Let's School Review (Switch eShop)

Everyone’s school days were a gauntlet of different challenges. From exams to social drama to the occasional run-in with a schoolyard bully, everyone had a bit of a hard time, but spare a thought to the poor headteachers who had to keep a building full of hormonal teenagers from descending into utter chaos. Let’s School from Pathea Games (My Time at Sandrock) gives a nod to these brave individuals and shows just how bogged down in bureaucracy everyone’s headteacher really is. No wonder they always had such a short temper with us.

The gameplay of Let’s School isn’t that different from other management sims like Two Point Campus. You inherit a rundown school from your old headteacher and are tasked with helping it achieve greatness once again. However, where Two Point Campus leans into the whimsy of running an educational institute, Let’s School instead focuses on mundane tasks required to keep both students and staff happy.

Each student comes to you with a certain set of traits based on what district they are from. Wealthy kids are Bad at Everything which makes them slow learners but come with a higher tuition from their parents. Theatre kids are more prone to fighting with their peers but excel at the arts, giving your school more prestige. You can choose which students to admit so you’ll spend more time than you imagine trying to find the right balance of students to help your school thrive.

When you’re not heartlessly determining the value of a young person based on a few stats on their application (just like real-life headteachers!) you’ll be bogged down in the drudgery of class scheduling to get the maximum output from your highly overworked teaching staff (again, just like real headteachers.) You have to make sure that each student spends enough time being taught each subject on their upcoming exams to at least pass but hopefully excel.

This system is the best part of Let’s School simply because it is such a delicate balancing act. Especially once you start teaching more than the two initial subjects, you have to make sure you recruit the right teachers with the right skills to keep your students passing and keep that sweet tuition money flowing in. It is much more mercurial than games like Two Point Campus, which mostly handwave this sort of detail, but we enjoyed it far more than we expected to. Let’s School highlights how schools, despite being there to help students achieve their academic and extracurricular goals, are still businesses.

That style of gameplay comes at a cost, however, as we quickly turned our school into an overcrowded student farm, with an almost assembly-line structure to teaching to ensure the maximum output from the students and the best cash flow for the school. It was highly effective but felt a little more heartless than we wanted it to be. It was certainly at odds with the polygonal art style that the game presented us with. There is an attempt at humour at points, particularly early on in the tutorial, but it is too quickly discarded and the game is poorer for it.

Between designing class schedules and ensuring your students and staff have the usual essentials like places to eat, drink, and relieve themselves, there is a hefty research tree to dive into that will allow you to unlock new courses and new features at your school. This is yet another balancing act as you have to assign your valuable teachers to the research centre, which means you have one less educator to impart knowledge to your classes. You will also have the chance to train up teachers to ensure that they are skilled enough to handle more advanced subjects as your students progress through the years, though the process can be slow until you unlock higher tiers of your research tree.

Let’s School is incredibly basic to look at, but that isn’t the real problem with the visuals. The biggest hiccup we ran into during our playthrough was watching the textures disappear from the floors, which made it difficult to tell where the grounds ended and the classrooms began. We ended up having to save and reload to make sure our school wasn’t floating over a strange abyss for a whole academic year. There were also some minor frame rate issues in docked mode that caused the game to stutter as we panned around our institution.

The other frustration we had was in how the game has been ported to Switch. Some controls felt counterintuitive, like switching between menus on the screen. It wasn’t anything game-breaking, but it was an unnecessary distraction from the serious business of running a school.

Ultimately, that’s what Let’s School really is – a business simulator involving a school rather than a game about running the school itself. The focus on that side of education is fun, but it loses something along the way. It also makes some features completely useless – what is the point of running around the school in Headmaster Mode, for example, when I don’t have any real incentive to care about the students or faculty I’m interacting with? If the game spent a bit more time making us feel like these students were more than just jagged polygons on the screen, it might have helped us feel more invested in them beyond the money and prestige they brought our budding centre for learning.

If you can get past the occasional bugs, the unwieldy menus, and the dated visuals, there is a solid and engaging business sim in Let’s School. The soulless and detached depiction of the educational system didn’t gel for us, but that doesn’t mean that people won’t be able to dump dozens of hours into building the most efficient, utilitarian education centre imaginable.