Demonschool review: "This Persona-inspired RPG is full of fun, flair, and ready to chomp away at your free time"

The Demonschool summoning ritual has taken a bit longer than anticipated. Earlier this year, when Team Cherry revealed that Hollow Knight: Silksong would release in September, it felt like an apocalyptic event for indie developers. Many teams scrambled to push back the release of their games, not wanting to be swept up in the tidal wave of Silksong hype that had been bubbling for years of anticipation. One such studio was Necrosoft Games, which decided to let its monster sleep in its crypt a little longer until the time was right.

Demonschool has now emerged, fully formed and ready to chomp away at your free time. It's a Persona-inspired RPG where you play as a group of college teens tasked with defending their island from a demon invasion. With a cryptic apocalyptic prophecy describing all sorts of supernatural nonsense slipping into the human dimension, the gang need to discover how to save their island from becoming a Hellmouth, all the while round-housing demons in the face. It's a tactical RPG full of fun and flair, and if you love punching ghosties and ghoulies in the face (who doesn't?), Demonschool will somehow make you love it even more.

Slay, hell queen

Let's kick off with Demonschool's combat, as for the majority of your in-game semester, you'll be crunching the bones of various monsters. Rounds are structured into two phases: you decide all your team's movements and attacks in the 'Planning' phase and then unleash them all simultaneously in the 'Action' phase. You need to keep killing monsters until you fulfil the encounter's goal and then seal the portal located at the opposite end of the board. These fights have all the trademarks of classic turn-based strategy games: action points, party combos, buffs, debuffs, all that good stuff.

For a turn-based RPG, it's very generous with little to no friction. In the planning phase, you can rewind your actions until you have the perfect strat down, which is great for experimenting with different approaches and abilities. Your characters can 'side step', which lets them move one tile left or right before using their action without actually spending an action point – which is, again, very generous. There's no perma death, and no punishment if one of your squad members meets a gory end. It's all incredibly approachable.

And I appreciate having characters not permanently kicking the bucket, as I've grown to love Demonschool's weirdo teens. To name a few out of the fifteen(!!) playable characters, there's Faye, whose solution for every problem is to kick it, loveable himbo Destin who "likes his milk lumpy" and proto-goth photography geek Namako, who just wants a normal college experience, bless her. And then there's the love of my life, Aina, a tattooed Yakuza girl who is quick with a blade and is a total romantic underneath that steely exterior.

There's a great mix of characters with different abilities and specialities, and in a genre where I stick to my go-tos for fighting, I found myself constantly switching between Demonschool's cohort regularly, making use of their elemental proficiencies, their resistances and weaknesses.

Punting enemies from one character to another across the board feels great, especially as enemies are all kinds of nasty abominations. Ghouls, ghosts, zombies, cultists, disembodied humanoid torsos that pull themselves across the floor, all of which need to be handled differently. When attacks connect, there's a burst of arcane colour, environments are bathed in a wonderful pinky-purple hue, and when you kill a demon, they erupt into a geyser of blood. The combination of a church choir and synth in the soundtrack never fails to pump you up, like your brain has taken a dunk in radioactive acid.

School's out

However, for a game about punching demons in the face, there's not a lot of crunch. As much as I've loved punting zombies and ghouls across the board, there's not a whole ton of strategy involved with these encounters. From the player's side, there is. You need to assign abilities to your characters, decide which four of the eventual fifteen you'd like to pick based on their weaknesses and strengths, move them around the board tactically to get the right combos and so on.

But, regarding each of the boards you play on, there's no real nitty-gritty. I'm thinking of some of the best tactics games I've played, where each encounter feels like the developers have almost designed a puzzle for me to work out. In the best of the genre, like Into the Breach, Tactical Breach Wizards, or Final Fantasy Tactics, each fight feels incredibly hand-crafted, each enemy placement and environmental obstacle given a precise purpose to test you and get your brain working in a certain way.

With Demonschool, this feeling just isn't there – enemies almost feel like they've been plonked on the board. That's one thing when a turn-based RPG features quick, cursory, mostly static battles like Persona 5 or Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, but another where tactical movement is a factor. Enemies will keep appearing randomly on the board until the barrier is sealed.

More fun elements get added – fire hydrants that explode on impact, ghouls that possess your characters and move them – but as much fun as they are, they don't really contribute anything interesting mechanically. It just feels like much more stuff I have to deal with. And because of the sheer number of fights, this is way more noticeable, not to mention super repetitive. I would have preferred fewer fights that were designed with more finesse, then a barrage of encounters that are always in very simplistic maps.

The boss fights, though? Spectacular. No notes. They're incredible and an absolute highlight of the game. They are each their own supernatural colossus, all totally different from one another, both gameplay and aesthetically. A favorite of mine has to be the giant skeleton whose head looms at the edge of the game board and uses its boney fingers to crush your characters. When the skull opens up its gross brain flops onto the ground, blood spurting everywhere. It's a bloodbath – a glorious, gory, bloodbath.

I yearn for more combat crunch, but, visually, Demonschool is deliciously excessive. Environments, in and out of encounters, are visually decadent. There's an incredible amount of detail and variation, from the deep, dankest of sewers to the ominous glow of the top of a lighthouse. The art style is a combination of 2D pixel art avatars and 3D environments, making it feel retro but also contemporary. Everything is bathed in a wonderful pinky, purply glow, like it's glowing with supernatural energy. It's awesome, even a dilapidated barn looks like a nightclub that would appease the most hardcore German raver.

Between your bouts of demon slaying, you can explore the surrounding town. There's satisfying busywork of exploring each area of the island; chatting with locals, visiting the town shop, and getting to know members of the group better with character events and mini-games.

The banter between the characters feels effortless, and each one of them is a great hang. I always made time to find rare VHS tapes with film buff Knute, help himbo Destin on his quest to find the elusive 'Snake Man', and help Namako refine her (very bad) cooking. Put in the time getting to know your demon-slaying squad, and you'll be rewarded with new abilities, friendship goals, and a smooch if you're into it. Balancing these side events with your main quest is all part of helping your team grow into an all-kicking, all-punching demon-busting machine. Its fights won't satisfy tactics diehards, but everything else about Demonschool gets top marks. Punching a parade of gloriously grotesque creatures with a squad of loveable demon slayers will never not be fun. Together with its chorus of upbeat synth and kaleidoscopic colour palette, Demonschool secures itself as one of the most exciting and stylish turn-based RPGs of the year. It's an absolute riot.

The greatest strategy RPG ever is making a comeback with the publisher behind Manor Lords, and I'm ready to relive my Behemoth-collecting: Heroes of Might & Magic: Olden Era looks set to bring that 2000s glory to a brand new generation