I Don’t Wanna Go To Demonschool – Demonschool Review (PC)

It never feels good to resent a video game. 

It’s fine to hate a game surely – I do that all the time when I think about the dejected hellscapes of Roblox, Grand Theft Auto, Call of Duty and so on – but resenting? Resenting feels like toxic acid eating away at your insides, tainting your heart and making you feel like something has to be wrong for you to feel such a way.

Going into Demonschool, I was very excited. As someone who really enjoyed the “push ‘em around” action of Into the Breach, I was all for getting into a similarly styled game that doubled down on not only aesthetics, but also the idea of having a meaningful narrative. Watching development updates over the years, and seeing constant references to the earlier Persona games, I was all-in to the point I carved out an entire section of my future gaming schedule after its release was pushed back in the wake of Sudden Silksong.

After 40 or so hours of working through everything Demonschool has to offer however, I find myself almost regretting that I ever did so at all.

Demonschool is a tactical RPG in line with the aforementioned Into the Breach or Tactical Breach Wizards. You control a group of 4 students on a battlefield, utilizing spacing and movement to achieve victory within (ideally) a certain amount of turns. There are dozens of abilities to equip that horizontally modify your characters kits, for example changing their movement patterns, or adding on hit effects to increase their damage or healing output. 

Within the framework of this RPG there is a narrative about (allegedly) a mysterious school on an island, where all sorts of young adults with demon hunter blood are being gathered under mysterious circumstances. You take control of the incredibly rambunctious and sociable Faye, a girl who believes that the apocalypse is coming soon, and that demons will be the cause of it. She’s quickly able to convince various members of her class into fighting alongside her against a slowly invading demon army, as their teacher mysteriously assigns them strange and obscure tasks over a series of eleven weeks.

I say allegedly there because there really isn’t anything that actually meaningfully makes Demonschool a game about going to school at all. It’s based on the older Persona games, so this makes sense, but at the same time, the game is so slavishly obsessed with an artificial scheduling system identical to that of a more modern Persona game that it makes it stand out in an incredibly confusing way. There’s no classes, there’s no actual meaningful interaction with any classmates or clubs or anything resembling an actual course. The opening cutscene shows your teacher leading several students into a random demon situation as a test and seeing them die! This is never acknowledged or even remotely comparable to the way he acts for the rest of the game!

The only real interaction you have at the school (for the first half of the game anyways), is a vague assignment related to demons at the beginning of the week that gets resolved by Friday every time without fail, and a quiz on the weekend that you literally cannot fail or gain from in any meaningful way. Outside of the first two assignments, you barely even do anything at the school, instead wandering randomly throughout the island fighting generic thugs in almost identical battles 1000 times like the worst of the Yakuza games. Why even make the setting a school at all! What is gained from this beyond a base aesthetic framework to stylize the UI around!

The general format of the game is getting that assignment on Monday, and then facing down a unique boss with interesting self contained mechanics on Friday. Within that week, there are various side quests and mini games you can engage with that will do things like give you the ability to unlock new abilities for your squad eventually (more on this later) and raise your bond level with Faye’s various friends. The side quests often have eccentric bits to them; most are related to your party, but some are little one off bits that add character to the world like a child dealing with his now demon possessed father who acts like a zombie, or a woman whose face is a ghost. On the surface, these are pretty standard fare additions to a game to mix things up and provide variety to the overall experience, but every single one of them feels like they purely exist to fulfill a quota, or make good on the kernel of an idea. 

When I said you fight generic thugs 1000 times I was hardly even hyperbolizing. Demonschool makes you fight constant generic random encounters that are nearly identical with incredibly unsatisfying rewards and minimal character progression to the point that it feels like they’re being forced to design the game this way. Every single cutscene in the game goes like this: Faye walks into a situation, talks about something unrelated, a Yakuza guy or a generic demon sprite crawls on the screen, it plays a shocked sound effect, and then you do a fight, then get back to talking about the unrelated thing. Sometimes, even, they’ll do two fights in a row! Both nearly identical! It’s exhausting! It’s one thing for a game to be formulaic, but it’s almost ridiculous the degree to which Demonschool goes to actively do the same thing over and over again like there’s actual numerical values of Story and Fighting to fulfill, rather than letting one inform the other. 

