Oh, further OT:
Black Closet
Oh. My. Gods. It's awesome. So addictive. OK, so first of all, it's a game. Second, I can't really nail the style but it's a cross between a visual novel and a strategy. To more properly explain what kind of strategy - it's more along the lines of a board game or maybe (were we to stay to video game examples) sort of XCOM-ish. Not entirely, but sorta. I don't really know what the genre is called (if anything) - I've played some others that are sort of similar. Long Live the Queen probably being the closest and the most recent one that I've played (and also the one whose name I recall).
At any rate, the premise is that you are a the student council president (think Japanese schools in anime) and you are in charge of a high class school. Your objective is to preserve the name of your school. It's done by a neat turn based resource allocation strategy gameplay. Namely, each week, you get a couple of cases to deal with - some could be finding missing property, others about uncovering who drew graffiti, others still could be about investigating cults that spring up in school. Usually, if you don't deal with them, they reach the public and your school loses reputation - if it reaches 0, you lose the game and are used as a scapegoat, so the school can keep its image. So, to deal with the cases, you have 5 minions at your disposal that would do the dirty work for you, and you can allocate them to various tasks. They can interrogate, and investigate students involved in the cases, as well as punish, silence, or reward some - whatever it takes to keep the shady stuff under lid.
The resource allocation part comes when you have just so much manpower at your disposal. You are not going to solve every case, if you stretch your resources thin, you may even not solve more than that. Some cases you may just have to leave and take the blow for, as long as you can complete others. And this is another neat thing - failure is an option. Heck, you'd very rarely "succeed" - at the end of each case, you get graded from A to F[footnote]with higher grades, you get more skill points which you can later use to train your minions[/footnote]. F is obviously the worse but interestingly, you may not get it as often as you would imagine. On the other end of the scale, A is the best but it's hard to get this grade consistently. A lot of times you would finish a case with missteps. Sometimes you would even have cases blow up and reach the public but even then you may get, like, a D because they weren't really that severe. Or, heck, a B or C if the cases weren't really anything noteworthy to begin with. Which is another cool thing - the cases are randomly generated, yet they still follow a pattern - you can have a stolen necklace case that turns out it was just the owner misplacing it. Or not.
Anyway, I did mention how you only have 5 minions at your disposal, didn't I? And even with them, you might be stretched thin. Well, one of them is a traitor and works against you. Yep. You also have to monitor them and find out who it is before it's too late. Oh, and even though in story mod[footnote]there also seems to be a custom mode where you set up parameters for the game and I think you can even pick minions. But I only know of it's existence, I've not tried it yet[/footnote] you always get the same minions, the traitor is randomly determined at the start of the game.
The game is just awesome, I loved it. It has simple, yet elegant mechanics. The gameplay keeps you on your toes and it suffers badly from the "just one more turn week[footnote]while you set out assignment for each day, which happen to be your "turns", you can only save each in-game week, so you would need to leave on a Monday"[/footnote]" syndrom. Heck, I played it until 3:30 last night, and I had to wake up at 6:30. It was worth it, though.
The "win back the planet" strategic play looks quite intriguing.
