Quite a few PC Gamer folk have been excited for Demonschool since it was announced at the PC Gaming Show in 2022. Rich Stanton said it was "one to keep a disembodied eye on," Robin Valentine said it has the potential to deliver "the most interesting turn-based combats of 2024," and Harvey Randall predicted that it could be "another Into the Breach." That's a lot of enthusiasm! And so it genuinely pains me to have to be the one to tell them (and you) the game has been delayed into early 2025.
"We did have the perfect release date in Friday the 13th in September," developer Necrosoft Games said in the delay announcement, "but given how the last years have been and how much we wanted to put into this game, we had to delay it if we wanted to really deliver the game we wanted to give you all."
Necrosoft said players probably wouldn't have noticed anything amiss if Demonschool had launched in September as planned, "but delaying allows us to add more life and liveliness to the world, so it's more of a game you can hang out in, aside from smashing demons of course."
That added "life and liveliness" will include:
- Adding a quiz section. One of our top requests at events like PAX has been more school aspects, so now you have to take weird tests at the end of the week!
- Adding more minigames. Won't spoil the details there.
- Adding more relationship stuff. I won't spoil this for now either.
- Brushing up the UI even further to make it cleaner and clearer.
- Adding Spanish(!) localization. We're targeting LATAM Spanish because we feel it fits the text best. We have noticed how many Spanish speaking fans there are and we wanted to reward them.
- Most importantly, finishing and finessing all the little sprite interactions during character dialog. This is what takes the most time, and what we would've had to cut down on if we had released on Sept 13. but really, these are important. If you played the demo, you'd have noticed the rival character Kestrel hanging around eavesdropping on our team's conversations before she drops some critical info. This little detail isn't critical to the narrative but really helps to build out the world, and it would've been an extreme shame to lose it.
- Doing lots of other things you'll never know about but will FEEL IN YOUR BONES when you play the game (we hope).
The studio is also launching a bi-weekly devblog to keep people up to speed—the first entry is available here, and there's also a Tiktok version if that's what you're into.
"Thank you for your understanding," Necrosoft wrote. "We don't want to play on anyone's sympathies but it has been a difficult year, not as a team per se, but for each individual team member. We're really hoping to make a game you all will enjoy, and we hope you'll continue to support us."
