Kudos

Most games marketed as 'casual,' you come to the end of the 60 minutes you get for free, and they want you to pay bucks, and you say 'meh--time to go to bed.'

When you find one that makes you instead go 'damn!', you know you've found a winner.

The background? You're 20, you have no particular skills, you're working as a waitron to pay the bills. Sure, Horatio Alger would urge you to work hard to get ahead, but a person's gotta have some fun. If you're too depressed and lonely to get out of bed, how are you going to do that?

This is a game that sucks you in. Perhaps like Cute Knight, but in a different way; both games put you in the role of a young person trying to make your way in an uncertain world, but Cute Knight is very much a fantasy, anime-influenced game, while in Kudos you get a real sense of being a 21st century slacker. But in both cases, you're likely to come to the end of the trial and think, damn... I want to keep on playing. Is it worth the 20 smackers?

The answer to that question is up to you. But we pretty much guarantee it will be a question you'll think about seriously. This is a pretty cool game.

Kudos, like The Sims, is in some sense a very conventional game of resource management--albeit in both cases, the resources you are managing relate to the motivations and happiness of the character you control, rather than to, say, building the most cost effective military force. But Kudos is, in a way, a far more realistic simulation than The Sims; how do you go from being a talentless chav to building some kind of reasonable life for yourself? The Sims' answer is "purchase consumer goods and flirt with the neighbors!" which is, well, very American; Positech's answer is perhaps a lot more British (attend night school to get some skills, and, oh yes, drink heavily at the local to reduce your stress).