Everyone’s school years were a maze of different challenges. From exams to social drama to the occasional schoolyard bully, everyone had a little bit of a hard time, but think of the poor school principals who had to keep a building full of hormonal teenagers from descending into total chaos. Let’s School by Pathea Games (My Time at Sandrock) gives a nod to these brave individuals and shows just how stuck in the bureaucracy everyone’s school principals really are. No wonder they always had such a short fuse with us.
The gameplay of Let’s School isn’t all that different from other management sims like Two Point Campus. You inherit a run-down school from your old principal and are tasked with turning it into a great school again. However, where Two Point Campus leans on the whims of running an educational institution, Let’s School focuses instead on the mundane tasks required to keep both students and staff happy.
Each student comes to you with a certain set of traits based on the district they come from. Rich kids are bad at everything, making them slow learners, but they get higher tuition from their parents. Theater kids are more likely to fight with their peers, but excel in the arts, which gives your school more prestige. You get to choose which students you admit, so you’ll spend more time than you think finding the right balance of students to make your school thrive.
If you don’t heartlessly determine a young person’s worth based on a few stats on their application (just like real principals!), you’ll get caught up in the drudgery of scheduling lessons to get the most out of your overworked teaching staff (again, just like real principals). You have to make sure that every student gets enough time in each subject during their upcoming exams so that they can at least pass and hopefully excel.
This system is the best part of Let’s School, simply because it’s such a delicate balancing act. Especially if you’re going to be teaching more than the two initial subjects, you need to make sure you’re hiring the right teachers with the right skills to help your students succeed and keep those sweet tuition dollars rolling in. It’s a lot more fickle than games like Two Point Campus, which tend to ignore these kinds of details, but we found it to be a lot more fun than we expected. Let’s School highlights how schools, despite their existence to help students achieve their academic and extracurricular goals, are still businesses.
That style of play comes at a price though, as we quickly turned our school into a crowded student farm, with an almost assembly line structure of teaching to ensure maximum student output and the best cash flow for the school. It was very effective, but felt a little more heartless than we wanted. It was certainly at odds with the polygonal art style the game presented us with. There is an attempt at humor at points, especially early in the tutorial, but it’s thrown away too quickly and the game is worse for it.
Between designing class schedules and making sure your students and staff have the usual necessities like places to eat, drink, and relieve themselves, there’s a hefty research tree to dive into that will unlock new courses and new features at your school. This is another balancing act, as you’ll have to assign your valuable teachers to the research center, meaning you’ll have one less teacher to impart knowledge to your classes. You’ll also get the chance to train teachers to ensure they’re skilled enough to handle more advanced subjects as your students progress through the years, though it can be a slow process until you unlock higher levels of your research tree.
Let’s School is incredibly simple to look at, but that’s not the real problem with the visuals. The biggest issue we encountered during our playthrough was seeing the floor textures disappear, making it difficult to tell where the terrain ended and the classrooms began. We ended up having to save and reload just to make sure our school wasn’t floating above some strange abyss for an entire school year. There were also some minor framerate issues in docked mode, causing the game to stutter as we rotated around our setting.
The other frustration we had was how the game was ported to Switch. Some of the controls felt counterintuitive, like switching between on-screen menus. It wasn’t something that broke the game, 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 sim with 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 pointless: what’s the point of running around the school in Headmaster Mode, for example, if I have no real reason to care about the students or faculty I’m interacting with? If the game had spent a little more time making us feel like these students were more than just jagged polygons on the screen, it might have helped us engage with them more than the money and prestige they brought to our budding learning center.
If you can look past the occasional bugs, clunky menus, and dated visuals, there’s a solid and engaging business sim in Let’s School. The game’s soulless, detached depiction of the education system didn’t appeal to us, but that doesn’t mean people can’t sink dozens of hours into building the most efficient, utilitarian education center imaginable.
Conclusion
Let’s School is a business simulator dressed up as a school simulator, with a heavy focus on the business side of running a school rather than the warm, fuzzy feeling you might get from teaching and helping kids achieve their goals. There are some visual bugs and frustrating menu layouts to contend with in the Switch version of the game, but there’s a deep, engaging – if slightly soulless – simulator here.