If you’re anything like me, the idea of going back to school fills you with dread. I still have nightmares about exams for which I’m unprepared and I still lay awake at night remembering embarrassing things I did when I was fifteen. Yet, show me a game that offers to send me right back there and I’ll show you a game into which I’ll sink a hundred hours.
What is it that makes these games so compelling? The obvious answer is that our school days – rife with drama and anxiety – make for the perfect foundation from which to build a video game.
“You’ve got folks telling you what to do, but they have no real authority over you,” says Brandon Sheffield, creative director of Necrosoft Games. “Teachers give you assignments, there’s authority to rail against, [and] there’s a good reason for a diverse group of people to meet and be forced to work together toward a common goal.”
Inspired by the Persona series and Italian horror films, Necrosoft’s upcoming Demonschool casts the player as Faye, a demon hunter sent to an institution that combines a university and a prison. It allows for a more mature take on the formula of juggling school-work, relationships, and decking demons.
Most similar games, however, skew younger. It’s easy to see why. With overblown and overwhelming emotions, teenagers can make the smallest moments appear more profound.
Annika Maar, game director of Kraken Academy!!, which dropped on Game Pass a while back, suggests, “All these big emotions you feel for the first time are a great inspiration for stories.”
This focus on younger students can also make games like Demonschool and Fire Emblem: Three Houses stand out for their more collegiate vibe.
Still, you’d think setting a game in a place of learning would feel staid by now. So potent is our collective education trauma, however, that developers continue to successfully plumb its depths for relatable stories. Whether it’s the pastiche of British schooling found in 1984’s Skool Daze or Yasogami High School in the recently re-released Persona 4, the gaming industry has a long history of tapping into the seemingly bottomless well of youthful chaos.
“A lot in our lives changes in a very short amount of time,” Maar says. “Puberty hits and all of a sudden, things that didn’t matter at all before have the importance of life and death.”
But that chaos doesn’t just make a good foundation for video game formulae. It also provides a window into our old lives – a glimpse into a different rendition of our own experiences – that may be more important.
Interactive media is unique for its potential for tangible escapism. But as much as we can be moved by the overabundance of father-driven stories found in games like The Last of Us or thrilled at becoming a flight of stairs in Kirby and the Forgotten Land, games that throw us into avatars of our younger selves offer a more specific escape. An escape into experiences to which we can meaningfully relate, in worlds that feel both uncanny and familiar.
It’s something that was important to developer Jae Yoo when creating Eternights. “Creating a world that is more colourful and enjoyable than real life is what makes games compelling for players,” he says.
Like Demonschool, Eternights takes influence from, among other things, Persona and drops a group of teenagers into an apocalyptic world filled with monsters. With school out for the apocalypse, Eternights manages to tap into both the youthful drama that drives these games and the monster-shaped obstacles that are a hallmark of youth-driven media.