Dangerous High School Girls in Trouble!™

It's hangman, memorizing some taunts, tic-tac-toe, and a bad version of poker rolled into one game. I read some other reviews that made me realize this game is not only boring but also terrible story wise.

What the actual fuck. I played this game on/off since I was a teen (am 23 now) and finally finished it yesterday. I actually stayed up until 2 AM trying to get the best ending for these girls. I won the extremely difficult, three round roast battle with the mayor, I got the detective to come with them (extremely difficult, three combo flirting) in the end, and despite beating the odds, this game still managed to ruin my day. Spoilers in the rest of the review below.

I spent 18 hours cultivating my team's skills/relationships and in the end they are expelled from school and one of them is "almost" raped and taken to the hospital so she leaves the team permanently. One of my girls shot the rapist in the head, which wasn't my first choice (I chose to use the crowbar) but apparently the rapist can somehow take that from her and kill our whole team?? So it's mandatory to kill someone in this game. Then we find out about the marriage law, where on the night before a wedding, the mayor is allowed to sleep with the bride to be (for the husband's profit)?? like WHO came up with this and WHY did they have me set up two of my HIGH SCHOOL friends to get married and therefore sleep with the mayor? I feel like an accessory to many terrible crimes after playing this game.

Then after I finished the game, in the end credits, I find out what happened to my cherished team (excluding the one that was assaulted):

One of them is a serial killer of child stars.
One of them became famous in theaters and then died of a drug overdose.
And my main girl ran a factory that produced tins with botulinum toxin.

You can't make this shit up. I would have never played this game if I knew the ending was this heinous, rushed, disgusting, unsatisfying, etc. I wasted 18 HOURS of my life on this game. I hope this review deters anyone else from wasting their time and money on this game like I did.

Cute and unique design, but under that it's four minigames over and over and they're grueling.

Then I read the top review (with the plot spoilers) and I'm glad I didn't force myself through hours of plodding, repetitive minigames just for that.

DHSG looks like an incredibly old board game you'd find in your grandmother's attic. The combination of soft line art and what is presumably public domain ragtime music produces an odd feeling; partially like a glimpse of life nearly a century ago (or at least the popular culture of the time), and partially like watching an episode of the Twilight Zone you've never seen before.

This is a weird game, with a clunky UI and a lot of RNG. But there's nothing else like it on Steam.

Rarely have I felt as compelled to write a review for a game as I have for this one. Dangerous High School Girls in Trouble (DHSGiT) offers a peculiar type of challenge. It's a game of highs and lows. Whether or not you'll find it fullfilling seems deeply personal in a way I've rarely encountered.

At first glance, DHSGiT appears quirky and charming - undeniably unique. A quick look at promotional material suggests 1920's teenage rebels taking on their school and town with wit and verve. I was excited to install the game. Who wouldn't love mouthing off to authority figures and getting into all kinds of period-appropriate debacles?

Unfortunately, I was met with an immediate wall to my enjoyment. Most encounters in DHSGiT are gated with one of four minigames. This has been exhaustively covered in other negative reviews. The four minigames in question are remarkably dull. If you don't enjoy them the first time, I assure you, you'll hate them by the 100th time. They never give way to something more nuanced. No matter what the circumstance, you'll have to taunt, bluff, hangman, or rock-paper-scissors your way to victory. It's disheartening, I must admit. When I realized that they made up the backbone of the game, I almost quit right out of the gate. I was looking for story, not tedious grinding.

Well, as it turns out, my ex adventure gamer instincts eventually took over. I have (if I do say so myself) a rather high level of tolerance for painstakingly hunting down a narrative. When I became comfortable with the minigame repetition, I started to enjoy myself. The characters are honestly endearing. Over time, I grew to care about my little girl gang. Every hour I spent with them added more affection. I saw my queen Charlotte as dangerously glamorous. Her second-in-command Jean was everything 1920's society found unfeminine, and I loved it. I was hooked.

