Demonschool Is An RPG Full Of Great Ideas It Doesn’t Know What To Do With
See me after class.
Horror games usually delight in making their players feel terrified and powerless, but that’s not the only feeling the genre can conjure up. Campy horror might be more associated with late-night B movies, but it has its place in games, too, as with the new tactical RPG Demonschool. And while it became one of my most anticipated RPGs leading up to its much-delayed release, Demonschool’s lighthearted take on horror leaves it feeling a bit weightless now that it’s finally here.
As Demonschool begins, protagonist Faye is arriving on Hemsk Island. She’s here to start college and hunt demons, though at first she’s having a hard time convincing anyone else to join her for the demon-hunting part. Soon enough, though, she gathers a gang of fellow students to help her close demonic portals opening across the island, while clashing with the school’s dean and trying to figure out why everyone seems to be losing their memories.
Demonschool is finally releasing after multiple delays.
Faye’s enthusiasm for fighting leads to a lot of scenes early on where she tactlessly spills the details of her demon-slaying family only to be met with blank stares or condescension by the person she’s accosted. That also sets up a pattern that continues throughout Demonschool: if a joke is good enough to tell once, it’s good enough to tell 20 more times. Faye and party member Destin are both a bit dense and eager to rush into combat. Mercy loves animals. Namako argues with Faye about whether she’s a goth. Characters in the game typically get at most two personality traits, which are reinforced over and over in dialogue, the joke getting a little more stale each time it’s reheated. As you get closer to party members, you can share scenes that strengthen your relationship, but even with the characters I like the most, these scenes rarely reveal anything you haven’t seen dozens of times before by the time you reach them.
To be fair, there’s a lot of funny writing in Demonschool. It’s a game that frequently had me laughing out loud, but for every genuinely hilarious line, there are countless throwaway jokes that add nothing to the experience. As you explore Hemsk Island, you can talk to party members and others townsfolk scattered around, but just about every line of dialogue you get from them is a jokey quip you’ll forget as soon as you move on, often hammering home the same few punchlines again and again.
There’s a lot to explore in Demonschool’s Hemsk Island, but its writing often falls back on repeating throwaway quips.
That sense of repetition permeates the rest of the game, too. Demonschool is spread out over Faye’s first few weeks on the island, and each week feels something like an episode of a monster-of-the-week TV show. Every day, you’re free to wander Hemsk Island, talking to classmates, pursuing side quests, playing minigames, and eventually moving to a marked location to complete the day’s main quest and progress that week’s story.
The trouble is that there’s very little variation within that structure. The minigames stay the same, the conversations are dull, and almost every mission feels exactly the same. You’ll show up to a quest giver, head to wherever they direct you, fight some demons, and head back. No matter what you’re being asked to do, it will always follow that same formula, moving between combat and not-that-interesting dialogue until the quest is done.
One of my favorite quest setups involves investigating a plane crash to find a ghost that isn’t meant to be there. The plane’s passengers were all C-list actors in life, and so schlock-obsessed party member Knute has encyclopedic knowledge of all of them. It’s a perfect opportunity for a bit of deduction to break up the combat, but one that ends up squandered. Instead of leaning on Knute’s knowledge to lead an investigation, the mission has Knute flex his fanboy credentials a bit for a laugh then heads straight into another fight.
Demonschool’s combat system is brilliant, but gets old over time.
Combat itself is inventive and fun, which is somewhat of a saving grace for Demonschool, until it also loses its appeal to repetition. You bring four party members into combat, with battles based heavily on positioning and movement. Moving into an enemy attacks them, which may also push or debuff them depending on which character you’re controlling. Health and damage numbers are extremely small in Demonschool, so enemies and allies alike can fall in just a few hits, which encourages careful play and finding opportunities to increase your damage. Rather than just attacking outright, you should always be looking for the chance to line up enemies to knock them into each other or position your units for a combat attack. It’s a fantastic system, but one that suffers, like the rest of Demonschool, from being overused.
Enemies get more varied as the game goes on, able to spit poison, restrain your characters, or shove your team around the board, but there’s never a real shift in strategy. The tactics you use at the beginning of the game never need to change. Boss fights offer some much-needed variety by adding new mechanics that only exist in their respective battles, but you’ll have to work through a lot of repetitive fights with lesser foes to get there.
The most disappointing part of Demonschool is that it seems to have all the ingredients of something great. Its writing is often funny, its combat system is extremely clever, and it both looks and sounds fantastic throughout. Hemsk Island is full of interesting little details, from beetle races to talking shrines to cursed karaoke bars. But it adds up to less than the sum of its parts by sticking too strictly to one formula and never giving its story the chance to do much beyond provide a setup for one quip after another.
