After playing Dirty Texts: Melissa’s Secret, we sent out a harsh review because it didn’t respect the setting it was set in, despite best effort. The developer has talent and I remained optimistic that his story form could grow into something special. We decided to give New Intern a try to see what changed. Things changed for the better.


STORY
First off, the premise of this story fits the writing style much better. While I do raise an eyebrow at a few key plot moments, most of the story is well thought out and crafted with a tongue in cheek. Some of the endings seem sudden or don’t fully make sense to me, but that doesn’t necessarily ruin the experience. I enjoyed this more than Melissa’s Secret, if only for the fact there were fun references thrown in.

So the backstory - you're an employer with an intern and said intern grows increasingly closer to you the further you go. You get to either pick love, corruption or creepy responses. Intern Sophie has a boyfriend, but in certain ways Sophie is curious to your sexual energy. How will you respond? Will the company suffer because of it? You're the one in charge of what happens. Or are you?

One thing I will say is that the game understands the concept of ‘things that happen in between conversations’ better. It’s an interesting puzzle to figure out what has exactly happened and how to respond properly, although that could be a separate game altogether. Sophie seems conflicted and open to corruption, but in a way that makes far more sense psychologically. In short, this game handles it subject far more serious and it’s showing, making an average to good game.

GRAPHICS
The graphics look great as they did in the other game, even though Sophie didn’t really appeal to me personally. It works fine and the art style is clean, yet realistic enough. Replayed for all endings and wasn’t ‘that’ impressed with the reach, but the story itself was nice. Extra sidenote is the attention to detail put in with street names, company names and call-backs to earlier situations. It visualizes everything pretty well.

GAMEPLAY
This is a game based around texting/sexting, so you'll see phones and responses to pick. It works differently than a usual story game because you'll mostly be referencing things and seeing photos, almost like a voyeur-style of gameplay. It works when the story allows it to. And this story allows it to work, simply by the taboo of the story.

OVERALL
Definitely recommend this game to people who would like to learn how to tell a story without actually showing it. This game is the definition of tell, don't show and surprisingly enough, it's working as a style. As long as the subject matter is interesting enough, this should work just fine.

Rating: 7/10
Developer: RoyalCandy