PAX: Demonschool has both style and substance in its tactical demon fights

destructoid.com:

A game like Demonschool feels like the kind of mash-up that makes obvious sense in hindsight. Tactics games are quite popular, as are their often-accompanying social mechanics and life-sim elements. So combining demons and school makes sense.

But Demonschool is a lot more than the sum of its parts. It’s a sleek, engaging tactics game that gets right to the thick of things. It’s a school life sim that easily slots into the overall drives of the story. And it’s a game I’ve been thinking a lot about since my two playthroughs at PAX East 2023.

Demonschool follows Faye, the last in a family line of demon hunters, attending an island university. Joined by photo-nerd Namako, the cheery Knute, and high-octane himbo Destin, some occult and demonic mishaps soon occur, and the crew has to get to the bottom of it with their wits and fists.

During normal hours, the crew can venture around, taking on a variety of tasks and side quests. A few of them weren’t available in the demo, but others allowed you to learn more about the island and its inhabitants, or just get a little slice of the university life. (Note: This is a college, not the high school fare you usually see in school-life stories, which I dug.) One of my favorite side stories simply led to discovering that Destin, who asked for help in figuring out why his milk tasted weird, had been drinking spoiled milk for a long time and grown accustomed to the taste and chunks.

Nice slice-of-life aside, this is also where the style of Demonschool shined bright. Recent hits like Signalis and Neon White have done a lot with sheer style in their UI and menu design, and Demonschool slots neatly into that subgenre of sleek, gorgeous, text-infused canvasses for otherwise routine activities.