Hell After School is an open-world Survival game in where we play as a nameless blonde heroine. Our journey starts off with her investigating the front of a school. As she tries to open the locked front door and then starts rummaging through nearby things, she is knocked unconscious by a mutated creature. For reasons unknown, we awaken in a bed inside of the school with no clear goals other than trying to stay alive in this monster-infested building. Luckily for us, we still have our katana and a pistol to defend ourselves with.
Much of the early game will be spent with aimless exploring. The school is massive and is made even more difficult to traverse thanks to the building crumbling in on itself. It won’t take more than a few feet before you encounter the first danger and must put your katana to use to save on precious pistol ammo. Melee will be the main focus throughout most of your journey until far later on when you find schematics to make ammo. Exploring and rummaging through any interactable objects will never cease to be useful. Any random scrap metal you find will prove more useful than you initially know, as does wood, cloth, and many other seemingly mundane materials you find.
To further encourage this cycle of scavenging, we have a hunger and thirst system. Coming as little surprise, we will die if we go too long without either. Those necessities can be found randomly, but you’ll have far more success finding food in specific scenery such as vending machines. If you are on the lookout for a certain material, knowing what to look out for is vital, even if you should never pass up the chance to loot everything not nailed down. When it comes to food, much of the things you’ll find will need to be cooked. You can however gnaw down a raw steak or other such edibles if you are desperate. The trade-off there is that it is significantly less nutritious and will damage your health.
In the early game, the amount of things you know how to craft is small. You are given a bed, in the beginning, to heal wounds by resting and saving your progress. The first thing I’d suggest building before anything else is the campfire for cooking. With how large this school is, it will eventually become more difficult to come all the way back to this starting point. It is only possible to build in specific areas. Your starting room can only contain three things to craft, for instance. You need to balance the need to sleep, cook, and the materials needed to construct them throughout the entire school. It is a fun balancing act that forces you to remember where you create more specialized stuff such as your weapon upgrade bench as you can’t build them all in the same area.
Exploring is made more confusing than it should be by the graphics. At first, I didn’t realize what I was looking at were stairs thanks to the lack of depth and way they’ve been drawn. Worse still is when you reach the end of the screen. It is sometimes a complete mystery whether that is the end of where you can go, or if it actually transitions into a different location without first trying to walk past the edge. With the lack of any form of a map, you’ll just have to memorize these MC Escher-like hang-ups. There thankfully aren’t many of them. Most of the time there are visually clear indications like rubble impeding the path. Every classroom sign stating both its floor and location is quite helpful too. If you were asked to head to 4C, you’d instantly know where you’re meant to go.
After you spend enough time scavenging, you will eventually find a glowing key. This single event will finally give you something to strive for and leads you on the path to actual story progression. The locked doors here aren’t just for show. Each have something hidden inside or can even lead to entirely new locations. While the loot does respawn after a full day passes, there is a real sense of excitement to venture into unknown dangers after spending so much time in your familiar sections of the school. One can only spend so long living on potato chips and dirty water bottles you found in the garbage before the prospect of possibly escaping the school becomes quite enticing.
I’ve been putting this off so far, but now it’s time to talk about the combat. It is terrible to the point of nearly ruining the title entirely. The animations are stiff and look like something out of an early 2000s Flash game, but the real issue here goes far beyond how it appears and feels. Being in the survival genre with a horror theme, it makes sense that the enemy takes quite a bit of damage before going down. What doesn’t make sense is the sheer amount of enemies. You won’t be able to walk more than a few feet before being forced to stop again and mash the attack button mindlessly. I’ve spent more time mashing the Z key than walking or exploring. It is akin to trying to read an article on a website while a full-screen pop-up keeps appearing.
You are entirely stationary when attacking. It really is just mashing the attack button and occasionally repositioning yourself to make any sort of progress towards where you are headed. The real death blow here is the fact that they respawn when you leave an area. Walk into one of the multiple classrooms on a floor and the hallways will be fully populated again. Being a school, you can imagine how many rooms there are to enter. This makes looting and exploring a complete pain. It is survival horror gameplay with Dynasty Warriors design, to put it one way. I am having difficulty even convoying the absurd repetition one has to endure. I would recommend for the developer to at least only fully repopulate the locations once dawn breaks and the loot respawns. Or during the night as to make the day/night cycle more meaningful.
