New game: "School Quest" playthrough!

New game!

When I first got into adventure games, back in the early 90s, they were already making them in VGA 256 colors. Over the years I did go back to play some older, text parser ones, like Leisure Suit Larry, Police Quest 2, Gold Rush and the King's Quest series. I'm a sucker for more realistic graphics, but you just have the play the classics, right?

Welcome to East Geauga High School in Ohio!

Anthony Anselmo of Pretty Bird Games seems to love those classics as well. He has developed School Quest, very much in the style of those early Sierra titles but with a point 'n click interface that just makes it a tad easier than finding the correct words in a text parser. The simplified graphics strike the nostalgic chord, and the game captures that typical 80s adventure game vibe.

The computer class.

You play as Tony, who has noticed that lots of kids in school have gone missing. He feels something's off with the faculty staff as well. So he goes about trying to find an answer to this mystery. You go round and round the school, through the hallways and into the classrooms, following one lead or other with the hope of ultimately discovering what happened to your missing friend Erik. You mostly do this through fetch quests, doing favors for your fellow students, and talking to them to learn information that will help you figure out what to do and where to go next.

When in doubt...

Beware of typical Sierra-style death scenes, however! The hallways are dangerous, with slippery wet spots and bullies ready to beat you up. If you don't have a hall pass, you'll be thrown into detention. And if the staff catches you doing something that's not right, it's game-over as well. The story-relevant deaths were okay, but I could have gone without the random bullies showing up and having to walk around the hallway obstacles, sometimes miscalculating a pixel breadth and still tripping over them. It seemed to me they were only there to prolong the gaming experience.

Oh no! Sports!

I finished School Quest in a little under 4 hours. I put in a lot of time at the start of the game exploring the school and all the class rooms, talking to all the other students. Turns out I didn't really have to; you wind up visiting every corner of the building anyway, and the game is so linear that the characters that can help you out will only appear when you have reached that point in the story, and all the "fixed" characters are only there for filling, though some do give you some useful pointers. So you end up searching the school over and over again for the next important student each time you're finished with the previous one. It's a bit funny, though, because in the end it can feel like everybody in school already knows what's going on exactly, leading you from one informant to the next, slowly pushing you in the right direction.

Victory!

But I loved the detailed writing, even though sometimes the dialogues go on a bit too long with the back and forth banter - and they could have done with one extra proofread as well. But the way all these characters are brought to life, and how they insult each other, or simply talk about everyday experiences, it felt a bit like I was playing an older cousin of Perfect Tides; the Sierra version, that is...

The developer is already working on his next game, College Quest, which will take Tony from the 80s into the 90s. School Quest is fun, but has some flaws, so I hope College Quest will be more streamlined. I really wonder how the developer's skills will have evolved!


You can find School Quest on Steam and on itch.io!