Coolest Girl in School

What is 'cool'? What does it mean? It's not exactly the same as good, but not exactly the same as bad either. You're not cool if you only do nice things like respecting people and working hard, but if your behaviour veers too far the other way onlookers are well within their rights to say, "Not cool," or even, "Totally not cool."

Doing puzzles isn't cool, but it's not not cool. Giving up your lunch break to help kids with special educational needs is quite cool, depending on who you ask, but actually having special educational needs can be far cooler. Everybody loves a class clown.

Making an approving remark about your teacher's breasts in a frenzy of ADHD is way cool. Making a joke about her mastectomy is way, way not cool.

It's a bloody tightrope.

To help you cross this tightrope, Australian developer Champagne for the Ladies has cooked up Coolest Girl in School, a game about learning how to become the eponymous superlative. (Are big words cool?)

There are things we liked about this game even before we played it, such as the fact that it upset stuffy old conservatives. However, you need to do more than vex bigots to satisfy Pocket Gamer. We're far more interested in gameplay.

To start on an inauspicious note, it's difficult in some ways to tell whether Coolest Girl in School is a game at all. It begins with you choosing the appearance of your sprite (which you can subsequently go back and alter whenever you like), and culminates with you either succeeding or failing to become Prom Queen. You start off friendless, and accumulate popularity, or a lack of it, as you go.

The game entails visiting 18 locations, split between Home, School, and a shopping precinct called Material World. Your virtual life is a hapless one, and every time you open a door something humiliating happens, whereupon you get three choices of how to respond.

So, you go into your bedroom and accidentally email a journal entry about having inverted nipples to everyone at school. Do you:

1. Create a faux journal entry explaining that "inverted nipples" is code for "fear of spiders"

2. Spam the school server with a Trojan that deletes all files

3. Curse technology and your parents for making you so dumb

Each choice yields different punishments or rewards. Choosing '2' from the above, for instance, gives you +2 'smart' and -1 'tough'. There are eight such categories, and you can check them whenever you want by looking at your Compact from the menu screen.

Of course, the same thing doesn't always happen when you go into your bedroom. Next time, "you masturbate".

You have the option to use one of the items in your inventory. I chose the Pot in preference over the Razor, but was rebuked. "That was useless," the game told me. "So anyway, you masturbate."

1. You literally go blind

2. After an orgasm you are much calmer and able to focus better

3. You sprain your wrist

Attentive readers will have realised by now that these three options aren't really coherent. You can choose to spam the school server, but you can't really choose to do any of the above. Things like that just happen. Well, strictly speaking, '2' just happens, and it doesn't take someone of my formidable expertise to know that you'd be mad to pick either of the others.

This problem crops up throughout the game. While it's sometimes difficult to tell which option will yield the best reward, you're frequently faced with options that are plainly going to reduce your standing.

Every so often, a friend or relative fills the screen and speaks to you. Your dad shows up, for instance, and says, "I just want you to know that even though you're developing into a woman you'll always be Daddy's little girl," whereupon you have the option to Give Daggers, Suck Up, Gossip, or Bribe.

Finding the right answer is initially difficult. I decided to play it safe by sucking up, but he was dismissive, saying he could see through my attempt to butter him up.

The merits of Coolest Girl as a game are debatable. As a strategy game, in its best moments, it just about works, but there are glaring flaws. The correct strategy is too often transparent, and the only feedback you get on your performance is coldly numerical. What's the fun in dressing up your avatar if you never see her strut her stuff?

It's a bare bones game, then, and the bones themselves are fractured in places, but Coolest Girl merits the recommendation I'm tentatively giving it simply because it touches humorously and sensitively on a number of issues not familiar to gaming, let alone mobile gaming. Asinine conservative objections notwithstanding, I'd be happy to see my teenage daughter playing this.

It won't satisfy hardcore players, no, but any game that forces you to decide whether it's better to shop at, protest outside, or firebomb a store that uses sweatshops, or talks openly about masturbation, or contains lines like, "I'm bulimic, gay, and allergic to the 21st century," deserves praise of some kind.

It may not be that good, in other words, but it sure is cool.