“Demo Disk” – Academia: School Simulator (2021) [PC]

Demo Disk is a series of first impressions posts for new releases and quick opinions.

I’ve never really played simulation games before. They’re a genre that I’ve always liked the concept of, but never took the plunge aside from, like, Stardew Valley, and don’t ask me what my farm looks like. I prefer to fish. All the same, I’ve had my eye on Academia: School Simulator for some time. Released into Early Access in 2017, it was starting to seem like it would never hit 1.0. And then, suddenly, it was out, and I was diving in. After 27 hours of gameplay over a single week, I emerged out of the simulation with ten things to pass on to those who might also be interested.

Ten Things I Learned About Running a School by playing Academia: School Simulator

1. Kids are filthy. Teachers are also filthy. They don’t even go outside and they get dirt everywhere. The only people who are not filthy are the janitors. They are your best friends and you will need to hire more than you think you need.
2. Read the menus. New Game will not give you a tutorial, Tutorial Mode will give you a tutorial. Do not just start a new game. Do the tutorial! Otherwise, you’ll be sitting there at a blank field and a bunch of options and no idea how any of them work.
3. There are school pets. Did you know schools had pets? Mine didn’t. We just had the feral cat colony that lived under the mobile classrooms, and they sure didn’t like attention. The ones in your Academia school don’t really do anything besides wander the property and make you go “It’s 7PM, who is still on the campus oh, it’s my cat.”
   

   

    

4. The “random events” will GET YOU. If you let one subject of the six available languish, there will absolutely be a random event where you get inspected on that specific subject, and then you’ll have to bribe the inspector and hope they don’t take your school’s credibility for trying to bribe them. Try to balance all of your subjects so the random events don’t get you.
5. Don’t spend all your money, because when you spend all your money, thinking, “I’ll get more tomorrow”, those random events? They will continue to GET YOU with events that would be much easier if only you hadn’t spent every penny on statues and trophy cabinets. Your school looks nice, but now you’re being sued because you couldn’t settle out of court with the parents of a student who got spanked. Or you have to hire new janitors because they demanded overtime pay that, let’s be real, they deserve, and you couldn’t pay them their due, so they quit. And you’re still broke. Wait until the day’s almost over, and THEN spend all your money.
6. Who needs things like Career Days and Leadership workshops when you can have a bake sale every day? Get brownie points with real (pixel) brownies. And also more money. So much more money. If you’re running a school barely above the profit margin, bake sales will save you. Or you could get a loan, but you don’t have to repay a bake sale. And you get cookies.
7. It can actually be fun cleaning up other people’s messes. In Scenario mode, you have various challenges to overcome with limited funds, some with the schools already built, some with blank slates to design freely, or as freely as your bank loan will allow. This was one of my favorite elements of the game, opening a new scenario and pausing it to take a good long look at what we’re working with and how I can fix it. Do I need to hire more janitors to clean up a few hundred messes? Do I need to FIRE janitors because the tiny school has 20 on hand and a massive daily financial loss? Where do I have room to build 1000 spruce trees? It turns the game into a bit of a puzzle game, and I enjoyed it.
8. Only students who deserve detention get detention. And then it actually works for rehabilitation. Did you know detention can cure smoking habits? It can. You also get a nice jolt of serotonin when a new delinquent gets busted and you send them to their punishment. The power is real.
9. I have no idea what kids get mad about. I’ve got 10 cooks, 10 stoves, 10 food counters, five vending machines, and 10 students and you still can’t get food? That sounds like a you problem. The school’s always dirty? Holy moly, there’s a single spot of dirt! Now it’s clean. And you’re still mad. You don’t feel safe? You’re at a school for delinquents. You are a known bully. Alternatively, you can lock them in a building with no exits, no bathrooms, and a single vending machine and half your class will make it to graduation day without dropping out. They’re hungry and need to use the bathroom, but boy, are they having a great time!

   

   

10. While you can step away and let your school run itself, if you haven’t told your maintenance team and janitorial staff to patrol certain areas in certain ways, you’re going to come back to everything broken and dirt everywhere. Dirt in places you didn’t know dirt could get. Dirt in places it’s not physically possible to get because there’s no entrance. Also, broken things are five times more expensive to repair than almost broken things. Don’t let your school run itself until you’ve set it up to do so or are prepared for the consequences.

So, million dollar question: if you like simulation games, should you consider Academia: School Simulator? Well, it depends. Me, I came in with no experience in the genre, and I had a great time. It was simple and relatively straightforward. However, based on other reviews on Steam, people with prior experience in the genre might not get as much out of it due to its simplicity. It’s not a perfect game. There were definitely basic elements I felt like were missing, like the ability to move objects instead of having to sell them and buy new ones. I’d also have liked more clarity with why kids are unhappy. As it is now, it’s a bit of a guessing game. Still, the devs have been hard at work with Academia: School Simulator since 2017, finally launching in a 1.0 status, so there’s still hope for more updates to come. If you’ve been thinking about getting into simulation games or have an itch that needs scratching, Academia is probably a good choice for you.

We’d like to thank Squeaky Wheel Studio for supplying us with a copy of their game for this critique.

Maggie Maxwell spends most of her days buried in her fiction writing, only coming up for air to dive into the escapism of video games, cartoons, or movies. She can usually be found on Twitter as @wanderingquille and @MaxNChachi or streaming on Twitch with her husband, also as MaxNChachi.