School Years is a Chinese romance visual novel exploring a male's perspective in dating during his life. Due to being in first person perspective, you fully explore his mindset and the game takes some psychological turns. The first episode explored his life during high school and was the only episode released at the moment. The game is therefore currently incomplete and at the end of the game there is an announcement stating the next episodes will be available via additional DLC's.

To understand the game in English, the only option is English subtitles. I played the game using the subtitles, as I don't understand Chinese >.> and the translation isn't the best. When I started playing it was a bit annoying, but after some hours you can get used to the broken English. Though, the Chinese voice acting sounds really good, most spoken dialogue has Chinese dubbing. The music and songs in the game are truly beautiful, I really enjoyed them.

I played the game fully through once, and started going back to some moments to get additional Steam achievements and see alternate routes (but at the time of writing this only played through one route fully). The game has choices you can make, and these choices determine the ending you get. Some choices are time sensitive, and not picking a choice is a choice itself. This means there's pressure to pick the right ones, I guess this aspect of the game made you feel as if you're more in the protagonists mindset, but I know some players might find this frustrating. At the top of the screen there's a bar showing you how much favorability you have with the female love interest, good choices make the bar more full. Once I started going back to play the game again after playing it the first time, I realised the vast amount of choices you can make to impact the bar and the game.

Something players should note before playing is that there is a lot of content available to play after the credits section in the game, though it may seem like it has finished. It's up to you if you want to stop playing there, but for my route in the game there was lots of content available after which I wouldn't have known unless I finished watching the ending credits xD . The game has truly ended once it takes you back to the title screen.

The challenging aspects of the game is getting a good ending and a full bar with the love interest, as well as some of the puzzles/ problems the game throws at you. You can spend some time figuring them out on your own, but there are Chinese guides on Steam which you can translate to help you pass those if you're really stuck. Some of them are multiple choice questions in which you can just guess blindly (and worst case scenario you get them wrong), but some challenges are puzzle-like and require you to finish them to continue the game.

I played the game for free, but I think as long as you don't mind the current state of the English translation, the game is worth the cheap price. Personally, I really enjoyed the narrative and I truly empathised with the main character and felt a bond to the characters he interacted with. I'm looking forward to Episode 2 which supposedly will explore his University life and I'm definitely going back to the game to explore more routes and endings.

School Years is a Chinese romance visual novel exploring a male's perspective in dating during his life. Due to being in first person perspective, you fully explore his mindset and the game takes some psychological turns. The first episode explored his life during high school and was the only episode released at the moment. The game is therefore currently incomplete and at the end of the game there is an announcement stating the next episodes will be available via additional DLC's. To understand the game in English, the only option is English subtitles. I played the game using the subtitles, as I don't understand Chinese >.> and the translation isn't the best. When I started playing it was a bit annoying, but after some hours you can get used to the broken English. Though, the Chinese voice acting sounds really good, most spoken dialogue has Chinese dubbing. The music and songs in the game are truly beautiful, I really enjoyed them. I played the game fully through once, and started going back to some moments to get additional Steam achievements and see alternate routes (but at the time of writing this only played through one route fully). The game has choices you can make, and these choices determine the ending you get. Some choices are time sensitive, and not picking a choice is a choice itself. This means there's pressure to pick the right ones, I guess this aspect of the game made you feel as if you're more in the protagonists mindset, but I know some players might find this frustrating. At the top of the screen there's a bar showing you how much favorability you have with the female love interest, good choices make the bar more full. Once I started going back to play the game again after playing it the first time, I realised the vast amount of choices you can make to impact the bar and the game. Something players should note before playing is that there is a lot of content available to play after the credits section in the game, though it may seem like it has finished. It's up to you if you want to stop playing there, but for my route in the game there was lots of content available after which I wouldn't have known unless I finished watching the ending credits xD . The game has truly ended once it takes you back to the title screen. The challenging aspects of the game is getting a good ending and a full bar with the love interest, as well as some of the puzzles/ problems the game throws at you. You can spend some time figuring them out on your own, but there are Chinese guides on Steam which you can translate to help you pass those if you're really stuck. Some of them are multiple choice questions in which you can just guess blindly (and worst case scenario you get them wrong), but some challenges are puzzle-like and require you to finish them to continue the game. I played the game for free, but I think as long as you don't mind the current state of the English translation, the game is worth the cheap price. Personally, I really enjoyed the narrative and I truly empathised with the main character and felt a bond to the characters he interacted with. I'm looking forward to Episode 2 which supposedly will explore his University life and I'm definitely going back to the game to explore more routes and endings.