Surviving High School

If the large influx of American TV has told us anything about their high school system, it’s that all of their 16-year-olds look like 25-year-old catalogue models. Except for the stereotypical nerds and the token fatties - and even they have flawless skin.

Surviving High School casts you as one of these pearly-toothed brats, and places you in one of two interactive stories depending on whether you want to play as a girl or a boy.

It’s your job to guide our protagonists to success in either a Dissing or a Dancing competition, depending on which story you opt for. As you click through the cartoony story scenes you’ll have the opportunity to decide upon relationship matters and how to spend your time in trying to reach your goal.

As the obnoxious male character, that involves digging for dirt on your bitter rival so that you can come up with a ‘Mega Diss’ come the time of the final showdown. You only have a week to play with, so you must choose your targets wisely. Repeat visits to your opponent’s mother, for instance, might ultimately reveal that her son is a bed wetter.

As this suggests, there’s a rather mean streak running through Surviving High School, with the lead boy repeatedly praised for his ability to reduce less confident students to quivering wrecks with his rhyming put-downs. It’s all done with the lightest of touches, but I’m guessing you’d have to be of a similar age to really appreciate the put-down humour.

Surviving High School tries to add a little more interactivity with a few mini-games, mostly centred around selecting the appropriate icon from a spinning wheel. These can be based on locating a rhyming word or a series of musical notes, although the lack of background music during the latter in particular is rather jolting.

Indeed, the gaming element is probably Surviving High School’s weak point, playing as a set of rather crude and charmless mini-games. The real effort has gone into writing the branching narratives, and three more can be downloaded should you wish to extend the experience.

I suspect that your desire to do so will depend on whether you want to play a game that really doesn’t require much playing. It will also undoubtedly depend on what sort of affinity you have with the subject matter - both in terms of age and mentality.