Demonschool

If I had to pick one word to describe Demonschool, I would pick cozy. I will admit that it was not the vibe I expected. All this talk of slaying demons and an impending apocalypse made me expect a darker game with some light humor to sand down the edges. Instead, the initial presentation of Demonschool is a demon of the week sort of affair with humor at the forefront. It is the largest difference between the tone I expected a game to have and the one it actually delivered.

To get a feel for it yourself, watch the cinematic trailer. The first dialog in the game is an overexcited Faye, our red-haired main protagonist, telling Namako about her quest to stop the demon apocalypse. Namako, understandably, decides that she would rather keep her distance from this clearly insane person. Quite the difference in tone.

Despite the early whiplash, Demonschool managed to pull me in. It captures the cozy comfort of the monster of the week style anime that I used to watch as a kid, just with much better humor and an actual eye to moving the overarching plot along.

The dialog is the obvious star of the show. It’s witty and fast-paced. I will admit that dialog-heavy games can sometimes make my eyes glaze over, especially ones with not a single line voiced. I don’t think many people are going to have this issue with Demonschool.

However, by the time the credits rolled, it wasn’t the dialog that was the most memorable for me. It was the members of the Black Magic Club, the name the group adopts for silly story reasons, and their friendship. You know that feeling at the end of a long RPG like Mass Effect, or a TV show? A heavy heart because this is the end of your journey with those characters? Demonschool gave me that.

Sadly, Demonschool doesn’t open by promising that. Instead, I think it’s fair to say that it spends its opening hours self-sabotaging. Its goal appears to be not to introduce you to the world, characters, and story, but to make you understand that none of those things matter. The dialog writing that I praised introduces itself by making everything play second fiddle to it. The initial impression is that things only happen as setup for more witty dialog.

Your university teacher singles you out and assigns you demon portals to destroy while seemingly everyone else is unaware of demons? The punishment for failing to complete your assignment? Jail. A fellow student watches a cursed VHS tape, disappears, and everyone forgets?

Oh well, time to shrug, joke about how weird this all is, and beat up some more demons. How is Faye going to stop the apocalypse? She has no idea herself. In the absence of a plan, just following the instructions of her teacher is as good as anything. He has no idea what is going on either; he just reads what it says on his clipboard.

None of these things are bad. They could set up tension, a desire to understand what is going on. But initially Demonschool struggles to keep a straight face. Instead, it beats over your head that it’s all just a joke, silly.

It does get there. As the virtual weeks move past, Faye and the rest of the Black Magic Club don’t stay the caricatures they start out as, and you feel genuine friendships develop. The stakes start to feel real: there is an actual apocalypse approaching, and it isn’t just Faye who believes in it. Somewhere between sharing sandwiches on the university rooftop and facing the apocalypse head-on, it stopped being a joke. Its largest failure then is to spend its opening hours making all that feel like a surprise, rather than the obvious direction the story will head in.

Combat follows the opposite trajectory. After Faye gets into her first fight with just Namako in tow, I was convinced that I was going to finish the game for the combat alone. The ingredients are simple, but they come together very well.

Necrosoft, the developers, use the line “Motion equals action” and it’s both an accurate description and a terrible marketing line. You click the character you want to act with and then where you want them to go. If there is an enemy in the way, the character attacks. If a character glows blue, they can enhance their next attack. During a turn you can rewind your actions and choose different ones. You can end your turn once you are happy with the moves and their order. That’s it.

The game provides a target turn count in each combat encounter. Together with the ability to rewind freely within a turn, combat feels less like a tactics RPG and more like a puzzle game. I never quite grasped what staying under the target turn count did for me, but accepted it as a challenge and completed all encounters within it. It creates those wonderful turns where you keep trying to eke out just a tiny bit more damage because you are not quite confident that it will be enough in the end.

Where combat falls a little flat is that it doesn’t meaningfully scale up the difficulty or variety of challenges it throws at you. Most enemy types simply require you to be slightly more careful about positioning, which makes sense for this type of game, but isn’t exactly groundbreaking.

There are some that really shake things up, but mostly with lackluster results. As an example, there is a “wall” enemy that has 40 health, in a game where 3 damage is already a very high amount of damage. You are meant to maneuver around them, but that just means you spend more time moving your characters and less time figuring out combos. Those fights were not among my favorites, so I am glad for the restraint the game showed in using them.

