Black Closet

This was a good idea squandered into a mind-numbingly boring game. The basic premise is that you’re the head of the student council as an extremely prestigious high-class private school and you’ve been tasked with keeping order. You investigate rumours and manage events and in the process protect the school’s reputation. To investigate, you send out the other members of the student council to interact with students. There are also overarching plots, such as sussing out a traitor among your own. Unfortunately the game is just a long series of skill checks. You send someone to investigate, and they either fail and don’t find anything or pass and get you the info you need to progress. There’s no deduction gameplay at all. Further, I was really disappointed to find that the plotlines are all repeatable and RNG-based. So like, the traitor on the council is selected randomly, and while they each have reasons for being the traitor when they’re selected, this means there’s no actual story thruline or consequences since it’s all random. The cases you have to investigate are interesting until you realize they, too, repeat ad nauseum. The result is nothing matters. You either pass or fail s…

its unfair on its normal difficulty, but that's the point. you're someone with little power and a lot of responsibility, who was elected to be a scapegoat. there is an easier difficulty setting too, which i appreciate. really good detective/management game, makes your choices seem really meaningful because sometimes there's no right answer, and sometimes the best course of action is to not investigate a mystery. really feels like a noir. everyone's morally gray, you don't know who to trust, and at the start of the game there is always one randomly-selected traitor that you have to unmask. the artstyle's inconsistent but it does get the point across. i recommend going to settings and clicking the help button to see the game's manual, it is really useful. as of writing this, its on sale for $5, so you should absolutely buy this at this price.

A wonderful, causal mystery game that keeps you guessing.

Girls hide their secrets A dean must sort truth from lies School holds its own war

I just want to get the negatives out of the way first, the UI can get really annoying, it does get a bit repetitive, and some aspects (loyalty, scaling, reputation, traitor, romance) don't seem quite tuned enough... BUT I think it's got a really addictive gameplay loop so I don't mind the repetition, it's got really charming art/designs, and in general it's just got a really fun point & click system. I would love it it were more expansive, but it's clearly a very small budget game and for that I love it. I want someone to fund whoever made this to make a bigger version of the game (with a bigger team) because it's very very fun with a great concept imo It's a bit like the gameplay for Dispatch which I said back then I really love, it doesn't have quite as much nuance, but it's got WAY more of the actual gameplay and WAY less budget so I love it

Oh yeah, good game. Fun to learn the mechanics of who to send where and why, but maybe takes a few runs/failures to get the hang of it. Interesting little stories for each of the characters and routes and some compelling decisions to be made.