MetaWare High School (Demo) is a free-to-play high school simulation game developed by Not Fun Games for desktop devices. In this single-player role-playing game, you will play as yourself, name your player, choose your own pronoun, and the characters you prefer to use until the end. What makes this game unique is that the characters are aware that you are the player that is playing this demo of the visual novel game. Story-wise, this simulator game is complete—however, its gameplay features and settings are still in the early stages of development.

Full but unpolished game

When you start off the game, you will be greeted by three out of the five schoolgirls in MetaWare High School whom you will encounter during the whole course of the game—namely, Chris, Hope, Aspen, Nari, and Isadora. It can be played for approximately 2 hours—an hour spent in playing while another hour is used up to search for the final ending. It offers ten different endings and every choice you make will matter to the conclusion you’ll have. 

MetaWare High School contains a fair share of light and serious routes—although its background music and art style mostly suggest cheeriness and bright colors. Finding the ending of your character can frustrate you as it tends to be quite long and slow. Some of the paths in this game, especially when you are near the end, were very subtle that even by making the choice you didn’t take before will still lead you to nowhere.

Some technical issues you will face here are the truckload amount of typos and spelling issues. The art background style in the game is also very limited and there are some scenes wherein a bad graphic style is noticeable. Nevertheless, the concept of this game is interesting and all the characters you’ll encounter here are highly likable. However, it is advised that only 12 years and above should play this game as it contains strong language and the occasional discussion of heavy topics. 

Needs improvement but still enjoyable

Despite the technical issues that you can experience while playing this simulation game, MetaWare High School (Demo) should still be part of the visual novel games that you should try out. It has an intriguing game concept and a remarkable set of characters. Although finding your ending can probably be a challenge for you and can possibly frustrate, you will still feel a huge sense of satisfaction once you’ve finished playing this game.