Additionally, not all characters are equally viable. Demonschool’s combat relies heavily on dealing damage to a group of enemies all at once. For reasons that I have not grasped, not all characters can do so. Those characters have some other interesting abilities, like a unique way of moving enemies around on the battlefield. None of it makes up for the fact that when there are 20 enemies to beat in three turns, being able to damage five at once is strictly better than just attacking one. In my playthrough, I only ever used those characters when the game forced them on me.

All this is compounded by how liberally Demonschool disperses demons in your general direction. The story advances in small steps: morning, evening, and night. It takes place over 13 weeks and a week has 5 days in which you encounter demons as part of the main story — since “nothing bad ever happens on weekends.” At each of these small steps Demonschool will find an excuse, usually multiple, to have you fight against demons. Even if there is no conceivable story reason for a fight to happen at this very moment, the game will shrug, have some demons wander onto the screen, and throw some combat your way regardless.

I don’t want to imply that I did not have a great time with combat in Demonschool; quite the opposite actually. I had fun solving combat encounters, even when the variety was a little lacking. The satisfaction when you find the right line to get another kill or position enemies better for your next turn, it’s so good. On the difficulty side, some of the boss fights did take me a few restarts to get under the target turn count. But I understand why my enjoyment might not be a universally shared experience.

The other part of Demonschool’s gameplay is a Persona-esque slice-of-life. Unlike Persona, Demonschool doesn’t ask you to manage your time. Time only passes when you decide to continue the main quest. You are free to do as much or as little of the slice-of-life activities as you desire. There is plenty to choose from: go on sidequests, increase Faye’s relationship with teammates, participate in a beetle race, or catch some fish — something that I am sure will make some people very happy.

In between the main story, there are optional sidequests. I would split these into two categories: regular sidequests and relationship quests, which advance Faye’s relationship with a teammate. Regular sidequests are what they are. If you want to scratch that combat itch, they are exactly what you would want. They don’t deliver much in terms of story; the beats are generally very short and mostly filled with humorous dialog.

Relationship quests are, on the other hand, real highlights. You still get your regularly scheduled combat encounters, but the story and dialog are much more heartfelt. They are a massive contributor to the feeling of coziness I described at the beginning of this post and make the endings hit that much harder. If you pick up Demonschool and decide that the regular sidequests don’t do it for you, I would still recommend that you seek to max out the relationship status with all of your teammates. Devin is terrified of snakes; go punch one with him.

Maxing out a relationship involves filling up a relationship bar before the quests can be tackled. To do so, Demonschool offers us four minigames. The minigames are, in descending order of how tolerable they are: cooking, rock paper scissors ¹, karaoke, and “guess what expression the silhouette of a character sprite is meant to imply.” You can play these every day and collect “relationship points” — I don’t believe Demonschool uses that name: it’s just a bar that fills up.

This is also where some time management manages to sneak back in: if you want to see all the relationship quests in a single playthrough, you will have to play these minigames each time they are available. There is some slack, but not much.

Overall, these minigames are … not great and they fail at the most important part of a mechanic about spending time with a character: actually spending time with the character and learning more about them and their story. Instead, the only difference between which character you invite to a minigame is what sprite is on screen. They might be the worst part of the game. Not because they are all that bad, but because removing them without replacement would have made the game more enjoyable.

I loved Demonschool, Faye and her antics, and the rest of the team too. The combat was great. Despite its shortcomings and the overwhelming flood of demons you end up fighting, not once in my 40 hours was I annoyed to see demons walk onto the screen. The dialog is amazing and I grew to really enjoy the humor. Especially once the game had the decency to be serious for a short while, I loved those earnest moments even more.

Demonschool worked for me despite its flaws. Despite trying its best to leave a bad first impression. That annoys me more than anything, because ultimately “stick with it, it will get good” isn’t good enough for a recommendation. But I do want people to give it a shot. Demonschool deserves that. Let the fun combat carry you into the latter half of the game where the story really comes into its own. Necrosoft does not offer a demo anymore ², but Steam’s 2-hour refund window exists. If you don’t bounce off right away, I think you’ve found yourself one amazing game to play.