Shoe it All! Análise (Xbox Series X|S & PC)

Shoe it All! is the kind of game that you find yourself playing at a quarter past midnight, usually in a pair of sandals, with ramen noodles down your priceless tee, and inadvertently drifting between sleep and a lucid dream. I suppose it’s a type of bargain bin find that you can’t help but look at. You know for a fact that it won’t scratch an itch, and that you won’t see it on the front page of a prestigious magazine. It just sort of hovers between a rock and a hard place—in the back catalog of weird and wonderful projects that you love to hate and hate to love. And it is, and quite rightly so, a weird game. But that doesn’t make it a bad thing. If anything, I can’t help but applaud its commitment to the art of shoe flinging. Someone has to fly that flag. Right?

Think of Angry Birds for a second. Picture the flailing birds, the toppling structures and the slingshot, and then replace them with a shoe, a swing, and a cage of apples, a stop sign, or just about any other inanimate object that might align with a bizarre hallucination. In some ways, this is Shoe it All—a liminal slingshot-like experience in which you, well, kick your shoe off and smash things with its sole. And if you think that there is more to it than that, then I hate to break it to you, but there isn’t. Eight year olds will love it, though.

Remember the days where you would see how high you could go on a swing, and then “accidentally” kick your shoe off, usually in the general direction of your nearest friend? Well, as it turns out, Shoe it All! is the digital equivalent of that same adolescent pastime. In this playground, though, you aren’t aiming your size eights at a random student, but at a barricade of items that make no sense whatsoever—a ventilation shaft on a rope, for example. Like Angry Birds, the objective is as bone-headed as it is annoyingly more-ish: to fling your shoe, and to target all of the usual weak spots to make things topple. There’s a little more to it than that, but you get the general idea.

Gameplay-wise, what you see here is what you get: a two-button experience that primarily focuses on two simple actions: swinging, and kicking. With one hand, you can tap the left or right button to build speed, and with the other you can aim your shoe and release it. If, say, you’re not aiming said shoe at a target of some sort, then you’re using it to land trick shots. There’s a point chart, star rating system, and an opportunity to replay levels. Simply put, though, you have a rather pin-headed job on your hands: to hit things. The more shoes you use, the lower your score, and so on and so forth.

It feels unnecessary to label Shoe it All as a bit of an oddball, because you can gather just as much without needing to gloss over the fine details. As conceptually simple as it is, it does bring about some strange ideas, with some absurdly complex stages, nonsensical props and totally bonkers animations. It’s flicking a shoe at a whole bunch of objects, and so, it’s only natural that it bridges the gaps with some form of filler. It just so happens that the filler in question is a lot of unusual transitions and in-your-face catchphrases. Weirdly, though, it works here. Go figure.

It’s best not to think of a game like Shoe it All! as an excellent way to cater to multiple cravings at once, but rather, a cheap and effective way to burn off steam for an hour or two before booting up another. Because let’s face it, it’s a pretty niche experience that leaves a lot to be desired. As humorous and as oddly addicting as it often seems, there are still restrictions here that prevent it from being a brilliant game. For a chuckle, it foots the bill incredibly well, with some comical effects, level designs and phrases that collectively put in the effort to make you smile. But that’s about as far as it goes.

To give credit where it’s due, Shoe it All does have some oddly creative moments. Rather than simply force feeding you a predictable narrative with similar levels and the same boring hook, each of its “puzzles” ask that you weigh our your options before taking to the swing and unloading your shoes. See, while most of the game is about dismantling a certain object from a random structure, a lot of the challenges require you to think outside of the box, so to speak. How can you drop an apple on a stranger’s head from the safety of a swing? Can you force a chain reaction by hitting one small target? Will the world come tumbling down if you miss a shot? Trial and error, really, is the only viable option here.

Suffice it to say that, as far as niche puzzlers go, Shoe it All is a game that knows how to laugh at its own shortcomings. It isn’t a visual representation of the perfect timepiece, and it definitely isn’t a masterpiece in the puzzle field, for that matter. It’s evidently and unapologetically ridiculous — but that’s sort of the point, I think. And as for everything else that make up its world—the absurd physics and the exaggerated animations, for example—well, they’re just cherries on top of what is, with all due respect, a pointless snack. And yet, I can’t help but love it.

Verdict

Shoe it All! boots its way through to the backyard of weird and wonderful puzzlers with a trove of random set pieces and shoes, comical transitions and over-the-top butterfly effects, all in an effort to create a short but stupidly entertaining experience that will leave a print on a lot more than your forehead and your sole. It’s evidently an unusual concept, but for what it’s worth, it leans into its eccentricity well. Still, it’s a niche game, and therefore it’s best not to expect the be all, and all of puzzle games here.