mini-game and would not be willing to make my way back from the beginning each time. There are three of these Black Hood instances in total scattered throughout all the stages. Thankfully she does not show up in the final level as I was fearing. That stage was a real pain to figure out as it had you make use of the randomly spawning enemies to clear several jumps.
The fact that I stuck with this game is testament that it has something going for it. Its gameplay is solid and I never felt like the controls where my cause of death. They are tight and responsive, though hit-boxes can be iffy sometimes. I enjoyed it and its high challenge. Even with skipping directly to the levels where I lost to Black Hood and giving myself extra lives at times, it feels like I need a document signed by the Japanese president himself to prove I even managed to see the ending. All it really needs to increase its rating is to remove the insane penalty for the Black Hood challenges, and zooming out the camera a fair bit to see what you are diving into, to remove luck from the equation. Its flaws are severe, yet there is certainly a title worth playing underneath them all if the most critical of them are sorted.
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