We Don’t Need No Education
If you’ve got a strange relationship with education like me, then perhaps Let’s School will give you a chance to relive your educational experience from the other side of the desk. This comedic, education-management simulator lets you run your own Japanese-style education establishment, from hiring overworked teachers to enrolling over/underachieving students, it’s all here, and it’s probably going to blow your mind. I know it did mine.
If education doesn’t float your boat, check out our review of Shift 87, a quirky horror game about working a repetitive job. We’ve also just checked out Super Woden GP II, if you want something a bit speedier.
What Is Let’s School?
As previously mentioned, Let’s School is an education management sim that sees you taking on the role of the headmaster of a crumbling educational establishment. With the walls literally falling apart and a local population of minors in need of some serious education, it’s up to you to sort out the minds of the future.
If you’ve ever played anything like Theme Hospital, or the more recent Two Point series, then you’ll be relatively familiar with what is going on here. You have an isometric view of a specific area, and you have construction and management controls to build new facilities, staff them, and educate the masses.
As well as managing education, hiring/firing, and building new facilities, you need to research new technologies to keep developing and manage every aspect of your students and staffs’ lives. Not only will you need to provide them with food, but you also need to give them some entertainment, motivation, and security if you want to have a successful establishment.
Starting Out in Schooling
There’s no real tutorial in Let’s School, outside of a set of missions that you have to complete. You get told how to use each function as it’s introduced, but mostly you’re given a decent amount of freedom to just figure out how stuff works as you go. It’s both freeing and in some ways a little chaotic. Early on, the lack of a really rail-roaded tutorial makes you feel capable of grasping things at your own pace, but as the years go by, you end up feeling a little overwhelmed.
There’s a lot of new information to absorb, and it’s easy to forget specifics that you were told about several hours ago. For example, it was only halfway through my second term that I realized I had to manually research more advanced subjects, or else certain parts of the schedule would be blank. None of this helped with the rapid deterioration of my school’s finances, which resulted in my first financial disaster of the game.
Honestly, if you’re anything like me, then you can expect to take a few runs at the game before you fully grasp everything you need to know. The game feels like it lays down a pretty rapid pace of expansion, and it took me a handful of runs before I was able to run an establishment well enough to actually make a profit.
Minutia of Management
Let’s School does give you a lot to control, with the training and capability of your staff and their various positions a particular point of focus. You get a management view that helps you figure out where problems are happening and how you can fix them. Although, the game will also typically give you a pop-up icon to click on when things muck up, so you might not find yourself using the management menu directly.
All in all, most of the problems here feel like they’re caused by needing to work around this game being built for PCs and instead having a controller to work with. Obviously, the same is probably true for the other console ports, rather than being an issue with the Switch edition specifically. Either way, the controls aren’t exactly awful, they just take a bit of getting used to. If you’re enjoying the game enough, it’s relatively easy to work past them, but I found myself floundering without a keyboard and mouse.
Not Cut Out for Education
In truth, I don’t think I make much of an educator. While it was easy in the early days to juggle the education requirement of the students with the psychological needs of my staff, I very rapidly lost control of the situation. There’s a lot going on, and trying to fiddle through all of the menus and systems to manage it all became a living nightmare, with several different attempts at an educational establishment crumbling into bankruptcy before they’d gotten much of a start.
That’s not to say that Let’s School didn’t offer a glimmer of hope. On the few attempts where I did make it beyond my first set of graduations, there was a sprawling complex of new things to unlock, from advanced classes to better amenities for my staff and students. With a bit (a lot) more practice, I feel like it would totally be possible to run a good school in this game, but personally, I’m going to be heading back to the PC version as soon as I’m able.
Summary
Let’s School feels like a school management sim designed to be a love letter to a certain era of PC games, as well as the many tropes of high-school-themed anime series. Its complex and involving gameplay suffers slightly from being on a normal controller over a mouse and keyboard, but if you can wrap your head around it, there’s still a decent sim here for you to throw your life into. That said, trying to mold the minds of the youth is a lot harder when you feel like you’re losing your own mind trying to manage everything.
Developer: Pathea Games
Publisher: Pathea Games, PM Studios Inc.
Platforms: PC, Nintendo Switch, Xbox Series/One, PS4/5
Release Date: 19th June 2023
