Psy High

This game hit exactly the right tone as I was hoping for: a mostly lighthearted teen mystery game with a supernatural twist, a la Buffy. As a big fan of that kind of CW-style drama, I liked this Choice of Games title quite a bit. I like stories that can balance the mundane concerns of teens trying to navigate the world on their own with some bigger concerns, and Psy High definitely delivers that.

You play as a high school Junior, starting to look ahead to college and what comes next while still very much embroiled in the social tensions of your small-town high school. The supernatural twist is that something has happened recently in the seaside town of Kingsport that has given many students a range of strange powers. The playable character is a clairvoyant, and other friends have telekinesis, ability to control fire, and powers along those lines. You've started to use your powers to solve mysteries, often with the help of your core group of friends, setting up a 'Scooby gang' dynamic that's a lot of fun.

The writing is also quite good, which makes this all work. Kingsport is a fully realized setting, so this doesn't feel like just a generic high school. Parts of the town's history and location come into play in compelling ways. Slitt also does a good job rendering the high school social dynamics, presenting a number of different distinct characters that the playable character can further bond with, whether romantically or platonically.

At the start of the game, your concerns are more focused on where you fit in your social circles and what you want to prioritize in your Junior year of school. Are you putting your energies into academics or athletics, for instance? As you progress through the game, you start to piece together a bigger mystery (Spoiler - click to show)involving someone trying to control the minds of students at the school. The mystery was fun to unravel, and the game structure provided what seemed like several different ways to approach the problem - or if you even saw (Spoiler - click to show)a magical mind control device as more of an opportunity than a problem.

I liked the path I took through the game, but it almost seemed a bit too easy to arrive at a 'good' ending. This is part of my only minor issue with the game, that some of the choices with an impact on stats and some of the ways to customize your character felt shallower and less developed than other CoG titles I've played. Since this game was one of the earlier titles in the CoG catalog, it could be that they were still figuring out ways to balance choice and agency while still ensuring that players arrive at some kind of satisfying conclusion to the story. The game definitely was fun and satisfying, but it seemed like some parts of the story abruptly snapped into place, especially toward the end.