There are many titles (especially in the land of indies) that immediately make you check whether your Steam library needs to be hidden from polite company. Crafted by Mitsuki Game Studio (a developer that frequently makes use of anime waifus), High School Dirty Secrets is actually very tame with the ecchiness on offer. This mostly caters to the horror crowd, with a somewhat dark story and decently oppressive atmosphere – it just happens to have a bit of light fanservice as well, in the form of short skirts, panties and jiggle physics.
The main heroine is Kasuga, a high school student who wakes up alone in her school with no memory of how she got there. The exit doors cannot be opened, the hallways are pitch-black dark, and soon a lethal stalker will make its appearance. Narratively it’s familiar, almost cliché psychological horror territory – locked location, fragmented memories, creepy revelations and textbook paranormal phenomena, but it works just enough to keep one interested and pushing forward. Unfortunately, it seems deeply conflicted about whether it wants you to feel dread or admire cute girls.
Kasuga wears a skimpy schoolgirl outfit, has relatively large breasts that are probably made out of jelly (milk flavoured), and when she looks at her phone (which is where maps, notes, etc. are stored), you are offered a nice POV shot where the device is almost shoved between her jiggly assets. Now, this critic has absolutely no problem with sexualisation; it’s just that, unlike something like Red Colony where the focus is on cheesy campiness, here it undermines the scare factor tenfold. Even the main adversary is also an anime girl, and one that wears a cute set of underwear, so ‘creepy’ isn’t really the first word that comes to mind. Oh, and panties are optional collectibles…
Described as a puzzle horror game, High School Dirty Secrets mostly leans towards the walking simulator side, with Kasuga moving through the school, collecting items with which simple (but fun) puzzles can be solved, only to then get a new item, which will in turn open the way for a new puzzle – rinse and repeat for about three hours. There’s a lot of backtracking, which pads the runtime and drains momentum, and when the enemy makes her appearance, it’s less “Oh, no! I’ve gotta hiiide!” and more “Oh, darn. I’ve gotta stop what I’m doing and hide again.” While visually simple, the atmosphere does the heavy lifting in keeping players immersed. The school is very dark, and the complete silence that usually accompanies Kasuga turns out to be far more effective at spooking you than the screams that can be heard when being chased.
A weird design choice is that interaction with the world is mainly done via the first-person mode, the third-person mode’s main use being to look around and see if the one chasing Kasuga is close or not. On the other hand, the flashlight on Kasuga’s phone only works when in the first-person perspective. Simply put, walking around while being able to look at the heroine means that it will often be impossible to see what’s two meters ahead due to the lack of decent lighting. Tension increasing? Probably, but aggravation becomes part of the experience as well…
Ultimately, what sinks High School Dirty Secrets isn’t its fanservice, low budget or overall simplicity, but how little it gives one to chew on moment to moment. The story is drip-fed in such tiny, vague fragments that it’s hard to care, and the constant back and forth feels purposeless rather than suspenseful. With gameplay largely boiling down to tenseless walks from point A to point B (and then back to A again), the horror rarely escalates and the mystery never truly hooks. Instead of building dread or curiosity, the repetition slowly dulls both. Its atmosphere remains its only redeeming quality, but as is usually the case, atmosphere alone can only do so much.
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