Demonschool puts you in charge of a group of students as they navigate both the horrors of college and the demon world. We got to go hands-on with the game at Pax West and see what the game was all about.

Demonschool’s four key features are tactics, story, scheduling, and friendships. The combat focuses on planning out your moves and creating combos with your party of characters to take out enemies. You can rewind any action during the planning phase, which we found was a welcome feature in this type of game.

Skipping the tutorial and jumping into the deep end isn’t recommended, as the game has a lot of mechanics to throw at you. But once you get a handle on things, it begins to feel like a devilish strategy twist on Chess.

Brandon Sheffield, the creative director of Necrosoft Games, named Italian horror cinema and Japanese horror manga as well as the genre of tactical games as inspiration for Demonschool. Sheffield and his team looked at games like Final Fantasy Tactics and thought about how they could do things differently.

Instead of battles taking 30 minutes on the grid, Demonschool keeps the times down to two to three minutes, sometimes even less. Necrosoft Games has also worked hard to keep numbers in the game low. You won’t see 10’s of thousands of damage numbers in Demonschool, they want to keep the numbers low and easy to understand.

As well as the role of creative director, he also handles the game’s writing. The weight of handling both of these roles is something he doesn’t intend on doing again, Sheffield said.

Similar to games like Persona, managing your time while juggling relationships, side quests and an overarching narrative is a major part of the Demonschool experience. There are 15 characters whom you can meet and build relationships with. Across a university semester, you’ll explore a mysterious island and attempt to reveal its mysteries over the course of each day’s morning, noon, and night phases.

This game is all about finding friendship, finding your own family and forging ahead with it, Sheffield said.

Demonschool launches later this year on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, Switch and PC via Steam and itch.io



Kelton Burns is a freelance games reporter and recently graduated with his degree in Journalism. You can find him talking about the latest gaming news on his podcast Press Why or reach him on Twitter at @KeltonBurns His favorite game is Alan Wake.

Posted: Sep 05, 2023 11:38 pm
Last Updated: Sep 06, 2023 8:21 am
Related Forum: Gaming Discussion

Source: Kelton Burns