Developer Pathea Games has been delighting us for a few years now with My Time at Portia and most recently My Time at Sandrock. Stepping away from the life simulator genre, they brought us Let’s School, a management game that lets you build and manage the school of your dreams.  

Recruit students and design a class schedule to suit their aspirations. Hire and train staff to work in your school and help students pass exams. Conduct research to discover new facilities to improve the life of students and staff alike. There is a lot to unpack here, so let’s get started.  

Surprise! You’re a Headmaster!

Our tale starts with a surprise message from the ex-headmaster of our Alma Mater. Apparently, he has officially run the school into the ground and is passing the school on to you. The only one left who can turn it around. So, after creating a character, picking a school name and emblem, and choosing your future student’s uniform you step into your new role as Headmaster.  

But the school you’ve acquired is quite different from the school you remember. With damaged walls, junk spread throughout the buildings and grounds, and not a classroom or desk in sight, it’s up to you to restore it to the school you remember.  

Build how you want

Let’s School features both a career and sandbox mode. Sandbox allows players to build the school of their dreams without the pressures of a campaign. Set your starting funds to unlimited and take as much time as you want to build your school without restrictions.  

Or put your management skills to the test in Career mode. Manage your funds so your school can stay open long enough to achieve one of four selected goals. Goals include having the most beautiful school, most intelligent or diverse students, or most robust clubs.    

Mind the menus

The tutorial experience for Let’s School varies depending on the player’s experience with management sims. The game has tons of menus and multiple point systems that work as different currencies. Unfortunately, the tutorial doesn’t do a decent job at explaining these as they come up.  

Even then, the explanations’ effectiveness is debatable. It’s a regular rabbit hole of menus. Some for hiring, for buildings, for construction, classes, teachers, staff, research. There are menus that connect to other menus or can only be accessed from furniture pieces. For a veteran management sim player, these menus are meticulously organized and robust. But for someone new, I easily see it being overwhelming.  

I feel the tutorial needs better explain what menus do and how they interact with each other.  However, the tutorial does something right by not restricting a player’s access to certain rooms and units before completing certain stages of the tutorial. Areas such as the bathrooms or the research room are not locked till the tutorial tells you to build them. The tutorial is there to guide you rather than prolong the earlier stages of the game.  

Low poly but high charm

The world of Let’s School has a charming low poly look to it. The current version has 3 maps available, with a different town layout and climate, and each with their own unique aesthetic. Looking to build a traditional Japanese style school with cherry blossom trees outside the windows? There is a map for that. Or maybe you’re like me and want to build a castle-like bastion of learning atop snowy hills. Well, there is a map for that too.  

If you’re into the low poly look, you’ll also be pleased with the character models. Although a little silly looking at times, you’ll have the opportunity to recruit and hire a cast of characters. Personally, I hired the first pink haired lunch lady that was chewing on a blade of grass that I saw, but why stop there? Why not only pick characters with little blades of grass and have an entire school of delinquent tough guys?  

Management potential or business school dropout?

The management and building systems are the bread and butter of a game like Let’s School. This game was built with management players in mind. As an avid player of the genre, I found I enjoyed this system. Even if I was looking for information that was a few menus deep, I typically found it on my first trip down the rabbit hole and let me tell you Let’s School can be a real maze of menus if you don’t know where you’re going.   

Additionally, I’ve always felt like hitting the escape button was a standard way of exiting menus. Players should ditch that habit now because hitting escape in Let’s School is not efficient. You’ll often have multiple menus open at a time, and escape does not prioritize the most recent menu.

For example, say you just built a new classroom. You’re laying out the furniture and forgot how many desks you would need. You open the class menu to see you need a few more desks. Then you hit escape to close the class menu. You get a pop up to ask if you’re sure about closing the menu, yes that sounds fine. And then, suddenly, the classroom you were building is gone. I ran into this a few times, before wising up and just clicking to close a menu instead of trying to escape out of it.  

The basics of building

The building system was fine. It served its purpose and the required furniture items being under each room type is a convenient touch. But the system is far from perfect. When you build a new room, you click and drag to select grid placement and adjust its size. If one of the walls with the size number overlaps with another wall the size number disappears into the other wall, and you can no longer see how large it is.   

This sort of odd graphical glitches extends to placing windows and doors. If placed too close to a corner the wall clips through the new opening. Additionally, if a room is placed while characters are moving away, the paths will not adjust for the new walls leading to a lot of characters passing through the walls and furniture of your new rooms. These are minor graphical issues, and while they may be visually annoying, all windows, doors, and rooms functioned normally despite it.  

Leaky Research

There is a research tree with 4 different major sections for general affairs, lifestyle, school clubs, and administration. There is a second tab for school reform which begins a new construction project unlocking even more things for your research tree. I have some bones to pick with this system as I find it completely under explained by the tutorial.  

Let’s School uses a “leaky bucket” style method to set the speed of completion for research. Your character may be required to have a research level of 10 to study something, but every research object is given a leak value of 2 or 3 which slows down the research speed of even qualified researchers. With some math you could reverse-engineer this, but it’s a method of trial and error as the game doesn’t tell you what the “leak” value is. For some management players, this kind of number crunching is just part of the fun of optimization, but to others not so much.  

It takes forever to progress through the research tree, even for the first tier. For example, you’re locked out of cafeterias till you research a food tent and move up the research tree from there. If you’re following the tutorial to a T, you will be stuck at this step for 4 to 5 in game days while your students complain about starving at school.  

Mods through Steam Workshop

Pathea Games worked with Steam to bring Let’s School to the Steam Workshop, and we couldn’t be happier. Mods are a fantastic way to extend the life of a game by giving players an avenue to receive a regular stream of new content. Even better they allow new developers to work on their skills while working with a game they already know and love.  

Despite being relatively new, there are many mods available for Let’s School. Custom low poly models that allow you to teach your favorite streamers, a Final Fantasy furniture pack with dragon statues to place at the front of the school, or even just some quality-of-life updates to help with managing your school: you’ll find it here.  

Cons

We’ve talked about most of the cons already, but let’s do a quick round up of what we’ve mentioned so far. The tutorial could be a little more beginner friendly but ultimately serves its purpose. It could be easier to move around in the menus, and players will need to get used to clicking out of menus instead of hitting the esc button, but it wasn’t a deal breaker. There were some minor graphical issues, and odd grid placements for windows and walls, but those pieces still serve their function.  

My only real con for Let’s School is the slow start and research system. In a traditional management game, you would be introduced to a few base units and gain more complex units over time. But for Let’s School, you start with all active units early on, meaning progress must be gated in other ways. The research system’s “leaky bucket” method does this to a detrimental point. By the time I unlocked the food tent, I had other rooms that I needed to research that staff was already complaining about. It felt like an unnecessary weight at the beginning of the game. I don’t understand why this pacing decision was made. Especially when it halts the tutorial for a few in game days.  

Final thoughts

Although Let’s School may not be the best for newer players, the game has a lot of offer veterans of the genre. The low poly characters are charming, and the graphics are fine minus some minor clipping. Despite the cons, I enjoyed playing Let’s School and will be playing more in the future. 

You can pick up Let’s School for Nintendo Switch, PlayStation, Xbox X|S, or PC today through digital retailers for $19.99.