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…

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.

The gameplay is not that bad but some mechanics can be chaotic and I discourage the use without a walkthrough. Otherwise is cool. 6.5/10

It needs some caution and strategy to reach good endings. Like the girls.

Really engrossing atmosphere and some of the routes blew me away, the mechanics are interesting but made the replaying ultimately tedious, detracting a bit from the drive to explore some really great narrative. (Time played not accurate, probably spent a day idle)