A blend of indie games, classic RPGs, ’90s nostalgia, and deep-cut horror.
Indie team Necrosoft partnered with publisher Ysbryd (VA-11-HALL-A, World of Horror) to create their biggest outing yet, and it’s a full-fledged RPG about teenagers kicking demons in the face. If that sounds like a slower version of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, you’d be right in the best way. Demonschool features a peak late ’90s aesthetic and heavily Italian-leaning horrors, with a unique hybrid of 2D pixel art and the current resurgence of PlayStation One’s blocky, artifact-filled 3D modeling. The game, set in the final weeks of 1999, features a bunch of rejects, would-be college students who are shipped off to an island for degenerates.
The lead among them is Faye, a girl who wants to stop an evil prophecy from unfolding around the island. She can fight demons, but needs help. To build her demon-hunting club, she enlists the help of the awkward photographer Namoko, himbo fighter Destin, and the healer nerd Knute.
Faye drags this group around to fight demons in grid-based battles, while socializing and exploring the island to piece the mystery together. There are also gangsters everywhere on this remote island school full of horrors.
Square dancing with demons.
Necrosoft / Ysbryd
Necrosoft wears their influences on their sleeves, not only in the aesthetic but also in the core game design. They describe a merger of SEGA’s iconic Persona and Shin Megami Tensei and indie hits like Into The Breech. The comparison is the most accurate description of the combat, making these encounters play out in a puzzle format once your party hits the ground running. The party starts in a line in front of a barrier on a grid layout battlefield.
Instead of combat happening in real time, players get a set amount of action points to use for movement and abilities. Once done, your characters play out the sequence you chose in real time. Then, the phase turns to the demons and gangsters to deal their damage.
Who needs homework when you can punch stuff?
Demonschool sticks with the typical tropes of RPGs with buffs, debuffs, status effects like burn, poison, heal, and environmental damage, all with a unique flair to make the most out of a school running rampant with horrors beyond your comprehension and ugly critters. The game keeps these effects simple. Where Final Fantasy has enemies and player characters hitting for numbers up into the thousands, hit points count for one at a baseline, and each party member only gets three. This makes managing your party’s health, stunning abilities, and clearing out waves of enemies as quickly as possible crucial.
Once the target number of enemies is defeated, players must get a party member to the other side of the field to “seal” the demons away. Once this is done, you get a pocket full of resources and a ranking from grade C to A. Unlike real homework, Demonschool lets you try again as many times as you want, and the better you do, the more currency for abilities and clubhouse upgrades you earn. This is where Demonschool can really hook perfectionists with the temptation to get every encounter completed perfectly with no party deaths and finishing under the targeted turn count.
Demonschool is impossible to put down.
Necrosoft / Ysbryd
Outside of combat, Demonschool stacks the calendar with things to do. While it is not on the same level as the Persona titles that inspired its premise, it captures the structure of an ominous daily countdown and the teachers’ busywork throughout. Once the party becomes more established, there’s also plenty of opportunity to get to know them and grow your bond levels by going to karaoke and cooking for them.
By week three on the island the flow is settles. This is also where it gets challenging to stop playing. Demonschool has snappy UI, and just enough visual character and strange NPC dialogue to make it fun to return to locations. There’s also a fishing minigame that produces some of the most hilariously ugly fish things I’ve ever seen.
Demonschool shines brightest in how it steadily deepens its combat and reveals its characters’ abilities, but its main cast is also full of character. Faye in particular drives the story forward by dragging her peers into the dankest and worst places to pick fights, and she embodies the energetic brashness that one would come to expect from a story like this, but the other characters equally play off her in fun ways with their own tonality with quality, yet simple, spritework.
The bottom line (for now).
25 hours gets us through the game’s first three weeks which includes taking time to interact with everything and perfecting most combat encounters. Considering that it is not even close to halfway through this game, considering achievement count and the number of weeks left in the countdown, it’s clear that Necrosoft has put in the work to make this a full-fledged experience of an RPG. That’s hard to do in a year with stiff competition in the RPG indie scene like Clair Obscure: Expedition 33. Despite that, Necrosoft seems to know exactly who their target audience is with Demonschool, and that audience will absolutely adore it. And, probably any other horror film nerd who wants to check out a game to play more casually than a survival horror title.
Demonschool is available now PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, PC, and Steam Deck – watch the trailer below.
The publisher provided code for this game.
Based in the northern stretches of New England, Evan is an elder high-wizard and co-founder of the inbetweendrafts.com. Leading the Games section, Evan is determined to make people remember the joys of older games which have since lost their way. Evan’s voice can be heard in podcasting, YouTube videos, essays, and overlong diatribes on media he wants you to have the full context on.