At times it reminded me of the early era of most gacha games, where incredibly short spurts of event writing would constantly be interrupted with an obligatory fight against some random monsters. There’s a joke in Fate GO that they fall to even now about Wyverns randomly showing up in the midst of things for a fight because the first few chapters of that game genuinely stopped the story dead over and over to fight wyverns that had appeared. They can make this joke because they moved past it, they learned how to do things better. Demonschool never learns this, but it still tries to make jokes about it later on, and it feels so bad.

This strict formatting applies to the mini games you dealt with as well. After each cutscene, the time of day will shift between Morning, Afternoon, and Evening. Every time this shifts, the game wants you to do the same exact karaoke (and later cooking) minigame to raise your bond with teammates to gain access to their sidequests. Every single time. 

Every

Single

Time.

Karaoke consists of very quickly selecting a line that has the correct keyword inside it between a set of three options three times. There are like 15 permutations of it. You do this minigame over one hundred times over the course of the game to max out your bond levels. There is no unique music during this sequence. There is no meaningfully unique dialogue to be had with your friends. Sometimes, the karaoke mini game even spoils what characters will join your party before you’ve even met them. I never want to see Faye’s singing sprite ever again as long as I live.

Other mini games don’t fare much better either in the depth department. The cooking minigame is a rudimentary sliding game you choose the right icons for. There’s a somewhat cute game where you have to guess the emotions of your teammates’ sprites when they’re obscured based on body language. There’s a rock paper scissors game…where you learn what move they’re going to do and repeat it literally every single time for that character because you can I guess. Fishing is also present, albeit in a purely shallow and self satisfactory form that disappointed me deeply as someone who loves fishing in games more than god, reliant entirely to the whims of RNG and an NPC that just sort of exists to say thanks for fishing.

“Self Satisfaction” is actually a great descriptor of so many issues within Demonschool, because it’s completely lacking in encouraging reward systems or progression at any stage. You’re incentivized to beat battles in a turn order to get an A rank, because you can I guess? You get one more piece of currency to spend on abilities, but you hardly even need that much at any stage of the game with how much fighting there is. Those abilities you unlock (incredibly slowly every few in-game days) are mostly horizontal upgrades rather than flat out increases, but nothing in the game really benefits from you even engaging with this system so I grabbed the few good options for my preferred fighters, unlocking the rest only out of a desire to see that I had, and still had far more currency than I needed at the end. I don’t think the game necessarily needed traditional level ups, but playing this alongside a traditional turn based RPG in my off time made the lack of interlocking systems and flow all the more noticeable. Demonschool feels like it’s tied to a specific format, while wandering aimlessly within it.

All this would be acceptable if there was a core narrative that was interesting enough to push through for, but Demonschool is unbearably irreverent.  Every NPC has a random quirky line to say, which can genuinely be funny in the simple ways RPGs often are (i.e. NPC named Sports Lover saying I LOVE SPORTS!) but as the situation becomes increasingly more dire and serious, the silliness makes everything feel fake and purposeless. This is compounded by bonding missions with your party members that seemingly exist entirely to give you the option to make out with all your friends (or watch them make out with each other). I don’t really oppose this concept inherently, but in a game starving for depth, it adds to the shallow feeling of everything. There’s something to be said for distilling a friendship in a video game down to a “meter to making out”, it’s a lot more honest, but when you don’t have many reasons to care about the characters the whole thing feels pointless.

Demonschool’s main story is a disjointed mess because of how much you end up in that loop of “fight, talk, karaoke, repeat”. The game abides so strictly to its own schedule that the characters joke about it constantly, jabbing about how it’s fine because everything will be worked out by Friday, or that nothing ever happens on the weekend. I assumed this would lead to some sort of gotcha moment of subversion but no! It’s played completely straight the entire game! Nothing ever happens on the weekends!!!! Someone could die horribly in front of them or promise the damnation of the world in a few days to their face and everyone goes “Alright well I’m gonna go hang out because it’s the weekend bye”! It’s insane!!!!!

So hearing all these complaints you might think I abhor this game, or maybe question why this isn’t a 1 star review. 

The problem is that Demonschool, through all its irreverence and incohesion, is still completely filled to the brim with moments of soulfulness and the occasional bell and whistle that really showed that this was created by people who wanted to express something.