Unfortunately, my love was not to last. I'm confused by the last acts of DHSGiT, to say the least. The spoiler-free version of this review is that if you care about these characters, prepare to be heartbroken. The story takes an unexpected and extremely dark turn. I'm all for complex narratives, but this felt rushed and disrespectful to what had come before. I've seen many reviews reference "girl power" as a primary theme of DHSGiT. I think the ending puts the lie to that theory rather thouroughly. I've also seen people recommend this game as "family friendly" or an option for children, which I feel could not be further from the truth. At the very least, make sure to play it through first, to understand the conversations you might want to initiate afterwards.

For anyone that wishes to explore the spoilerific:

For some reason, that I cannot fathom, DHSGiT decides to introduce the theme of sexual assault as a major plot point. Not only is a random member of your gang a near victim (incapacitating her for the rest of the game), but the entire town of Brigiton is complicit in said systemized assault. Very late in the game, the mayor is exposed as a beneficiary of Prima Nocta or Droit du Seigneur. Which is, to say, he is allowed to have sex with any woman in town on the night before her marriage.This is made even more repellent by a subplot in which you arrange the marriage of two of your classmates. You have, in essence, arranged both their marriages *and* their assaults. I'm not ashamed to say that I felt a bit betrayed. The story doesn't feel so empowering as it does exploitative. To make matters worse, a noted suffragette has traded the right for women to vote for this violation. It's off-putting and unnecessary. I can't imagine making that trade in good faith. No matter how well meaning, it is beyond fathoming. As a woman, more than anything, I feel like throwing my mouse through my screen. This game touched something unpleasant in a way I never could have expected. I'm willing to acknowledge the parts of DHSGiT that I enjoyed, but it's impossible to forget the parts I didn't.

Well, I'm pretty disappointed in this game, considering the price of $19.99. I LOVE board games, and I thought this one sounded great! I ignored the other reviews, thinking "those people don't love board games as much as I do. And this one has smart girls? It sounds AWESOME!!! And mini-games are always a fun little challenge."

I was wrong. This is literally just four mini-games over and over and over and over again. (There is a story in the background, but the "story" doesn't really make any sense, and adds nothing to the game). The worst part is that the mini-games are NOT fun. They consist of: 1) Pick from a list of 'comebacks' to something another girl says. 2) Bluff about how good your poker hand is. No, you don't play poker. They deal you a hand, and you bet on how good it is. That's it. 3) Guess some missing words in a sentence, and 4) try to find a random pattern, using trial-and-error.

This game would be worth about $2.99. NOT $19.99. I'm so disappointed.

I played most of this game ages and ages ago, before Steam started tracking playtime (so overlook my hours!) My memories are a bit hazy, but after seeing how few reviews there are and how many of them are negative, I thought I should throw my hat in the ring, since I really enjoyed it at the time.

It's a weird fusion of adventure game/point-and-click game with a board game. I opened it up expecting to just try playing it for a few minutes and then spending the better part of a weekend on it. I remember the story being really fun and compelling me to keep playing. The minigames have an addictive quality too, at first; but as most of the negative reviews say, they start feeling repetitive eventually (which is why I'm pretty sure I never finished it.) It sucks because the story makes you want to find out what happens next asap, but the game suffers if you don't play it at a casual pace. I'm looking forwards to giving it another (slower) try.

(Also: it only takes up like 24 MB, so if you get bored of it and don't intend to play it for a few months, you won't feel like you're wasting harddrive space by not uninstalling it.)

Since it's such an oddball of a game and it's probably nigh-impossible for many people to guess whether they'll enjoy it or not, try getting it on sale. (I'd say it's worth 10 USD for sure and $15 maybe, but $20 is a little much.) For people who like checking out unusual gameplay or are intrigued by the story premise, it's definitely worth a shot. It's a very novel experience you that you might end up enjoying a lot.

An unusual game that is resfreshing. Too few game designer use creativity in their design. It's always cloning each other's ideas. But these guys have come up with an original game idea and successfully delivered a good design too.

