“Video games are important, but education is importanter” is a saying that gets flung around my household a lot as I have two kids in school, and trying to get kids to see the value in education is most parents’ daily struggle. Let’s School by Pathea Games is a Video Game about the importance of Education, bringing School Management into the palms of your hands. What’s It Like? Sit up straight, pay attention, and can I borrow a pencil? as we review Let’s School for Nintendo Switch.
Let’s School makes you the principal of a run-down school and it’s up to you to turn it around. You won’t be alone as you have a teacher there to help you try to build up the education standards of the local area and train young minds to succeed in passing standardised tests. The game has a very similar premise to that of Two Point Campus & Hospital and shares a lot of similar core mechanics. You will build, hire staff, research new tech, and manage the school from behind a cursor, pointing and clicking on whatever needs your attention. There’s a surprisingly deep level of customisation and management to delve into, provided you can stay in school… but that lesson will come after recess (or little lunch to us Aussies.) It has some unique mechanics like starting off the semester with a speech at assembly to inspire students and provide buffs, but the UI isn’t adjusted so half the text is missing or simply trails off-screen leaving you guessing what you should press. The core or the gameplay loop consists of structuring classes by managing teachers and lesson schedules to help students succeed while researching and building new upgrades for your campus to enroll more students and therefore earn more profits to expand. There are a lot of clever additions like seasonal festivals with mini objectives, and natural disasters or events to mix up the gameplay instead of putting time in fast forward to churn and burn through the semester. At the end of each semester, students sit their exams and how many pass and fail sets your ranking as a school in the community.
The art and animation style of Let’s School looks almost like a PS1 game and intentionally has janky animation as a part of it’s charm. The game runs at a consistent framerate as well, but the overall product has a very obvious lack of polish on the Switch and despite having a couple of post-release patches, is still a mess. Localisation is awful with some buffs saying “9Person disappointed” with no spacing and a few other slip-ups of similar nature. Cutscenes stutter about, sometimes characters don’t even appear, and there’s a 2-3 second pause when opening up a menu which may not sound like too bad an issue until you realise you spend a lot of time navigating menus… something that brings up its own challenges and frustrations.
This is where Let’s School didn’t pay attention in class, as the controls were so unintuitive and frustrating I had to put my Switch down and walk away for a while. I’m not an easily frustrated person, but the first few hours of wrestling with the control system made me want to pull my hair out. The menu wheel, which is your main form of navigation, simply selects things at random should you move the control stick too fast, simple things like editing an existing building require trying to figure out how to navigate to the next window because moving in the direction of it does nothing, and trying to auto schedule the classes didn’t work at all for me at least. Most of these problems could be fixed if the game had touchscreen support to mimic a keyboard and mouse combo but alas, there are no touchscreen controls.
All of these frustrations are a shame because at its core, Let’s School actually has a solid foundation of management and gameplay, and the more I persevered, the more I found myself enjoying the game, despite battling both the controls and the menus. The depth of the management is enough to keep the player engaged, but the fundamental problems will do everything in their power to push you away. This could be a case of “Good Game, Bad Format” because, despite all these issues, I enjoyed the game. I would say that a patient gamer might get more enjoyment out of this, but I recommend getting it on PC if you can. For my vision-impaired Principals, there are no accessibility options, so I recommend further research to find out if Let’s School is for you.
For $30 AUD, Let’s School is okay value for money, there’s a lot of depth in managing and building a school to discover, but the hostile controls and general lack of polish will most likely have students looking to enroll elsewhere before they do. Despite its PS1-era graphics that try on the charm, there’s a distinct lack of polish that takes center stage with odd localization issues and bugs. Those who do manage to stick it out will find a lot of management options, depth, and hopefully the secret to inspiring students.
So, What’s it Like? Let’s School is like Two Point Campus, but on a primary school level.
In the interest of full disclosure, a review copy was provided, but this doesn’t influence my score.