This entire first section of the game is by far the worst in regards to combat. I’m going to lightly spoil the plot and say that we do eventually escape the school. That is not the end, however. We are given the entire surrounding area to explore in our car. There is a town, lake, safe house, and elsewhere we can travel to. They are far more open areas with significantly fewer areas you can walk into. It makes the respawning enemies less of an annoyance. On the outside, you’ll find a great deal more rare Metal Parts needed to upgrade your katana. You’ll also learn to upgrade your guns and craft ammo, among other things that you can now build. It was a massive breath of fresh air after the endless drudgery that was the school. I still wouldn’t call combat good or fun, but it is over far quicker when you can finally find the parts to increase the damage you deal out.
Okay, but what about hentai, some of you may be asking by this point. It mainly comes in two forms here. Either you are knocked down and are sexually assaulted by a monster, or you slay them then extract their DNA/sperm yourself. It is a different animation depending on one of those two causes of sex. Every monster has their own unique H animations as well. The more DNA you collect from your fallen foes, the bigger your breasts will become until eventually, your shirt just can’t hold them in. Bigger mammaries doesn’t equate to more power, it is just a visual thing. There are three sizes until you ultimately can’t get any larger and birth a mutant out of your breast. After that, you’ll be back to your regular chest size and free to start the process again. This too is mainly non-consequential. You simply kill the now hostile abomination you just birthed and move on with your life as if nothing happened.
Yeah, the sex can be just as out there. There is some vanilla penetration and other kinks thrown in like footjobs or voring. The thing here is that you are facing mutants, so you’ll be giving titjobs to dogs and jacking off flies for their DNA. Heck, at one point you even sit on top of a gun turret and extra DNA out of its metallic barrel somehow. There is nothing extreme here, just really unconventional sexual partners. You can view all of the sex animations of foes you’ve encountered via the pause menu. That’s a nice touch as typically a game would put their gallery mode for hentai viewing on their main menu. While there isn’t a ton of animations, all of them are decent and of such variety that you’ll likely find something you really enjoy, whatever your fetish may be.
Let’s get back to the game itself and the actual uses for DNA. With some rare parts, you can build a Science Table. All it says in its description is that it can upgrade your stats. This is technically the truth, but the stats it does upgrade are less useful than you may assume. You don’t get stronger, faster, or any of the other things you’d imagine after hearing the phrase genetic modification. What you do get is either a slightly longer thirst or hunger meter. It is altogether useless since you carry your entire inventory with you at all times, so can chow down at your leisure. The other is an HP boost. It is more useful, yet you have so much health already that you’ll likely never come close to dying before reaching another bed.
Once you leave the school and explore the surrounding environments a bit, you will eventually learn how to craft a Medical Station. That lets you build healing items by using cloth, which is a common material. Opening up your inventory screen pauses time, so if you are ever in any actual danger, you’ll simply pop one of those. Having an actual use for the DNA would have gone a long way into dampening the blow of the school area with its endless and densely packed enemies with no payoff. While there are no other melee weapons, you will eventually find an assault rifle and a shotgun outside of the school areas. Their use is self-explanatory, while upgrading them requires the same rare material your katana does, leading to some combat specialization of your choosing.
Hell After School is a massive game with a ton of content. An update a few months after its release lowered its price to a mere 95 cents. It is hard to complain with that taken into account, yet the combat is just that monotonous. This single aspect turned what I would have considered to be one of the best games on Dlsite into a deeply unenjoyable experience much of the time. Grotesque boss fights, tons of exploration, a useful crafting system, there is a lot to love. It does many things well, yet you have to slowly inch your way towards all of it due to the astonishingly high amounts of mindless downtime the combat causes. The ending is a complete cliff-hanger, leading me to hope that they seize the potential shown here if they go through with a sequel. It took me around 8 hours to complete this title, and I appreciate the fact that it lets you continue exploring after it ends. Hell After School is flawed and repetitive to a fault, but I’m ultimately glad I played it.
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