Building on Josba and themagiman 's insights I managed to clear the game with about 2 days left.
My general guidelines for playing were as follows:
1) Early on buy items with a red arrow.
2) Try to buy at least 1 item for every turn spent 'resting', preferably more.
3) Buy items with high values in the last column.
4) If you are starting to run out of (affordable) items with a red arrow, pick a faction and invest in them.
5) While still confined to the school grounds be prepared to invest in unlocking new locations.
6) Stop buying items for a faction once they turn red in the faction overview (top left icon on the map) and you start seeing regular events with them.
7) Stop worrying about events from factions which have turned pink in the faction overview.
8) Watch all the events, firstly the ones with just the upper icon and potentially the heart. Only after you've watched all of those pick an event with an icon in the lower right (preferably with a heart icon as well).
9) Do not worry about your alertness until you get to about 60. Then start investing in items with the blue arrow in between doing events.
So early on I was just buying items with red arrows I could afford. They seemed to net the best corruption. After a couple of days of doing that I'd run out of good targets with the red arrow and decided to set my sights on the ahtletes, since there are a lot of items for them readily available at the school. Just from buying the random assortment of items with red arrows I was getting events, but once you start to sink points into a particular faction those really take off and self-reinforce.
Looking back I'm doubting the events that don't cost a turn do much. I felt I had to watch them because they might trigger a rules change, and those seemed important. But I have no clue if those rules changes actually matter to the points economics of the game, and thus victory. So you might decide to ignore parts of guideline 8, but I'm pretty sure the events that cost you a turn are worth it.
I may have actually gone too deep into the athletes, also making sure to unlock the locker room and the pool early and such. At some point they're all pretty corrupt and more scenes with them just doesn't give the same returns as scenes with less corrupted factions. Still, between day 10 and 20 things were going just fine and corruption soared. Things started slowing down a little later though, and that's when I started paying attention to which factions where still white, which were already pink and which were red. I started making a point of buying items for factions that still had a white border in the overview and ignored events with pink factions. I also realized at some point that the events on the map have different colored borders, I think they refer to the particular's girl level of corruption. I didn't notice until I had basically already won, so didn't really test that. Could also be a good indicator to use, though.
Somewhere around halfway through the time limit my alertness got into yellow territory. I think I had bought my way out of the school not long before that, so when I started looking for items with blue arrows I found one in the forest location on the island map called 'something something ERO'. I don't know if it was a coincidence or what, but after buying that alertness started going down quite swiftly.
One thing I noticed during some failed attempts is that depending on the time of day a certain location will cause more alertness when buying an item there than at some other time. The difference looked quite significant, but I didn't want to track how much alertness it cost to do something at a certain time of the day for all those locations, so for the run that made it, I didn't pay attention to that at all. But it is something you could try to use to your advantage.
Hopefully this helps others clear this game as well. You get access to all the events afterwards, so that's neat. But I've seen enough after the ordeal of clearing the game, haha!
My general guidelines for playing were as follows:
1) Early on buy items with a red arrow.
2) Try to buy at least 1 item for every turn spent 'resting', preferably more.
3) Buy items with high values in the last column.
4) If you are starting to run out of (affordable) items with a red arrow, pick a faction and invest in them.
5) While still confined to the school grounds be prepared to invest in unlocking new locations.
6) Stop buying items for a faction once they turn red in the faction overview (top left icon on the map) and you start seeing regular events with them.
7) Stop worrying about events from factions which have turned pink in the faction overview.
8) Watch all the events, firstly the ones with just the upper icon and potentially the heart. Only after you've watched all of those pick an event with an icon in the lower right (preferably with a heart icon as well).
9) Do not worry about your alertness until you get to about 60. Then start investing in items with the blue arrow in between doing events.
So early on I was just buying items with red arrows I could afford. They seemed to net the best corruption. After a couple of days of doing that I'd run out of good targets with the red arrow and decided to set my sights on the ahtletes, since there are a lot of items for them readily available at the school. Just from buying the random assortment of items with red arrows I was getting events, but once you start to sink points into a particular faction those really take off and self-reinforce.
Looking back I'm doubting the events that don't cost a turn do much. I felt I had to watch them because they might trigger a rules change, and those seemed important. But I have no clue if those rules changes actually matter to the points economics of the game, and thus victory. So you might decide to ignore parts of guideline 8, but I'm pretty sure the events that cost you a turn are worth it.
I may have actually gone too deep into the athletes, also making sure to unlock the locker room and the pool early and such. At some point they're all pretty corrupt and more scenes with them just doesn't give the same returns as scenes with less corrupted factions. Still, between day 10 and 20 things were going just fine and corruption soared. Things started slowing down a little later though, and that's when I started paying attention to which factions where still white, which were already pink and which were red. I started making a point of buying items for factions that still had a white border in the overview and ignored events with pink factions. I also realized at some point that the events on the map have different colored borders, I think they refer to the particular's girl level of corruption. I didn't notice until I had basically already won, so didn't really test that. Could also be a good indicator to use, though.
Somewhere around halfway through the time limit my alertness got into yellow territory. I think I had bought my way out of the school not long before that, so when I started looking for items with blue arrows I found one in the forest location on the island map called 'something something ERO'. I don't know if it was a coincidence or what, but after buying that alertness started going down quite swiftly.
One thing I noticed during some failed attempts is that depending on the time of day a certain location will cause more alertness when buying an item there than at some other time. The difference looked quite significant, but I didn't want to track how much alertness it cost to do something at a certain time of the day for all those locations, so for the run that made it, I didn't pay attention to that at all. But it is something you could try to use to your advantage.
Hopefully this helps others clear this game as well. You get access to all the events afterwards, so that's neat. But I've seen enough after the ordeal of clearing the game, haha!
