Demonschool is not afraid to be a little different. Different like Disco Elysium crossed with Persona, but like the first Persona games, and then crossed with something like Front Mission. It’s got that retro feel from back when games just had menus for getting around towns instead of avatars. Demonschool takes that retro constrained-avatar format but modernises it, adds some eye-catching pixel art for the game to play out in, something akin to The World Ends With You crossed with Scott Pilgrim.
And the battles are different too. Even as a long-time turn-based JRPG player and aficionado of tactics games, it’s not every day you encounter a battle system like this. We’ll get into it in more detail, but it involves setting up your moves in advance and then letting them play out, moving in straight lines on a grid, and chaining attacks to get combos and multi-kills.
The Persona comparisons will serve you well if you are really wondering what this is about. There’s a high school in the midst of a demon outbreak, there’s snazzy menus, a smooth jazzy soundtrack, and countdowns and timers clocking through your day in great big chunks. Modern-day Persona rewound back into the pixel art and constraints of Persona 2. But enough with the comparisons, let me try to explain.
So even before we get to the gameplay, looks and battles, the narrative is plenty bizarre. You initially play as Crazy Eyes, sorry Faye, she’s sort of a demon scholar and hunter, but not quite. On a boat trip to this odd island, clearly atop a Buffy-like hell-gate, she meets Namako, who is a reclusive closet demon hunter, and who really doesn’t want to be seen dead with Faye. Once on the island, you start at this strange school for spirited kids. I mean like they can see the dead and demons etc, not that they need Ritalin. You soon also meet two guys, Knute and Destin, to fill out your party.
The game loosely follows a series of weekly assignments and a story that gets weirder and murkier the further you approach the coming apocalypse. It starts out with finding a cursed video cassette that kills any viewer within three days, ala The Ring, and the school faculty seem not to know the school is covered in demons, and then they do. And it’s simultaneously like no one knows about the demons, but at the same time, there are demons in almost every scene.
It’s full of intensely grating Gen Z dialogue. Dialogue that if I were being generous I’d call quirky, but in a bad mood I’d call distracting and annoying, and skip as often as possible. It’s fourth wall breaking, making comments on video game tropes sometimes, but in a sort of meaningless way. Nobody seems to trust or like anyone else, and while that can be just fine in some narratives, it made it hard to form a connection with the characters.
For at least the first few hours you mainly just disjointedly follow Faye around a series of progressively more annoying exchanges without ever explaining even basic systems or why anyone lives here or comes to this school. I had faith the answers would come eventually. Some often complain that stories can have too much exposition up front and slow down the action. Those kinds of people will be at home here, where the player is just thrown into this scenario without reason or context for many hours.
The Demonschool itself is a collection of still field areas that you can move about in, but none are connected to any other. The moment you move to the next area, you’re bumped to a menu where you can choose where to go next. Again, if I’m being generous, it’s a constant fast travel system, which made getting around the strange story at least relatively fast, but I mostly found it just made every location feel unconnected from any other, and made the whole thing seem unreal.
The location menu tells you where the next story-progressing scene is going to happen so that you can keep things moving. There’s only very little reward for exploring any other locales, especially near the beginning, because you have no money and there’s nothing to do. This does open up later and you will find scenes where you can increase relationship points with your party for examples, and eventually afford some moves. There are also multiple other screens that for many hours are not adequately explained. For example, one covered in squares, which turned out to be abilities you can research and learn, but I’m not sure I ever found a tutorial for it, even when it is finally opened up and useable.
For all the menus, there’s very little to do on them. Your party are constantly in battle, as we’ll cover in a moment, but they never seem to level up or need managing, or have any real weapons or stats to tinker with. It’s very linear and starts to not feel like Persona because, even though you are marching through these time periods, you are never really given the freedom to do anything except the next scenario.
It feels like virtually every day of the students’ lives at this Demonschool involve fighting demons. Sorry that’s not a complaint, that’s just Demonschool. Clue’s in the title, etc. However, it is true that almost every scenario area and dialogue exchange culminates in some kind of battle. And battles are going to need a little explanation.
Check out the screenshots, but in essence, you begin on the right side of a grid, enemies are arrayed on the left, and you need to advance forward, taking them out as you approach the other side. You start in a planning phase, where you can try out as many abilities or combinations of skills as you like in an effort to take out the enemies without them getting any chance to attack you. Then you hit play, and the attacks and moves play out as you finally decided on. If any enemies are left standing, it’s then their turn to attack you. When your turn resumes, another wave of enemies almost always spawns, mostly so you have fodder for the next round.
You are challenged to kill a certain number of enemies before reaching the end of the grid and finishing the battle. But you are also challenged to do that in a certain number of turns. Put the two together and battles become a puzzle – for example, how do I combine sidesteps (which don’t cost AP if you attack), combos (where two characters interact to slay an enemy), and buffs and debuffs to take out five enemies instead of just two? Grasping that each battle actually has an optimum solution had me restarting battles just to do a better job before moving on.
It’s weirdly not about killing all the enemies as they just spawn every turn, but rather about meeting the battle quota and then rushing to break the seal on the far side. Make your kills but keep back at least enough AP to make a run for the end, or set up one attack to leave a character there already. Otherwise, the enemy takes their turn and counters you, really hard.
It’s a pretty compelling system, and one that has to be experimented with and played a few times to really appreciate. I found myself enjoying the planning phase, maximising my efficiency in battle. It means the battles can almost never just degenerate into that awful RPG staple of just hitting ‘attack’.
Demonschool has a nice design akin to a kind of western The World Ends With You. The static location areas are pleasing, but they don’t do a lot. And the menus that take you everywhere are at least flashy. But the package isn’t all that compelling or lush to look at. Enemies and NPCs can often be faceless cookie-cutters of the same thing over and over.
What I did enjoy was the music. On static RPG backgrounds like this it’s really nice to have a smooth jazzy Persona-like soundtrack full of good earworms I quite liked listening to on repeat. I can’t remember there being any voice acting, so there’s not much to comment on there, but sound effects were fun, and the game sounds pretty good overall.
I think my issues with Demonschool run pretty deep, as deep as that hell-gate I assume is under the school. While I can appreciate the nice music and art, and definitely appreciate a quirky and compelling puzzle battle system, I really didn’t like the narrative, the characters, or their painful dialogue, and the structure of exploration or the lack thereof. I found myself less and less compelled to come back to it, just continuing out of obligation.
It fails to deliver a compelling group of characters or a plot with any interesting hook, and doesn’t live up to the games that it’s clearly inspired by. It is a lot like The World Ends with You, which I also felt failed to give its characters any real depth, but it is not Persona 3, for example, that delves deep into its characters and their motivations to the point you feel you know them. All I knew, even after many hours with Demonschool’s cast, was that they were snarky and annoying, and they couldn’t accept plainly obvious things for hours on end.
Demonschool releases on 19th November 2025, on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch, and PC via Steam
Developer: Necrosoft Games
Publisher: Ysbryd Games
Disclaimer: In order to complete this review, we were provided with a promotional copy of the game. For our full review policy, please go here.
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