Short version: If you adopt a stray cat it'll come and sit on the headmaster's desk.
Long version:
This game is not unique in having the player create a character, it is not unique in letting them click on students and read their thoughts, it is not unique in asking you to balance said students' happiness and their grades and the school's budget.
What makes Let's School unique is that its elements come together to create a traditional management sim that frequently has the texture of a life sim, working off its systems in place of a script - a game in which you'll hand-craft a curriculum for each class, period by period, and then sit back and watch as your students go cloudgazing at recess, develop crushes and try to sneak video games into the classroom - apologies to Janet Lewis, who has had her GBA personally confiscated by me on four separate occasions. I am simply too powerful, and you are not.
In playing the game it's easy to see that its developers have genuine admiration for a child's earnestness and enthusiasm, as the game is chock-full of little things for the kids and faculty to do that make your school feel lived-in. These are undoubtedly nice features that add flavor to the game, but more importantly they turn the consequences of any managerial decisions into something more real than just lines on a spreadsheet and a stick figure with a frowny face above their head. In theory, this shouldn't be too uncommon for the genre. In practice, though, Let's School ends up way at the top of the pack by leaning wholeheartedly into its theme. It is unmistakably a game about being the headmaster of a school, about crafting organizational charts, arranging field trips, training staff, balancing budgets, and building a facility that (hopefully) ensures your students are cared-for and comfortable enough to be kids instead of little machines that pay tuition and fill out Scantrons. Perhaps talking about things this way makes me sound like a blowhard, but I emphasize the illusion of NPC interiority because this is the game, this is why you buy Let's School over something like Two Point Campus. Its specialty lies in building your attachment to those kids to the point where - when it comes time to start spending that tuition money - you stop thinking about that "Satisfaction" value like a min-maxer and start thinking like a teacher.
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Please stop bringing frogs into the classroom.
Long version:
This game is not unique in having the player create a character, it is not unique in letting them click on students and read their thoughts, it is not unique in asking you to balance said students' happiness and their grades and the school's budget.
What makes Let's School unique is that its elements come together to create a traditional management sim that frequently has the texture of a life sim, working off its systems in place of a script - a game in which you'll hand-craft a curriculum for each class, period by period, and then sit back and watch as your students go cloudgazing at recess, develop crushes and try to sneak video games into the classroom - apologies to Janet Lewis, who has had her GBA personally confiscated by me on four separate occasions. I am simply too powerful, and you are not.
In playing the game it's easy to see that its developers have genuine admiration for a child's earnestness and enthusiasm, as the game is chock-full of little things for the kids and faculty to do that make your school feel lived-in. These are undoubtedly nice features that add flavor to the game, but more importantly they turn the consequences of any managerial decisions into something more real than just lines on a spreadsheet and a stick figure with a frowny face above their head. In theory, this shouldn't be too uncommon for the genre. In practice, though, Let's School ends up way at the top of the pack by leaning wholeheartedly into its theme. It is unmistakably a game about being the headmaster of a school, about crafting organizational charts, arranging field trips, training staff, balancing budgets, and building a facility that (hopefully) ensures your students are cared-for and comfortable enough to be kids instead of little machines that pay tuition and fill out Scantrons. Perhaps talking about things this way makes me sound like a blowhard, but I emphasize the illusion of NPC interiority because this is the game, this is why you buy Let's School over something like Two Point Campus. Its specialty lies in building your attachment to those kids to the point where - when it comes time to start spending that tuition money - you stop thinking about that "Satisfaction" value like a min-maxer and start thinking like a teacher.
----
Please stop bringing frogs into the classroom.
2 Comments
@dalaamclouds: thanks! i think one could conceivably complain about the game inflexibly adhering to one particular philosophy of schooling (it's obviously trying to recreate an east asian - presumably japanese? - school setting) but if you're fine with that, it's at least worth trying out the demo
Dalaamclouds
6 months ago