Foot Hacks: PrincesSize Is A Brutal Footwear Puzzle
If the shoe fits
PrincesSize [itch.io link] is a Cinderalla-themed game which combines the grisliness of fairystories, the simple attraction of tangram puzzles and a touch of "oh good god, the pain of attractive but horrifically uncomfortable footwear intended for special occasions".
In PrincesSize you are presented with the outline of a fancy shoe atop a fancy cushion and tasked with inserting a character's in-game foot into that outline. The foot, as initially presented, will not fit. At all.
Luckily you have a knife and a can-do attitude and thus begin carving chunks off your hoof, rearranging them to fit the shoe and attempting to convince the prince that you are his beloved.
It's an idea you might recognise from Into The Woods, where Christine Baranski's evil stepmother hacks away at her biological daughters' feet in order to convince the prince that one of them is his love. The act of forcing a shoe to fit also reminded me of some of the casualties you'd see at fashion week - plastered and bruised and squished into a sample size - or that bit at the end of a ball or a wedding when shoes which rounded out the outfit to perfection become too painful and awful to countenance putting back on and end up held by the heels in one hand or kicked into a corner.
This incarnation came into being as part of the Public Domain Game Jam and is the work of Ido Adler, Alon Lipelis, Shir Hadar Oz and Ohad Reshef. It's a tiny game with only a handful of levels and the collision physics sometimes gets pretty wonky but I do rather like it.
The rating system for how well you've done in each round seems to be that the fewer cuts you make, the less queasy the prince feels when looking at the bleeding mess you've stuffed into a stiletto. If you are eyerolling at that and thinking, "Yes, the poor prince; for really it is he who suffers in a world of unrealistic beauty standards and the pressure to adhere to them in order to achieve a much-vaunted fairytale ending..." you might rather enjoy the concluding challenge.