Demonschool

Two years of delays, one specific reason for the last one

Demonschool comes from Necrosoft Games in collaboration with Mystic Systems, published by Ysbryd Games, and it took an unusually long road to release. The game was originally targeted for 2023, slipped to Q2 2024, slipped again to a planned September 2024 date, then moved to Q1 2025, then to Q3 2025 — and its final scheduled date of 3 September 2025 was pushed once more, specifically and publicly, to avoid landing the same week as Hollow Knight: Silksong's own newly announced release. Demonschool finally launched on 19 November 2025, simultaneously on PC and Nintendo Switch. That's an unusually candid, specific reason for a delay, and it says something about the confidence Necrosoft and Ysbryd had in the finished product — betting a smaller, more specialised tactics RPG could hold its own audience rather than get buried entirely by one of the year's most anticipated indie releases, rather than trying to beat it to market.

Faye, her misfit friends, and a combat system built like a puzzle box

The setup follows Faye and a roster of fifteen companion characters navigating university life on a mysterious island that sits between the human and demon worlds, fighting off increasingly strange threats — "big weirdos," in the game's own words — while balancing a school schedule that governs character growth and skill-building between missions. It's a structure with clear Persona-series fingerprints: social time and combat time alternate and feed into each other, and the roster's relationships develop through repeated interaction rather than a single fixed story beat per character.

What sets Demonschool apart mechanically is how its combat actually works. Rather than a standard tactics RPG's turn-by-turn attrition, Demonschool is built around planning phases where players can rewind and reposition actions before committing, chaining movement and attacks so that enemies get knocked into each other, off ledges, or into position for a single devastating combo — closer to a positioning puzzle than a traditional strategy game, a comparison so consistent across the review corpus that multiple reviewers independently reach for Into the Breach as the clearest reference point. Every encounter carries a turn-limit and a star-rating for efficiency, rewarding players who can solve the puzzle in the fewest possible moves rather than simply grinding an enemy down, and the game's best moments — its boss fights especially — are widely praised as clever, distinctive set-pieces built around specific mechanical gimmicks rather than recycled attack patterns with bigger numbers attached.

A script that can't always resist the joke

The review corpus is close to unanimous on Demonschool's presentation: pixel art and character design that reviewers repeatedly place in a Saturn-and-PS1-adjacent aesthetic lineage, paired with a synth-heavy soundtrack multiple reviews call one of the best they've heard in the genre this year. Where opinion splits sharply is the writing carrying the story between fights. A real, specific and repeated criticism describes Demonschool's dialogue as leaning so hard into deadpan, very online comic humour that it actively undercuts its own darker story beats — several reviewers use almost identical language to describe serious moments getting deflated by an immediate joke before their weight has a chance to register, arguing the game would be stronger if it trusted its horror and drama elements to sit for a beat rather than reflexively cutting the tension. Other reviewers describe the exact same tonal choices as part of the charm, praising the cast's specific, exuberantly campy voice as a feature rather than a flaw, and one widely upvoted review frames the whole game as an example of "the authors' weird extremely specific interests coming through, loud and clear" — a compliment, in that reviewer's telling, not a complaint. Both readings sit comfortably within the same review corpus, which suggests the tonal choice is a genuine matter of taste rather than a simple execution failure most players agree on.

When the puzzle repeats itself

The other recurring critique is structural rather than tonal: several detailed reviews describe the game's balance between combat and everything else as skewed too far toward fighting — one review estimates roughly 75% combat to 25% story and social content — and argues that ratio exposes the puzzle-combat system's limits over a full campaign in a way its opening hours don't. The same mechanical cleverness that makes early encounters feel fresh, in this reading, becomes repetitive once a player has learned its core patterns, with the turn-limit and star-rating system adding pressure that some find rewarding and others find needlessly punishing for anyone not trying to optimise every single fight. It's worth noting this is a genuine minority position within an otherwise Very Positive review base rather than a majority complaint, but it's specific and detailed enough, from players who clearly invested serious time before writing it, to weigh seriously rather than dismiss.

A confident swing from a small studio, mostly landed

Necrosoft Games is a small studio with a track record of stylised, mechanically inventive smaller releases, and Demonschool reads as its most ambitious project to date by a wide margin — a full-length tactics RPG with fifteen companion characters, a branching social structure, and a combat system distinctive enough to earn its own comparisons rather than simply borrowing a genre template wholesale. The multiple delays, and the specific, publicly stated reason for the last one, point to a studio genuinely willing to protect its release rather than rush a smaller-scoped version out the door to hit an arbitrary date — and the finished game's presentation and combat design mostly vindicate that patience, even where its writing doesn't land as consistently for every player.

Value

At NZ$37.90, Demonschool sits at a reasonable mid-tier indie price point for a full tactics RPG campaign with fifteen character relationships to explore and a distinctive combat system built around genuine mechanical depth. The 92%-positive Very Positive score across more than a thousand reviews reflects a genuinely strong reception, with the split in opinion concentrated specifically around the writing's tone and the back-half combat pacing rather than around any single dealbreaking flaw. For tactics RPG players willing to treat this as closer to a puzzle game than a war-game, and tolerant of a script that leans consistently silly, the value case here is a straightforward yes.