Scoop has an exciting intro: there's a dead body in the kitchen, the police are banging at the door, and the PC has a limited amount of time to escape. I spent the first few restarts running around frantically, hiding in the wardrobe, under the bed, trying to break the window, and so on. In the end I had to look at the walkthrough, but the puzzle was reasonable. To discourage me from dawdling and speed up the action, the object descriptions at this stage of the game are helpfully sparse.
Unfortunately, the sparseness is only helpful in the intro: the rest of the game is merely sparse. It's quite a disappointment. First of all, there's an unwelcome PC change from the spunky chyk-in-distress of the intro to some characterless journalist guy I don't care about. The villain of the piece is similarly bland, and I can't remember precisely what his villainy was even though I've played the game five minutes ago. There are bugs, there are frequent guess-the-verb problems, and in the end it all just peters out. The scoop of the title turns out to be an anticlimax.
Rating: 4 (7th place)