I have nothing bad to say about this game aside from no replayability. It's tough to beat the first time you play, so it might take you a while to finish and that is good since there is no point of playing it a second time. Oh, and the game takes 24 megs on your HD, that's a really great thing especially if you have limited bandwidt

Love the simple interface, it is clean and direct, you don't have thirty sub-menus or other inconveniences like that.

If you can get it at 5$ or less, well worth it if you are looking for something new and small.

I kind of love this game but can't really articulate why.

Maybe it's the writing. Or the theme, the idea of this posse of girls causing and skirting trouble in the 1920s. It calls me back to reading about Encyclopedia Brown and Sally Kimball when I was a kid -- it's got that sorta feel to it, but you know, as a game. Well, as a boardgame, with tokens in room locations to indicate encounters. You basically play one of five mini-games to promote your agenda -- they tend to be luck-based but most of them have some small bit of skill involved. Lots of tongue-in-cheek humor. I mean, you recruit other girls to join your gang (complete with a "queen"), and then, each girl can have a boy in tow to use as an expendable tool, if need be. You're trying to get things done, while constrained by these 1920 gender roles, heh.

Oh, to note: It's older, so the window/resolution is low and you have to edge scroll. That's the one con.

I love this game. It was my first steam buy in 2009 and I still play it. It's an adventure game, with lots of mini-games. The game is plenty long, Everytime i thought it was over there was another chapter, which i really liked and made me feel like this was a solid buy.

I went into this game unsure- it seemed like it might not have enough content, but I had $20 to blow and was ready to take the risk for a really stand out game. The concept seemed really interesting, and I liked the idea of a diverse cast of high school girls.
I actually don't really want to write a bad review of this game because, there's a lot of potential. I hope the creators continue, fine tune the art of the mini-game, and go on to create characters with greater depth and the player can actually feel an interest in. But for $20 it's a big disappointment. The minigames are really boring and that's basically they're all you'll be doing. I think it may have built up to more interesting storylines, but I was too bored to continue. The art, considering there's so little of it, is really sub-par. There is also way too little strategy and long term planning in this game so I felt like I was meandering around. I felt the 20s era felt inauthentic and too based on stereotypes and slang- perhaps if the characters had a little more depth or backstory it would feel truer to the period.
If you want a truly awesome dark, involving detective game involving high school girls I would recommend Black Closet. It's by Hanako games, and though it is planned for Steam release soon (the creator is fine tuning it) it is currently available through their website. Of if you simply like the fun of a brightly colored teen girl unraveling a mystery in a dangerous setting (and possibly dying horribly) you'll love Hanako's Long Live the Queen on Steam. And no, I'm not affiliated in anyway with Hanako. I just love their games and their nuanced portrayal of girls.

I sadly have to give this game a very mild recommendation against playing, and a 5/10.

The board game scenario was pretty ingenious, the storyline interesting and compelling, the 1920's setting both fun and unique, and the RPG party building a nice little touch. But the mini-games that comprise the bulk of the gameplay, while mildly fun on their own, quickly became tedious and even mind-numbingly boring. On top of that, the storyline kind of takes a cliff dive by the end of the game, taking the RPG party building elements with it. I struggled along with the game as it became more and more tedious, hoping to simply complete the storyline... but the end of the game finished in such an abrupt and non-fulfilling way that it made me regret the hours I'd spent wasting my time with the game in the first place. If only the gameplay had been more varied, and the ingenuity that began the game's storylines carried through to the end, this would have been a charming little game worth maybe a 7-8/10.

It's really cool and interesting talking with people like in the 1920's. I don't know how accurate it is -but it's fun.
The game has charm but overall I can't really recommend it unless it's on a really good sale and you don't care about the following cons:

First off to navigate the map you need to put your mouse to the edge of it and wait while it scrolls to the appropriate area.
This quickly gets tedious since it would be very easy to make the arrow keys or something scroll the map without you having to mouse over everytime. It's a needlessly slow process.

