Gakuin Makyo ~High School Crisis~

My first honest reaction to this one was a quiet eyebrow raise, and not entirely in a bad way. Gakuin Makyo takes the bones of a classic grid-based, first-person dungeon crawler and wraps them in a premise that is oddly specific and oddly charming: your school gets swallowed by a demon realm, your classmates are your party, and the corridors you once knew as mundane are now mazes full of things that want you dead. It is a setup that should feel gimmicky but lands with a certain low-key sincerity that I appreciate in small indie releases. The core loop is pure dungeon-crawl orthodoxy. You move tile by tile through first-person labyrinths, manage a party of classmates each assigned to weapon-based, magic-based, or assist roles, and lean hard into understanding enemy attack patterns and elemental attributes before charging in blindly. Skill customization lets you shape each character around a personal build rather than locking you into rigid archetypes, and the chain-attack system between party members adds a rhythmic layer that rewards paying attention to order and behavior settings. None of this reinvents the wheel, but the wheel turns. Players who grew up on Etrian Odyssey or the older Dungeon Master lineage will find the mechanical language legible and reasonably satisfying. Where the game earns honest hesitation is in two areas that are hard to separate from each other. First, the pacing grows uneven in the back half, where the narrative steps aside and the combat loop shoulders almost everything. The early sections spend time building out the premise and introducing the cast, which creates some investment, but that investment gets thinner as the dungeons stretch on and the story quiets down. Second, and this is the fact I cannot set aside without mentioning it, the character and background illustrations are disclosed by the developer as AI-generated. For a genre that lives and dies on atmosphere and visual identity, that is a meaningful caveat. The presentation works at a functional level, and the cartoony aesthetic has an approachable quality, but the handcraft that I instinctively look for in a game this modest is harder to feel when the art pipeline is disclosed as automated. Steam user reception sits at a coin-flip split with only a thin slice of reviews to draw from, which means the signal is weak. What community commentary exists points to the game respecting classic dungeon-crawler structure and delivering a coherent, if unambitious, experience for players who want exactly that. The complaints cluster around repetition and visual polish rather than broken systems. If you can make peace with the AI art disclosure and approach this as a budget-tier throwback crawler with a quirky high school skin, there is a functional little game underneath. If atmosphere and hand-drawn craft are non-negotiable for you, those needs are not met here.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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