Pathea Games released Let’s School on PC earlier this week and we got ourselves on the morning bus to attend this charming school management sim.
Set in a rural town and leaning heavily on that quaint village charm, Let’s School is a new take on the traditional educational journey. Developed by Pathea Games and published by PM Studios, it puts players in the role of a headmaster. Given care of a run-down educational establishment, it’s up to you to rebuilding and run this dilapidated building, eventually tuning it into a centre for excellence. You’ll be expected to attract students, employ staff, create courses, manage money, craft a building, and keep the kids in line long enough to pass their exams and raise the educational attainment of the surrounding towns.
While this evokes Sega’s Two Point Campus, Let’s School draws on its own inspiration. While the core of both game’s revolves around outfitting a run-down school and training a bunch of clueless bipeds to word better and count good, this take on the genre is a lot less boisterous. Gone are the cartoonish clowns and silly astronauts, instead the bright colors of Two Point are subdued into warm autumn tones and light pastel shades. Character designs seem deliberately block and even the animation of the school building feels a little rough around the edges. As you gaze down on the opening clutter of abandoned hallways and unkempt lawns that fill an unopened school building, it almost reminds me of a high school art class. It’s a great set of visual ideas that set it apart and present a tone that makes you want to chill out and get to understand the personality behind this title.
Much like the teenagers that you’ll admit, Let’s School is far from fully matured from day one. Players picking the game will need to gather students from a range of local town, opening new admission centres as the game progresses and they build prerequisite facilities. This all makes perfect sense, and the induction provides a solid tutorial for navigating the breadth of menus on offer. Much like other people management titles, these students come with their own stats and need to be managed using broad strokes to stop them from wandering out of line or disrupting class, and they will if you don’t keep them busy.
Keeping an eye on these delinquents are the teaching staff. Like the students, they come with their own proficiencies and goals. Unlike the students, they take money out your coffers on a regular basis. Both sides of the faculty have plenty of requirements to keep them on track. Whether that’s training, teaching, relaxation time, the environment, or exam results. None of this gets anywhere without a classroom, however.
Building
Building is central to Let’s School. Thie physical appearance of a building is the outward reflection of your ability to manage anything semesters throw at you, and an increasing complex beast to be tamed. Starting off as a shanty set of corridors, and cracked wooden frames, you’ll use fairly familiar construction controls to drag out rooms, click and drop furniture, and add extra facilities. The act of inserting a room is intuitive and the usual suspects all arrive fairly quickly. Within a couple of hours, I had two classrooms, toilets, a staff room, a tearoom, a research lab, and a cluster of lemon trees dotted around the grounds. This doesn’t fall particularly far from the sort of ideas explored in Two Point Campus. Like this adventure, Let’s School is largely a game of balance, and while income is never too difficult to keep on top of, if you don’t keep research moving fast enough, then the curriculum comes to a halt very quickly, and the entire school adventure immediately afterwards. That said, pacing is consistent and never overburdens headmasters in a single semester, as long as you keep ahead of a few items like research.
While those aforementioned lemon trees provide a decorative touch, other Items like trees, posters, water fountains, and garbage bins have a more peripheral part to play than that precious Research Lab. Assuming you can keep the kids in class, the teachers trained, and the course material coming out the lab, then these more menial items help push the needle towards some of the game’s win states. All have an obvious influence on the overall environment. While the progression tracks will tend to unlock big ticket items like stairways and concrete walls, soft furnishings might help improve the overall comfort and attractiveness of the environment. These little nudges all provide nuanced choices, an extra money pit, and a way to keep the overall impression of the school high. A pleasant school makes for a pleasant life, after all.
Certainly, this micromanagement influences the learning outcome, but it spreads a number of minute decisions over a wide range of areas. The biggest single influence on a school’s development is still the pupil attainment. That means headmasters need to set a curriculum for each class as it starts a new semester, ensure teachers are available for the right subject, and conduct research without going broke. Keep ahead of this curve and Let’s School is a relaxing, sometimes charming, high school adventure with just enough micromanagement and subject matter to keep you busy. It even manages to be entertaining at times. There are some wonderful ideas, like sending classes out on field trips. These side quests have their own adventure that can influence learning outcomes. End of year pep talks by the headmaster drop in like narrative RPG interludes, and you can hatch a nest of school cats. There’s even a disciplinary system when pupils sneak off to play video games or toss frogs around the corridor.
Unfortunately, Let’s School doesn’t dive as deep as it could do or feel as polished as I might expect. Theme Hospital came to the conclusion that keeping eyes on the screen meant keeping players constantly amused, back in 1997 The same can’t necessarily be said of Let’s School. It does enough to provide variation and depth across the core gameplay systems but fails to go quite as deep when touching other ideas. Furnishings unlock but they lack breadth of choice. Pupils can be unruly, but always in the same ways. Character dialogue is repetitive enough that the whole idea of following individual teachers or pupils at ground level just feels unfinished. Pupils’ aspirations exist but free thinkers are few and far between. Let’s School does a decent job of peppering a functional management game with cute ideas and an adorable aesthetic. Heck, I spent far too much time just playing around with the uniform designer for each class. Despite that, it’s not quite there yet. If you’re looking for 30 or so hours of back to school, or some chilled out sandbox management then pick up Let’s School. It defiantly scores pass marks all round and I’m sure it will get better given some learning time. Pick up Let’s School now over on Steam.
A key was provided by PR for this review
