I first heard about "Demonschool" in Panda's GOTY list on this very website, and they described it as, and I'm paraphrasing, "Into the Breach meets Persona," and I didn't even have to look up anything else about it, I bought that game instantly. And I'm so glad I did, because if anything, they undersold what the game is really about.
It takes the basic setting and setup of most Persona games: a collection of young adult weirdos are on their way to a new school, in this case a college in a change I really wish Persona would just implement already, and once they arrive, something is incredibly strange and suspicious about the island and its prestigious academy. And it's not just the gangsters sorting kids into different classes, nor is it the professors who can't seem to remember one day to the next and just do what a clipboard tells them, no, it's much more to do with the constantly encroaching demonic presences that kill and eat people.
The game's tone is surprisingly dark: fountains of gore accompany character and enemy deaths, students are found murdered, children are not safe (one NPC starts with 7 children and gradually loses them, but can't remember ever having had them in what turns out to be one of the most dark mini-arcs of the game) and it hearkens back to the earlier Persona games, where the culture around things like Tarot and magick were more horrific than curious. But the protagonist Faye is almost supernaturally chipper and optimistic, partially because she comes from a long line of demon hunters, and has the martial-arts and magickal skills to fight back against the demons, and partially because she's not alone for long as a group of wonderful oddballs soon finds their way to her side!
Neurodivergence is a topic that's only just begun to get anything remotely like a day in the sun in-terms of understanding or discussion, and this game plows ahead into the daylight on it: just about every party member you get is "off" in some very specific ways, oftentimes not even being coded about it and just overtly stating the things like anxiety, ADHD, and hyperfixations are parts of their daily lives, and I'll be damned if it doesn't make them relatable, adorable, and most of all: incredibly lovable. Which raises the stakes enormously when it turns out the strange prophecy that Faye has grown up with, that the world will be afflicted with a horrible apocalypse once the year 2000 hits, turns out to almost certainly be based in fact. And it gives a ticking clock to the game as it counts down week-by-week to the end of the world.
It actually called to mind the underrated Shinji Mikami game "Soul Sacrifice," a pretty so-so hack-n-slash game with one of the most compelling narrative hooks I've ever played: you're one of the only survivors of an apocalypse, and a horrific, flesh-hewn book is recounting how the world became like this, counting down to the end. Things in both games start light and even a little bit silly, but as you're constantly reminded that your days are numbered, things start to get less-and-less happy-go-lucky and curious, and more and more dreadful and dire. Even fun or exciting moments can be punctuated by the reminder that the world is going to end in a matter of weeks, or even days.
I've held off on talking about the actual gameplay because it's probably the part that resonated with me the least. And that's not because it's bad, but because it gives you a ton of options, but you sort of wind up defaulting to a few for most of the game (before you start to form 2 teams that fight simultaneously in what saves the endgame from becoming entirely dull, and honestly: well done to the devs!) The game is played on a grid, you have a limited pool of actions you can take, and using the same character repeatedly increases the action point cost. It's very reminiscent of Into the Breach, but you don't know what the enemy is going to do ahead of time, and it doesn't provide as much feedback as that game did either. This is fine as battles tend to be a lot simpler, but there were more than a few times I was completely baffled as to how the enemies would behave. There's no perma-death nor penalty for trying multiple times, and while you're graded on each encounter, the only thing you get from a higher grade is more of a currency that I was never short on.
Characters also don't grow their stats across the game, rather you unlock abilities that can be assigned to each character, and each character has a class (brawler, healer, phaser, and some oddball ones you get near the end), and combat is far more based around these abilities than classes. Destin and Ti are both brawlers, both have the same movement, do the same damage, and push enemies 1 space. What will inevitably separate them are the abilities you give them, but this does unfortunately incentivize only focusing on a core group and just giving them the most useful abilities, until the game forces a split. This does serve to keep things simple, and gives the combat more of a 'puzzle' feel than a tactical one, but I liked the lack of head-smashing frustration because the writing and lore really are the stars of the show here.
It wouldn't be a Persona-adjacent games without matters of the heart, and I won't say it's underdeveloped, but it definitely feels more like it was written from a place where the devs and writers just wanted Faye to be kiss and be kissed a lot, everyone is polyamorous and almost everyone is pansexual (one or two of the lads are queer and end up with other male characters, which is very nice and stops Faye from feeling like an absolute cad, just going from one flower to the next) but the characters and their stories are written with such glee and real pathos, that it never even struck me as hollow or disingenuous. They also give the option to be "just friends" or high-five with anyone, and there are no bonuses or penalties for kissing or not kissing, because platonic friendships matter too, damnit!
"Demonschool" feels like a throwback in the best way. It feels like the PSX games we should have gotten more of, but everyone was too busy pushing polygons at the time. It's quirky in the best possible ways, a little rough around the edges, but it makes me excited for whatever this team does next. There's a real beating heart at the center of this game and it feels like one of these new crops of games that realized people don't split apart during hard times, they come together.