Great, as if I wasn't already sitting here at home, sitting in front of a computer, already feeling enough like a social pariah, now I can play a game in which I fail miserably and end up being alone and a miserable cashier. Woohoo! In all seriousness though…okay, perhaps that was all seriousness. Anyways, now you can try your hand at living life again, while you let your real life pass you by.

Kudos plays like a mixture of The Sims mixed with that of the Tamagotchi games, only you don't have to monitor such miniscule and ultimately needless roles, like going to the bathroom. Instead, the game is setup so that everyday you naturally go to work, get some money, and then come home. If it is during the weekday, you get to choose one extra task to perform, and these all have various negatives and positives to the overall health of your character. You can choose to go out and do something by yourself, like jog, take a bath, watch TV, clean your house, or literally stare at the walls. Jogging is of course good for you, but will make you extremely tired. Taking a bath will get you clean so you don't get sick and rest you from your stress, but it will make you feel really lonely. Watching television can improve certain aspects, but you'll get fat from sitting around the house.

When you get some money saved up, you can go shopping, to buy you things like books to read, instruments to play, and many other different items that lead to paths later on. You can also buy pets who will help keep your loneliness at bay, though they dirty up your house quicker, and you must have the money to buy their food or else their skinny as a rail fur covered butts will leave you and head off to find another home.

To dull that feeling of isolation and feeling like a little fish in a big pond, you can also go out with one of your friends. Based on your monetary funds, you can go to some place like the theater, go golfing, bowling, beer drinking, and several other different scenarios. If your friend had a good time, your relationship and bond will make you two closer. However, should you choose an entertainment option they don't like, you'll find themselves growing bored of you and not wanting to be your friends (I took one girl to a gore movie one time and she no longer wanted to be my friend). You'll also get the occasional call from one of your friends, who might want you to hang with just them, or either some of your friends. If you choose to reject their offer (either because you don't have the money or you have other plans) your relationship will become strained too and they won't like you as much. When you go out with a friend who asked you out, if others are along for the ride, you can even find yourself making new friends and contacts to hangout with. You'll also run into new contacts through things like going to work.

In the game you start off as a lowly nothing, working some menial job that any kid in high school could get. Now, if you wanted to, you could probably live your whole life in the game as that; chances are though you'll want to improve yourself and make you a somebody, which means you'll have to go to school. School has several different professions you can practice and learn at, such as legal careers, medical careers, journalism, acting, and so on. To improve these studies though, you have to go to school on certain nights, and wouldn't you know it but someone usually wants to hang with you that night – oh, decision decisions. You can look for a new job whenever you want, though you must meet certain requirements to even be able to apply for that position. For example, there is a nursing job you can have with 80% Basic Medicine or you can get a better job with 100% medicine. I wanted to be a doctor, so I improved my education while I ignored my friends (losing some in the process) and then though I applied, they rejected me because they frankly told me I was a loser. I mean, I thought doctors didn't have social lives because of their job, and now they don't want to hire me cause I already got rid of those distractions?

So the game of Kudos is balancing all of those different social goals, while also maintaining your personal goals. You have to manage several of your different personal goals, like making sure your character never gets too lonely, is healthy, clean, and other various goals that in the end equals a better, healthier you on both the physical and emotional state, because what good is going out to jog every day when inside you are wanting to cry and you are taking such so little care of yourself that you always feel miserable, have become a recluse, and ran all your friends away?

Both graphically and in regards to audio, Kudos isn't really much. The graphics usually consist of you looking at the same screen over and over again, which has your poorly rendered upi standing on a screen, looking different in regards to how they are holding themselves to reflect the mental state and what they are feeling. Outside of this main info page, there isn't really anything else but a few faces to represent your friends and a few images to represent things you can buy at the store. One sort of nice graphical touch is that this main screen will get smudged over and have virtual flies buzzing around and crawling on your monitor to reflect the cleanliness of your living arrangement so that you know when you really need to cleanup. On the audio side of things, you've got some easy going techno music, the occasional rumble of thunder or rain to show you weather during the workday progression, but that is all.

Kudos might appeal to some people, but it seems that market would be very small. There just isn't enough content (or interesting content in other words) to make it very fun or engaging for very long. The real die-hard and sim completists might enjoy picking it up, but then again their time might be better served by focusing on a more competent and fun life sim game like The Sims.

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