Old School

What kind of game this actually is

Steam files Old School under Action, Adventure, Indie, RPG and Simulation. Ignore the RPG tag — there is no stat sheet, no gear progression, no quest log, nothing that resembles an RPG's core loop. What Old School actually is: a physics-driven life-sim sandbox about attending school, built on top of the same 3D wrestling-combat engine that powers developer Mat Dickie's own Wrestling Empire. You create a student — pick from hundreds of presets or build your own in a genuinely deep editor — and are dropped into a school full of hundreds of independently-simulated NPCs, each running their own schedule, relationships and grudges. You attend classes, answer trivia-style questions to keep your grades up, and, near-constantly, get into fights: with bullies, with teachers, with random classmates who took exception to something. Graduate, and the game hands you a second career as a teacher at the same school, inverting the power dynamic.

This is, transparently, a 3D remake of Dickie's earlier mobile game School Days, and several long- time players say so directly in their reviews ("So glad the 3D version came to Steam. The 2D port… is nowhere near as good"). It is also, just as transparently, running on the Wrestling Empire combat system underneath the school skin — punches, grapples, throws, stamina and pin-adjacent knockdowns all behave exactly like they do in Dickie's wrestling games, because they are the same system. For fans who already own Wrestling Empire or Hard Time, that recognition is either a comfort or a complaint depending on who's writing the review; one puts it bluntly as "a bland reskin of Wrestling Empire," while another calls it "MDickie continues to release Wrestling Empire texture packs… and they are still just as gold."

The comedy sandbox works — when it's not fighting you

The reason Old School has stayed Very Positive for three years despite everything below is that, when it clicks, it produces exactly the kind of absurd, self-generated stories Dickie's games are known for. The positive review sample is full of them: getting hospitalized by a teacher for playing a flute in class, an 84-year-old twelfth grader throwing classmates into an oncoming subway train, snitches getting drowned in the pool, an entire emergent "character development arc" one reviewer wrote up as though it were a novel. None of this is scripted — it's the combination of a full-contact physics combat system, an unscripted crowd of NPCs each running their own day, and a school setting that is funnier than a wrestling ring precisely because it isn't supposed to have fistfights in it. The system is genuinely distinctive: there is very little else on Steam that plays like this.

Local multiplayer is the other consistently praised pillar. Extra controllers can join at any point, cooperatively or as rivals, and reviewers repeatedly single out sessions played with friends in the room as the best version of the game — "even better with friends acting as bodyguards," reads one; several others describe streaming it and having chat pick who to target next. It is a legitimately good party game for people who already find the premise funny, in a way a single-player review can undersell.

The complaint that never went away

Set against that: read the negative reviews in order by date and the same specific complaint shows up in the very first week (October 2023) and is still showing up in mid-2026. It is the camera and movement controls. "Controls and camera are complete cancer for no reason at all," reads a review from launch day; "the camera control, button settings, and movement" are "so difficult to manage," reads one from October 2024; "abysmally [poor] controls… you also just completely lose control of your character randomly, for literally no reason," reads one from July 2025. This is not a launch rough patch that got patched out — it is the single most repeated word across nearly three years of negative reviews, from players who otherwise identify as MDickie fans and want to like the game. A handful of 2025 reviews add a second, more concrete bug: controller support — listed as a selling point on the store page — reportedly stopped working entirely for some players with Xbox, DualSense and DualShock pads alike.

The pacing compounds it. The school day runs on a real-time clock with a strict timetable, and several early reviewers describe being unable to reach class on time without getting into a fight along the way, then losing marks or getting expelled as a result — "Stamina is downright unbearable, it's impossible to just play without falling to the floor," "no way you're making it to class without dying." A few reviewers who otherwise recommend the game still flag this: it can feel closer to a punishing survival sim in its first hours than the loose comedy sandbox its positive reviews describe, and the very consistent "camera + timing" complaint pattern suggests this is a genuine design fault rather than a skill issue.

Value, and a newer trust problem

At NZ$21.99 (checked 13 August 2026), a handful of reviewers argue the price doesn't match the depth once the novelty wears off — "should not be $15, that's just criminal for a game that's quite repetitive too," reads one; "this should be $5 maximum," reads another. That's a minority view inside an otherwise positive sample, but it's a specific, repeated one, and it's worth weighing against the fact that there is no meaningful end-state: no Steam achievements exist for this game at all, so there's no external structure marking progress beyond graduating and starting again as a teacher. Several reviewers with 30, 40 and even 65 hours logged still call it worthwhile for the chaos alone, so the ceiling is real for the right player — but the floor, for anyone who bounces off the controls in the first hour, is a $22 loss with no achievement or refund-friendly milestone in sight.

A smaller but distinct cluster of negative reviews, concentrated from September 2025 into early 2026, raises something unrelated to any of the above: that AI-generated imagery was added to the game after launch without being disclosed on the store page, which — if accurate — would put the listing at odds with Steam's own AI-content disclosure policy. As of this review's research date, the live Old School store page carries no AI-content disclosure section. This is a live, ongoing concern for anyone deciding whether to buy today rather than a settled historical complaint, and it is worth knowing about independent of how you feel about the gameplay.

Verdict

Old School delivers exactly what a Mat Dickie game promises: a scrappy, one-man, physics-comedy sandbox that generates real stories, especially with friends in the room. What keeps it out of "Good" territory is that the complaint standing between a new player and that experience — camera and control jank — has been the top negative-review topic since the week it launched and still is nearly three years later, and the store listing's current AI-disclosure gap is a fair reason for a cautious buyer to wait. Existing fans clearly know what they're getting and mostly recommend it anyway; newcomers should go in knowing the reputation is earned in both directions.