PC Critic Reviews

In Their Shoes is a great experience, even if it doesn’t fully deliver as a video game. The seven characters and the situations they have to deal with are beautifully constructed to be both relatable and interesting. The problems they have to deal with will resonate with anyone living in a big modern city, even if they’ve never set foot in Milan or Italy. I like that each moment is relatively short and that each encourages players to replay the previous ones. But there’s nothing complex about the gameplay, which involves paying attention and making dialogue choices. In Their Shoes will appeal to players who love great characters and solid narrative work.

In Their Shoes is a narrative adventure that succeeds in achieving the primary goal of video games: putting the player in someone else’s shoes. Except this time, the “someone else” isn’t a pirate, an astronaut, or a space marine, but an ordinary person (actually seven of them), living in a big city like Milan and facing everyday problems like the high cost of living, rent, job insecurity, or discrimination against minorities. Its strength is undoubtedly its credible, sincere, and relatable writing: the same language that the average person speaks on the subway car taking them to the office in the morning.

It’s obvious that In Their Shoes was made to test and improve a player’s empathy. Although some of us have probably gone through some of the situations we encounter here, many will be outside the average person’s experience. Further, it’s mechanically not a game for everyone — it’s targeting the niche of people who love reading in games, and I suspect it will be repetitive and monotonous for most. However, pedagogically speaking, it’s worth playing as a way of training one’s ability to feel for others, and to be in the shoes of people who are different than us.