Schoolhouse is a fascinating game to try to define. It, at its foundation, could be called a hidden object title with a light horror theme to its visuals. We play as a nameless protagonist who just got dumped by his girlfriend and is set to move out of town in a week’s time. For a send-off, he decides to buy into a cabal that offers the services of prostitutes. He receives this invitation via some unknown person on his cellphone and must travel into an abandoned school in the dead of night. Luckily for us, this was a legit prostitution operation, and we didn’t end up having our organs harvested as this all sounded sketch af.
Once in the abandoned school, it is up to us to find our prostitutes. Armed with nothing but a flashlight, we must explore this massive building until we eventually find one. As a small tip, look out for red cloth on the floor. It indicates there is someone in that room, making the whole process much quicker than blindly searching every nook and cranny of this horror movie looking ass building. Upon finding someone, this is where the next aspect of this title comes into play. You will notice that your options for sex are quite limited. We can pay a girl to take off her clothes or to talk to us, but when it comes to sexual services, at most they offer a handjob.
While they are prostitutes, they have complete control of what they’re willing to do with a stranger. You’ll have to earn their trust by spending enough money with one of the five overall girls. You have a seven-day limit, and your character can only ejaculate three times a day before being thoroughly worn out, which puts you in a conundrum. One can either spend a bit of money on every girl or invest in a single one to get further with them. That will decide what ending you get when your week is up. Either you find the love of your life, or you simply have one heck of a send-off by sleeping with various women. It is reminiscent of the dating sim genre.
From those pics, you’ve likely noticed the black bar covering their faces and their fake names made of a random string of letters & numbers. These sex workers take anonymity very seriously. This fact makes it all the more impactful when/if you manage to get one of them to fall in love with you and finally get to see their faces. Beating the game once unlocks a ‘new game plus’ mode with all your progress intact. This allows you to continue visiting the girl you’ve chosen without that black bar covering her face afterward. It also unlocks a new park area where you can call your new girlfriend over and have sex with her there, free of charge.
Eventually, you can get all girls to reveal their faces, but you will have to invest a lot of time and money. Remember, money is how you get their affection in the first place. Our character seemingly doesn’t even have a job, given that our total income never rises. So how in the world could we afford this? Well, this is where the game gets a tad bizarre. You see, we get paid a thousand Yen every time we clean up cum-stains off the school floor. It is like white gold and our only source of income. We need to pay 3000 Yen every day to enter the school, and then a ton more for the sexual services we went there for in the first place. This creates an odd loop where we spend most of our time scouring the entire school with our flashlight to clean up any wank paste we find.
At that point, the girls and their relationship become more like a side-game. You likely won’t care when you randomly bump into one on your search to get paid. Unless you plan on wildly investing your cash into all of them, you’ll point your flashlight in their face and nonchalantly go back to searching for body fluids like a cum-hound. It’s not until after you cleaned off all the DNA evidence in this multi-floor building that you return to the prostitute you’re trying to woo. Given how large this place is and the characters appearing in random locations every day, we may forget where we found them and just choose to go back home for a nap. It soon becomes easier as we eventually gather enough money to spend on our prostitute of choice whenever we encounter her.
All of the game takes place during the night, and we sleep throughout the entire day. After returning to the abandoned school, we occasionally find that the construction crew may have moved stuff around during the day. This results in new paths being unlocked for us to explore or old locations now being blocked off. It is a pretty cool way to breathe some life into exploring throughout the entire week. Aside from being on the lookout for any baby batter, there are some cellphones throughout which we can gather nude pics from. A couple appear to be screencaps of a manga and not in the artstyle of this game. It is a noticeable mismatch of visuals, though it is interesting how we can pull up those pics during sex.
Something else we can come across are lost personal objects of the women here. Each girl is missing a single thing, and finding them will result in a unique sex scene as a reward. It does try to offer up reasons to explore, but honestly, it quickly gets tiresome going around a dark building and always looking at the floor for any wiener sauce residue. You will always require that money, so there’s not a day that you can simply choose to ignore this part of the game. This is definitely the type of experience you’d want to take in short bursts over time, rather than a multi-hour long binge. While wandering around the building, you may enter a room and immediately receive a text message warning you that you’re not supposed to be there. Given the context here and the eerie horror theme, I obeyed during my first playthrough. It turns out it’s entirely safe and nets unique H scenes instead of resulting in your murder.
Those scenes in that mysterious room only occur once your relationship is high enough with one of the girls. While on the topic of the sex scenes, the animations here are pretty solid, though incredibly short. They would be far less kinky if it wasn’t for how stylish this game was. The blowjob animation, in particular, is sub-par. With how cool this title looks and the effort you need to put in to get there, it does make it feel like quality scenes. Just getting vaginal penetration is a heck of a mission here and the experience was all the stronger for it than it otherwise would be. It does an excellent job in the details, however. If you don’t pay them to take their clothes off, they will leave them on during sex. Another example is that the background will change into a chain-link fence if you are doing it in the park.
At the start of each day, we end up back in our room. That walk from our house to the abandoned school can result in us meeting one of the girls just hanging out on the street. If you talk to her, you’ll then be able to have some casual sex in the alleyway. It gives you unique sex positions you can’t access during regular services at the school, and it is free. This doesn’t increase your relationship or have any other effect. It is just more H content. For a game that doesn’t even cost ten dollars, it offers a ton of hentai and content in general. As stated before, the animations are nothing to write home about, yet there’s just something about it all that makes it more than the sum of its parts. This is the type of adult game you’ll have deep second thoughts about ever uninstalling.
The sole reason I’m not willing to call this a review is due to Schoolhouse not being fully translated from Japanese. There is quite a lot of text here, and I understood none of it. It definitely felt like I was missing out as I had nothing more than looks to go on for what differentiates the girls. This is no fault of the game, of course. I’m just informing those that don’t understand the language that they’ll be missing out on a significant portion of the experience. Is it enough to ruin the whole thing for us? Absolutely not. While on that subject, the UI itself was recently translated to English at the start of 2022. This leads me to hope that the rest of it can be given that treatment in the future.
All in all, Schoolhouse is unlike any other adult game I’ve played. The first thing that drew me in was the horror-like graphics. It really looks like this could be a horror title, but it turns out to be a rather chill experience where you essentially work as a glorified janitor. This is one for the patient gamers who enjoy a good atmosphere, not the type who likes quick results. Our character moves like his shoes are made out of lead, even at the fastest walking speed. Add to that having quite a ways to go before engaging in any meaningful sex. It is an amazingly therapeutic experience in short bursts, however. There are no fail states, no danger, no rush. Just a ton of H content wrapped up in an incredibly stylish title. If nothing else, I’d urge you to try the demo if that sounds appealing to your tastes.
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