Parents' Guide to Black Closet

You're the newly elected student body president, and your job is equal parts status and stress as you take the reins of power and get acquainted with your council member minions. Though sporting the lengthy text and anime-style graphics of an interactive novel, there's more to Black Closet than conversations. Each week you're given problems (runaways, bad grades, bullying, theft) and must assign student minions to solve them. These people come in a variety of personality types -- shy, outgoing, friendly, intimidating -- and success means choosing the right girl for the right job. Finding quick, effective solutions is the key to maintaining a strong but approachable image and earning points that can be used to raise your minions' skills; failure to resolve issues means that both your and the school's reputation suffers. Getting a handle on all this can be hard at first thanks to an insufficient tutorial, but an online reference can help walk you through the basics. Until the rules sink in, nice character graphics, moody music, and teen melodrama keep things interesting, as do an array of tongue-in-cheek power-ups (such as a baseball bat that increases "Intimidation"), multiple story lines, and a custom campaign mode.