Story–driven games need strong writing and noteworthy characters to work. It’s an immutable fact. So I was more than a little surprised to find Demonschool, an RPG from developer Necrosoft with Persona-like ambitions, treat both with such a lack of consideration. If you’re going to invite comparisons to one of the most acclaimed and beloved series out there, you probably want that comparison to be a flattering one. But Demonschool falls far short of that standard in terms of pacing, plotting, and character development.
Demonschool is part slice-of-life RPG and part tactical strategy game, starring a band of self-styled misfits at an unusual college on a remote island. Faye, the protagonist, is the last in a long line of demon hunters. She has a vision that foretells the apocalypse, by way of demon invasion, and she’s determined to keep that from happening, along with the initially unwilling students she presses into joining her. You spend your time doing rote RPG tasks — investigating leads, school assignments, and chatting with people and allies around town — and kicking demons and other horrors to the curb in a lot of turn-based tactical battles.
“Horrors” is a term I’m using lightly here, as the catalog of atrocious beings on parade is rarely scary and usually forgettable. The best monsters say something about the time or place that gives rise to them or the people they’re meant to reflect. Even Resident Evil’s monstrosities are tied to things like the futile obsession with perfection and eternal youth. Demonschool‘s are just… there. The first boss is a giant pile of TVs, which you’re meant to think is a terrifying entity from another plane of existence, which is hard to do when it’s just a pile of TVs. There’s a big skeleton, a bunch of evil fish, a big crab. Blobs too, lots of those, some with their insides outside, some that barf poison. These encounters are rarely unsettling or reflective, and even if you don’t care about any of that and just want cool freak-ass monsters, well, you won’t really get that either. Barring a few later bosses, Demonschool‘s enemy designs are pretty dull.
I’m sure many of them are deep-cut references to niche international horror movies, as Necrosoft promised they would be. Homages like that are fine, albeit uninspired. But in a media landscape where Homer Simpson can shoot Geralt of Rivia at a taco shop or Spongebob Squarepants ends up being faster than Sonic the Hedgehog in a street race, whatever shallow appeal these kinds of moments had is long gone. You need to do something with your homage beyond just putting it together for people to point at and recognize. Demonschool doesn’t, and they aren’t even tied to the plot in most cases.
That plot is uncomplicated and easy to see from the start, so the pressure to keep things interesting falls on what happens around major story beats. There are a series of MacGuffin hunts for demon-possessed objects across areas with limited exploration and few important characters to interact with, which means it’s up to strong writing and personalities to carry things forward.
The big problem with Demonschool‘s script is that it doesn’t take itself seriously, and that’s not a genre choice. Necrosoft isn’t trying to make a parody. Everyone, literally every character, even the nameless NPCs who have maybe three lines of dialogue total, has to say something cute and quippy or drag out an unfunny joke. Some seem like they were written in the hope that players will clip them and turn them into memes, like Faye saying something is demonic possession whenever an odd event takes place or shouting “best buds” if a friend does something she likes. Some are just obnoxious.
A lot of them are plain nonsense, though, and not in a literary kind of way. Take one NPC at the island’s lighthouse, who hopes there’s a dinosaur near the canal because he’s always wanted to get eaten by a dinosaur. The school is a college for people age 20 and older, and it’s set in the 1990s — no one in this scenario would reasonably think a dinosaur is living in a canal. A more generous interpretation is that the writer just wants to be silly, and that might be true. But when almost every NPC or important character is just as “quirky,” then it isn’t really quirky anymore. It’s repetitive and unoriginal.
Then there are the times when Demonschool can’t even be bothered to pay attention to itself. In one particularly irritating scene near the end of the first chapter, Faye and her friends are at school after hours, with no staff or other students around, and see a student fall through the roof before a group of gangsters remove the body. The next day, Faye’s asking everyone she meets if they saw a student fall through the roof. No, Faye, they didn’t, because it was very clearly established that no one else was there except you and the gangsters. That was the point. It’s an early instance of the game not following its own logic, but it’s far from the only one.
An endearing cast would make overlooking messy writing easier, but Demonschool‘s main cast is a collection of traits, not people. Stupid is the most common. That’s not me being mean, either. Demonschool goes out of its way to make sure you know Faye and Destin, among others, are incredibly dim-witted, and a good 75 percent of their lines are written with the assumption that you’ll continuously find that fact amusing. Other characters are “smart” or get defined by a similar, singular idea and suffer from the same issues. Comedy, almost more than any other genre, needs strong personalities and careful writing to work, and this ain’t it.
Little character development takes place throughout the course of Demonschool. The main story, side quests, bonding events — it’s almost always the same kind of predictable attempts at humor and tiresome variations of the same one-dimensional personalities. Some bonding events with companions don’t even tell you anything about the character Faye spends time with, as Demonschool makes Faye the center of attention, despite still doing nothing with her. There are occasional moments of depth or unexpected insight, but they happen so late and so infrequently that there’s no incentive to care once you finally see them.
During my second playthrough, following a hefty pre-launch patch made possible by the game’s Silksong-induced delay, I skipped huge chunks of dialogue, something I almost never do in any game. By the time the plot started laboriously hauling itself forward, I wasn’t any worse off for not having read several hours’ worth of Demonschool‘s writing. So much of this game’s script just feels thrown together because there was a gap that words needed to fill.
Demonschool‘s combat, in contrast, feels like it was pieced together with the utmost care. You have a set number of action points each turn and can spend them freely, but a character’s moves cost more action points the more you use them in that turn. Each character has a unique gimmick, like healing and buffing an ally in one go, or moving enemies around the grid to set up combos for someone else. Performing actions with specific pairs of characters in proximity activates a special bonus effect, so placement and good timing are paramount. It’s easy to see that a lot of effort went into planning every encounter, and Demonschool has probably one of the best uses of the action point system in the last decade or so.
The problem is there’s too much artificial difficulty. Combat is fantastic on its own and really doesn’t need added complexities, like only being able to move one tile under certain circumstances. Most of the time, you have to move across several tiles for absolutely no reason other than… to make positioning seem more important and challenging than it already is? I dunno. But it demands a level of perfection that’s annoying more than satisfying.
Each battle also has a recommended number of turns to beat and earn a bonus, similar to the Mario+Rabbids games. You also have to clear a set number of enemies to activate a sealing ritual at the stage’s far end. There’s no room for error in balancing these two objectives if you want to pass with top marks, and while a rewind feature does take some of the pressure out of planning, there’s just so little incentive.
You’re supposed to do the absolute best you can, every time, for the sake of it. That might feel worthwhile if encounters were more rare or had some kind of useful reward (it’s usually common currency), or even if it felt like you had multiple ways to solve each puzzle (which you usually don’t, even after you start teaching allies new skills). As it is, battles just start feeling tedious and poorly paced. I stopped caring after a few hours and accepted my less-than-stellar combat grades without any negative repercussions. Maybe it’s some kind of commentary about how worrying about things like schoolwork is futile since grades don’t really matter in the end. But I think I’d rather just skip class altogether, thanks.
Demonschool will be released on Nov. 19 for Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 5, Windows PC, and Xbox Series X. The game was reviewed on Windows PC using a prerelease download code provided by Ysbryd Games. You can find additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.
