Evil School Review — An Interactive Live-Action Film About Bullying and Revenge

In recent years, the FMV genre (Full-Motion Video) — interactive movies with live actors — has been in a contradictory state. On one hand, in the West such games are becoming rarer due to the high cost of production and the niche audience (no strong project has come out since Not For Broadcast). On the other hand, in Asia the genre has a much bigger audience, but developers are focused on producing dating sims like Love Is All Around and Five Hearts Under One Roof — those are the only ones that "earn back" the cost of hiring live actors.

So what do you do if dating sims don't interest you or you've already had your fill of them, and you want something serious — a thriller, some risky choices? Looking for an answer, we checked out Evil School — an interactive movie made for $1.5 million.

Get your double sheets of paper ready and — welcome to a Chinese school!

Honestly, it doesn't really matter whether it's a Chinese, American school — the main problem in any of them is the same: kids. More specifically, the way they assert themselves, i.e. bullying. And you were lucky if the worst memory of your school years is a failing grade in chemistry. The developers state directly that they could have made yet another romantic interactive movie, but instead chose to put ¥10 million into a project about bullying, because victims are too often blamed while most bullies go unpunished.

The theme of revenge sits at the center of the story. The protagonist is a schoolgirl named Gu Panqing, whose sister mysteriously vanished right inside the school building. The police closed the case, but Panqing discovers that her sister wasn't just a bullying victim — she was killed to cover up the beatings. And it wasn't students who did it, but five adults, each of whom became an accomplice either for personal gain or out of fear for their own life. Panqing sets out to take revenge on each of the killers, one by one.

We've seen this kind of revenge story in games and movies before: Oldboy, The Punisher, Reacher, Munich. More often than not, their creators aim to show the destructive power of vengeance, turning an avenger into a killer. Evil School only hints at this in its "post-credits scene," but overall the story doesn't lead its heroine to any remorse. It simply shows, quite dramatically, that revenge will inevitably touch not only the guilty but also those who had nothing to do with it, spinning up a fresh cycle of vengeance.

It's also worth noting that, being an interactive movie rather than a game, plausibility was sacrificed for the sake of cinematics more than once. There's a schoolgirl casually planning murders, "Hollywood"-style last-second rescues, and plenty of movie clichés (a computer science teacher who can crack any gadget with ease, silicone masks, hidden bugs). The final chapter, in particular, is so over-the-top it feels less like Hollywood and more like Bollywood.

According to the developers, the game has over a hundred story branches and 42 endings. There really are a lot of branches, but what the developers apparently call "endings" are actually game-overs triggered by a wrong choice or a failed QTE: clean up the clues badly, and the police come for you. These game-overs just make you replay the scene to get back on the main route. In practice, we only found one full, proper good ending and a handful of early "bad" ones.

The variety on offer is decent enough for a story this contained, like Gu Panqing's revenge tale. But don't expect a branching decision tree on the scale of pricier games like Detroit: Become Human or Directive 8020.

The gameplay in each of the 7 chapters involves finding leads, working out a plan (a couple of chapters even let you pick between two ways to carry it out), executing it, and cleaning up the clues.

Planning the murders, in turn, feels a lot like Hitman: to keep the schoolgirl out of prison, she has to disguise her killings as accidents. Swap someone's pills, drop a painting on someone else.

For its genre, Evil School is made to a very solid standard — not Hollywood-movie level, sure, but on par with a good crime TV series. The story isn't free of excess cinematics and clichés, but as it develops it throws in some intriguing twists — it ends up less straightforward and predictable than it seems at first. It's not an educational piece for students about the harm of bullying, nor is it a romantic story about "sweet revenge."

The variety on offer is more modest than what the developers promised, but the overall level of gameplay is still quite high: the QTEs are unobtrusive and varied, the clue-hunting isn't overcomplicated, and mistakes don't force you to replay huge chunks of the story. It's also worth praising the solid, non-amateurish acting, the variety of shooting locations, and the complete absence of that cut-rate feel so common in Chinese productions. Fans of interactive movies, the FMV genre, and Asian culture in general definitely won't regret the time spent on it.