Academia: School Simulator Review (PC Game, 2021)

Academia: School Simulator is a new PC simulation game from Squeaky Wheel. You have the opportunity to build a high school from the ground up. You start with an empty plot of land and a budget; once you build the Principal’s office, every decision is up to you. Build classrooms, hire teachers, set the quality of ingredients in the cafeteria, establish disciplinary practices, and try to become the top school in the state.

If you’ve played a simulation game before in the style of a Sim City or Civilization, Academia: School Simulator will feel very intuitive. You move with WASD or by dragging your mouse while pressing the scroll wheel. Zoom in and out with the scroll wheel or with the +/- keys. Rotate objects with R. You can set the game at three different speeds so you can define how fast you want everything to move. The map is a grid where you can drag and drop different objects, building supplies, and people into place per your heart’s desires. Track your resources like money and student population along the top and choose your variables—build menus, school schedule, staffing, etc.—on the bottom.

Academia: School Simulator is much more challenging than it originally seems. Take the Grant system, one of your main ways of earning money to keep expanding the school. These objectives offer you an advance to start and a cash bonus for completion. They can be relatively easy things like research how to hire janitors or lay down concrete floors. They can also be things like research Vice Principals or build five small fully staffed kitchens for efficiency. You need to pay attention to your resources, your map layout, your student population vs staff count, and your progression on research to succeed.

How hard is it to research a Vice Principal? Aren’t they a major part of school structure? They are. They’re also one of the last branches on the disciplinary research tree, requiring you to research detention, hall monitors (really security officers), routing for hall monitors, student discipline through cleaning the school, and other ideas before you can unlock them. Research gets more and more expensive as you progress on the web, so hiring a VP can cost over $10000, but might only offer you a few thousand as an advance on the project. If you choose to hire a VP and can’t complete it, there’s a penalty to back out of a grant. That means less money to work on a more achievable goal like building teacher and staff lounges so your staff are better able to do their jobs.

This is what I mean by the challenge of the game. Almost everything in Academia: School Simulator makes sense. There is a great sense of logic and Squeaky Wheel clearly researched pedagogy and school structure based on what the game encourages you to do. However, if you don’t plan ahead, your school is not going to survive very long.

It’s real world problems in the education system gamified. Academia offers you a small stipend for each student in your school. This is meant to provide for their needs as they attend your school. What’s sufficient to cover your first year when you can have, at most, 15 students per grade, is not enough to continue to add resources like libraries, tracks, and science labs. You can provide students everything they need during the day and still face a failing school. You can literally be left with the choice between students not having enough teachers and going bankrupt providing a higher quality education in a few short minutes.

All the best teachers in the world mean nothing if you don’t properly budget for a common area of some kind where students can just have fun. That doesn’t mean you can get away with just hiring anyone to teach the children, either. Your progress at the end of the school year (Day 10 in a year) is defined by what students learned and the quality of the school/education. Hire the wrong teachers for the wrong subjects and your school will struggle to grow.

Detention is the easy solution to student discipline, but even Academia warns you that detention alone will rarely turn around a troubled student. If you leave disruptive students in the classroom, other students will be demoralized and eventually leave your school because they don’t feel safe. If you leave disruptive students in detention, they’ll go truant and possibly never return. Student labor, like cleaning the cafeteria or common room, is one option, but the most effective option is one on one counseling. However, counselors are expensive and can only meet with one student at a time. You’ll quickly bankrupt your school if you hire too many counselors, but you’ll forever damage a student’s opinion of your school if you lock them in detention, which only requires $500 of research and an empty classroom per grade level.

I love this kind of control in a simulation game, especially one that actually does its research. Academia: School Simulator feels true to my experience working as a certified school teacher in NJ. One of the hardest research nodes to unlock allows you to provide student events like bake sales that earn your more money and boost student morale; it’s even harder to unlock music, art, and AV rooms. That’s the equivalent of schools always threatening to defund the arts and student-run clubs while actively pursuing adding more sports facilities to the campus. If you fight against the structural biases that exist in public education systems, you have a far harder battle to the top of the school rankings than if you buckle and do things the traditional (cheaper) way.

My biggest piece of advice: take your time. Anything is possible in education if you pace yourself. With seemingly infinite possibilities, it becomes easy to think you can take on every student and build your educational utopia. That’s simply not the case, and you’ll learn that lesson after running a few schools into the ground in-game.

Aside from the traditional mode, the game has a Sandbox mode with no consequences. That’s where you can build whatever you want with no limitation. There are also a variety of Scenarios where you take over existing school structures with the goal of building up the sports program or building schools in remote areas that have limited resources. Academia: School Simulator is a highly repayable simulation game with so many different ways to play.

Academia: School Simulator is available on PC.

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