Its art is absolutely gorgeous, every character expression has its own distinct style, and the way that they all move, especially the way they’ll puppeteer over world sprites in minimalist Scooby Doo-esque ways is incredibly charming. Bosses all stand out as iterative on obscure horror designs with a low poly 3d look that makes them look as foreign and imposing as they ought to in a 2D world.

The soundtrack is full of really good synthesizer beats, and evokes the sense of occultic eccentricity that the game is ostensibly supposed to be about, while amping up into genuinely catchy and engaging music during the constant fighting. The effect is amplified by the dynamic switching between a calm version of a song during your planning phases, and active punchy variants once your turn properly begins. More games should do this. It’s sick!

User Interface, while simplistic, is unbelievably slick. Everything feels like it’s where it belongs with purpose, the fontwork is distinct and eye-catching, and everything is imminently usable. A problem I have with flashier stuff like Persona is you can often be distracted by how much is on the screen at any given time, but here the designers have perfectly balanced accessibility with style, and I was impressed by how well each scene flows into the next with tight transition animations and really cool title cards.

I even like most of the combat! It’s simplistic, and there’s too much of it. You sort of move people around and do things over and over again. Still, it feels good to puzzle out harder fights! I enjoyed getting new characters because I could slot them in and do weird little techniques that weren’t possible before (the late game attack stealing party member is a particular standout for making this sort of thing fun).

You can get one of your teammates a movie rental every week, and they’ll write a short one paragraph review of it each time. They’re all real obscure B movies, you can watch them. I knew some of them and sat in awe as they succinctly captured a Siskel and Ebert style Video Pick of the Week blurb. Often, characters will even bring up movies and older video games mid conversation with complete reverence rather than playful allusion. There’s an entire sequence of the game where Faye mourns her friend isn’t around to get all her Resident Evil jokes, and another where they argue whether the situation they’re in is more reminiscent of the movie Cube or a different situation entirely. It’s cute!

But these things only go so far. Games, as a medium, aren’t just how good they look and sound, or a tally mark of moments that made you laugh. They’re dense complex things you meaningfully have to push through and be pushed through by deliberate design in some way. I’ve played through games with underwhelming gameplay like Utawarerumono or this year’s Hundred Line because the presentation of their stories were engaging and worth putting up with. I’ve brushed off mediocre stories in games like Ninja Gaiden or Khazan because they provide mechanical experiences that don’t necessitate that aspect to bolster their existence. Demonschool suffers on both of these levels, offering an experience that’s aesthetically pleasing and intriguing, but actively exhausting and monotonous when you attempt to seriously engage with it.

A lot of these things are also what Demonschool became known for after its announcement, without much in the form of actual depth added on over time. Yeah everyone saw the cool boss fight art they posted, and everyone saw the funny dialogue their characters said, but the actual game barely feels like it’s grown beyond that sort of ephemeral concept of looking cool on social media in screencap form. 

More so, the entire vibe I got playing Demonschool — as it crashed multiple times, or I ran into various weird oversights that weren’t telegraphed, or dialogue that implies they changed their mind on something late in development — is that there seemingly wasn’t enough in-depth playtesting being done on it before release. I don’t doubt that this is a hellish work to experiment with, things like party composition and specific skills mashing up against each other so on and so forth, but the core issues with the experience on its own leaves me wondering how it could have possibly been so thoroughly experimented with that people were coming out the other end like “yes I love stopping to fight triangle formation of yakuza that die in 1 minute 40 times in a row”. Hearing this game was delayed because of Silksong’s release feels even more disingenuous now, when it feels like it needed even more time to bake.

I take no pleasure in judging Demonschool so harshly, but it’s incredibly rare I get towards the end of a video game and find myself actively going “Oh thank god, I can play something else after this”. I’m someone who usually prolongs the ending of a game as long as possible because I get attached, or I find some level of zen in the experience of slowly working through it. Here, I was completely broken by the time I finished, especially thanks to an unceremonious slew of non-telegraphed joke endings with absolutely 0 fanfare or sincerity.

I think that this team could create an incredibly interesting game in the future if they’re able to understand what worked here, and I hope they do! I want to read more B movie reviews! I want to see what cute soundscapes and environments they can come up with next! I want to see how they improve their camera switching tech in the future! I just don’t want to open the fast travel menu to cycle between karaoke, cooking, and a series of exclamation points that all lead to the same old demon fight ever again.