The second con and the biggest is that the game is mostly luck based. You have stats you can increase but you will soon realize that sometimes the only reason you lost - was because of luck. You can win with the worst stats and you can lose with the best.
The minigames themselves are a bit fun though.

While it sets uncommonly and interestingly in 1920s pre-Women's Rights era at a high school, playing the game itself feels like a chore as every choice you make has you either delving deeping into a shifty and overindulged plot by playing repeatitive card games that feel more luck-oriented than skill-oriented, or borderline-level-grinding your characters (via the same repeatitve card games). After about three hours, it felt more like I was watching a snooty teenage love story set in Victorian Era rather than actually playing a game and enjoying it.

When you play this game, all your Call of Dudebro friends will ask you why you're playing a game about high school girls. They might even make some sort of lolicon joke. This is because they are boys and you are a man. A man can play a game about high school girls without feeling his masculinity is threatened.

I really wanted to like this one. However, what begins as a fun, minigame-filled romp through old-timey America (complete with bigotry and intolerance and backwardness, which is refreshingly NOT glossed over) quickly becomes a grind-heavy slog that rivals the worst the JRPG genre has to offer for effort vs. reward. I can't recommend this; if you play the demo, you've already extracted all the fun there is to be had here.

Probably the quirkiest offering in recent years, a girl detectives mystery story set in the 1920s, presented as a board game with challenges in the form of card-based minigames. Utterly charming!

This is actually kind of a compelling digital board game but god dammit I feel like owning this game by title alone puts me on some kind of watchlist

Dangerous High School Girls in Trouble - Oh noes

Believe it or not this is an RPG - a hillarious vintage board game with unique mechanics and a role-playing soul, to be exact/more vague. Set in the early 20th century, you control a group of high school girls trying to solve a mystery murder, which leads them to uncover a darker secret involving the whole city. The skills you invest in are Rebellion, Glamour, Savvy and Popularity. You level up by using those in appropriate 'mini games', which always involve interacting with the townsfolk.

Both writing and the art are superb. While exploring it for 15 hours or so, I encountered some weird things - a talking pony, a split personality, a desk serving as a policeman, a ghost hired to scare unwanted visitors... The story got more ridiculous, more interesting and more serious as I progressed. By the end it felt like Doctor Who, catching you off-guard with messed up revelations & profound thoughts, right in the middle of the laugh. Let's just say I understood why it got banned by Big Fish Games.

If this got you interested at all, try it - a tad repetitive mini games don't detract from this one of a kind experience!


V e r d i c t : GREAT, with some room for improvement

-NOT- recommended. I was curious about the 80/100 Meta score and grabbed this for 2$ on the 75% sale. First this is not a video game, more like a table game poorly adapted to the screen. The resolution is tiny (800x600?) with no option to resize it, the board screen is so tiny that you spend your time scrolling around endlessly looking for objectives, and hell the characters are not even modeled, you see them as pawns exactly like on a table game.

But all of that could have been forgotten if the gameplay or story were solid. The story is boring, a bunch of girls get into accidents at school that look like sabotage and mainly you will be investigating who did it. Second the gameplay is poor, divided into 4 repetitive, childich minigames of -NO- strategic or tactical depth.

Bottom line, I don't know how it got such a high meta score. Stay away from this game.

At long last a game dedicated to being a teenage girl in the 1920s! In this game you can choose which sass-talking, proto-feminist, 1920s feminine archetype you want to play as and recruit a cadre of catty teenage divas in order to trade insults with other girls, flirt with boys, and engage in all manner of romantic and academic misadventures! It's basically every guy's fantasy!

What?

You don't have the fantasy of being a girl from the 1920s?

Well...er....I don't either. I just said that because I thought you might.

So, um, this is awkward.

How about that local sports team, then?

Anyone want to play a game of "Call of Duty" and perhaps discuss the women we are interested in engaging in heart-felt and totally earnest "sexual intercourse" with? I'll bring the 12 pack of cheaply priced domestic beer! It won't be weird, I promise!