School life can encompass a lot. There are classes to attend, extracurriculars to get involved in, and plenty of fellow students to meet and grow alongside. And if you’re attending Demonschool, there’s a fair bit of infernal conflict and apocalyptic terror to overcome, alongside your finals.
Demonschool’s Hemsk Island is a lively college town filled with things to do: fishing, cooking, reading tea leaves, tossing coins in fountains, fixing up arcade cabinets, and dispensing of demons with tactical precision, all set amid a Y2K-fueled analog community. Demonschool feels like a lockbox of clever ideas. Though the breadth of side activities sometimes belies depth, it’s the core tactical combat, audio-visual flair, and found-family story that helps Demonschool clear the course with great marks.
The semester of Demonschool starts with Faye, a new student descended from a lineage of demon hunters, on the ferry to Hemsk Island for university. There’s a prophecy saying the world will end several weeks from now, and she’s on the hunt to solve it. Along the way, you gather up a party around Faye, get weekly assignments, and learn more about why demons are popping up with increasing frequency.
The cast of characters gathered throughout the course of Demonschool is an eclectic, fun bunch. There were some clear favorites for me over others, either depending on their particular skillset or just general vibes, but each one stands out on their own. Aina, the cool, tough daughter of a crime lord is probably my favorite, but others such as the beastmaster-like Mercy and Henk, who literally drops desks and other items on the field, all offered unique options for my party, as well as fun social bonds to build up between major quests.
It’s a shame, then, that it takes a bit for Demonschool to get to that point. The first few in-game weeks of Demonschool are slow, as Faye and friends take time to start growing their numbers. This, combined with a generally high frequency of battles, means you’re tackling fights and hanging out with the same set of companions for a spell.
When it gets going, though, the tactical combat sings. In description, Demonschool’s tactics sound complex; you have a planning phase, in which you spend increasing amounts of fixed points to move and attack with your chosen party. Movement happens in straight lines and diagonals, so combat often tasks you with threading moves together, hopping from one foe to the next. All the while, you’re trying to kill enough demons to fill up the meter and reach the opposite side of the battlefield, to seal them all away and end the fight, before any demons reach your side of the field and crack the barrier, spilling out into the real world.
Add in some specific rules around moving and attacking, as well as little adjustments like side-stepping, and Demonschool can be a lot to wrap your mind around, tactically. Necrosoft’s taken a very direct approach – numbers are low, as are health bars, and it makes combat feel punchy, fast, and sometimes dangerous. That’s why the planning phase works so well, though. Nailing a turn where you sweep through a horde of demons, pulling off big manga-panel cut-in combo attacks and wiping away the field before sealing it, is an electric reward for solving the tactical puzzle.
The tools available ensure you have interesting options for solving too, and I enjoyed when Demonschool forced me to stop using my go-to A-team and experiment with more unconventional characters’ toolkits. The focus on movement and effects, rather than only increasing base damage numbers, means characters do cooler things: augment their attacks to fire in different patterns, add poison or burn to their strikes, or let healers reduce the damage output of enemies with their restorative measures.
Though the information is not always easy to uncover, managing your party’s skills and abilities lets you craft a crew that can do some really wild stuff. It all culminates in the boss fights, which are the crowning highlight of Demonschool. Making bosses for tactics games can be tricky, but Necrosoft makes every major encounter memorable and exciting. Bosses add new dangers, push you in ways normal fights don’t, and can even warp the battlefield and game mechanics in ways you’ll have to adapt to on the fly. A particular fight on a circular plane lived rent-free in my head for days after clearing it.
Some fights were a bit perfunctory, but honestly, even the ones that took me just a minute or two to clear felt like I was exhibiting mastery over a system that once intimidated me. Like acing a final, Demonschool lends a notion of accomplishment.
The less-engaging side is the extracurricular activities, where Faye can hang out with characters or take part in minigames. Fishing, karaoke, cooking, and more add a lot of things to do, and some help with boosting social rapport for the ever-growing cast of characters. But they become repetitive too fast, especially if you’re trying to max out bonds with specific companions. I slowly lost interest in them over the course of the 30 or so hours I spent working my way through Demonschool. There are some side quests, as well, but they usually encompass talking to a few people, fast-traveling between zones, and a battle or two.
Side quests and activities do, at least, encourage you to wander the island and take in the sights and sounds. Demonschool has a wonderful blend of sprite-work and low-poly, PS1-era graphics that frame its world perfectly, alongside an absolutely masterful soundtrack. Every battle, the music drops to a subdued beat for the planning phase and then naturally slides up to an intense tune when you hit “go” on the fight, then back down for the next round. The turn-of-the-21st-century vibes are immaculate in Demonschool; it looks and sounds unlike anything else you’ll play this year, in the best way.
Demonschool is infectious. The tactical clicks as I fired off a masterful turn that wipes out swathes of demonic creatures kept me coming back, day after day, week after week. Each new character pushed me in new directions, opening new horizons, while also luring me into new bonds and relationships. Though it takes a while to get going and falls a bit short in its side activities, Demonschool still manages to be a haunted PS1 disc of tactical joy.