Agefield High: Rock the School Review - The Ultimate 'BULLY' Successor?
- Barely Magic Mike
- 11 minutes ago
- 9 min read
The lack of any true successor to Bully, Rockstar’s nearly two-decade-old masterpiece of schoolyard debauchery, is perhaps one of modern gaming's greatest mysteries. Maybe not from Rockstar's perspective, since the combined PS2, Xbox, and PC releases of the game only sold a few million copies compared to Grand Theft Auto’s trillion bazillion copies, and I'm a mathematician by trade, so I do in fact confirm that trillion bazillion is a much larger number.
Still, with Bully 2 having been rumored for years and never materializing, you'd think another developer would take notice of the demand for a school life simulator that also happens to include shoving kids in lockers or giving them swirlies.
It's apparently fallen to an indie developer, Refugium Games, to pick up the mantle. And while Agefield High: Rock the School sounds like a name ChatGPT would come up with if you told it to impersonate Jack Black from the early 2000s, does the game underneath manage to fill the nostalgic shoes of its spiritual predecessor?
Ha! NO. No no no. No. Not even a little bit. No. If Agefield High gets recognized for anything at all, it's for being the first game I can think of to be so actively terrible that it might be mildly amazing. If you made Bully into a movie and had Tommy Wiseau direct it, you might get close to the vibes this atrociously charmless turd gives off from its every pore. Because it's not just that Agefield High is bad, but also that it is fucking weird beyond description. The sheer volume of timestamps I had to communicate to our editor for inclusion in this review could very nearly fill a novella. And accordingly, this is going to be the strangest review I've ever done. So stick around, because I don't think the intentions of Bully crossed with the execution of an early Deadly Premonition prototype was on anybody's 2026 bingo card. Let's get weird.
Temu Bully–er, I mean, Agefield High, has you playing as Sam, who's new in the town of Agefield and has the personality of a plastic grocery bag. Sam's hobbies include listening to generic rock music, playing guitar, and staring indifferently into the void. He has a mom who constantly looks on the verge of tears, a sister who we're never actually introduced to and just happens to be walking around the house at some point, and two new friends named Axel and Kale. Yes, Kale, like the leafy green. This is Kale. Kale looks like the unlikely lovechild of the Mad TV mascot and this dummy from that horror movie Dead Silence. Together, Sam and his new friends imbue Agefield High with a charmless, store-brand edginess that lays the foundation for a story that might as well be procedurally generated for all the intrigue it inspires. It's trying to channel the vibe of early 2000s coming-of-age movies, but does little more than assemble a litany of high school movie tropes into a Frankenstein monster of disturbing uncanniness.
The game's Steam page clearly indicates that it's the type of game that quote “isn't afraid of humor that some people may consider outdated.” I take some issue with that, because I'm not sure the script of Agefield High actually contains any jokes. Sure, it puts us in situations like a mission where you chase after a teacher who's running through the neighborhood blatantly creeping on teenage girls through binoculars - and when I say blatantly, I mean literally a peeping Tom standing in the middle of the street. When confronted, this teacher defends himself by saying “Boys, everyone has addictions.” On a different note, almost every single woman in the game is skinny, scantily clad, and heavily made-up, which is… an interesting choice in 2026. But if “humor that some people may consider outdated” means situations and tropes that feel unnecessarily creepy for no reason, then yes. Agefield High has plenty of that.
The overarching story about Sam and his weird, performatively rebellious friends is window dressing, though—the true joys of Agefield High hide between the cracks, of which there are many. Agefield is, for whatever reason, full of bizarre and sometimes creepy adults who tend to say weird things. Much like our protagonist, these characters have the charisma of unseasoned cabbage and consistently look like they cut off somebody else's face and are wearing it around while trying to play it cool.
Seriously, I understand and respect that indie development is difficult, especially when making a game that's trying to look somewhat modern, but the entire cast of Agefield High: Rock the School looks like they're being actively filled with formaldehyde. If the dev team has an ounce of self-awareness around this, they're frighteningly good at hiding it, instead opting for lengthy, uncomfortable close-ups of characters’ faces as they try to remember what emotions are. For example, just get a look at this scene at the start of a party that Sam and his friends decide to crash. At a certain point, any game's scope has to match its budget, and it's clear not just from Agefield High’s character models and animations but the entire game, that it was built with the intention of functioning and literally nothing else.
That's the strangest part about this—normally when a game is this comprehensively atrocious, it's equally broken, filled with game-breaking bugs and a general vibe of a rushed job. By that standard, Agefield High is more polished than I would think. Relatively speaking, that is, don't get me wrong—I still ran into some game-breaking bugs like a door that swung inward and trapped me between it and a flirting party couple like a non-consenting cuck, forcing me to reload the checkpoint or stay trapped in a deeply uncomfortable limbo. But most pieces of the game function. It's the design of it where things go bafflingly wrong.
While signs of this strange design are everywhere, nowhere is it more apparent than the game's combat. Sam can lock onto an enemy, punch them, block their attacks, kick them, and shove them. Each of these motions feels like they're being performed underwater, with such a sluggish lack of fluidity, responsiveness, and proper hit detection that I often opted to just kick my enemies repeatedly while occasionally blocking their attacks to knock them out. Combat, infrequent as it thankfully is, becomes a breeze to cheese your way out of, making purchasable food items that act as health, and money in general by proxy, feel like mostly pointless mechanics.
The way you get money at all in Agefield High is by actually going to school. Sam is on a schedule, and twice every weekday will be expected to attend a variety of classes. These are some of my favorite sequences in the game because not only are the teachers hilariously disturbing, but the requirement for the player to take Sam's tests is about as well-thought-out as Michael Scott's charity 5k to cure rabies. For example, Sam has a German class he must attend, and in order to correctly get the answers for his tests, you as the player must actually know German. There is no mechanic where Sam actually learns the things he's quizzed on like the questions you may get mid-class in the Persona series—the developers just assume you know enough spelling, math, German, or geography to get through them well enough.
Sam has a break between his two classes each day, which occupies a strange chunk of time that is too long to feel accidental but too short to actually do anything with aside from buying a hotdog from the vendor across the street. This is how Agefield High’s open world feels in general—and again I know, open world from a small team = low expectations. But where I struggle here is in understanding what the purpose is of an open world when there is almost literally nothing in it. Sam can engage in the occasional boring side quest, play truly the worst Guitar Hero-style minigame I've ever seen (more on that shortly), or just ride around town on his bike.
Agefield isn't a bad-looking place, though - there's something oddly cozy about its generic take on suburbia. Maybe it's because games in this setting aren't too frequent, and the ones that do exist, like Life is Strange, don't give you the freedom to go out and explore. So I can't say the town feels lifeless, but it does feel generic to a fault, lacking anything in the way of interesting landmarks, unique geography, or characters to talk to. Most of it feels like filler - the kind of place an AI would generate if you told it to create a utopian suburb where the grass is always green and the sun is always shining. The town itself can sometimes get away with that, but Agefield High School is a different story. This school is so blatantly flavorless that I kept getting lost in it, unable to differentiate one hallway from any other, and constantly unsure where the stairs were no matter how many times I traversed them to get to class.
The rest of the presentation doesn't do the game any favors. Performance is all over the place - don't play on Steam Deck or Steam Machine unless having occasional drops to literally 12 frames per second sounds fun to you. Even on my laptop with an RTX 4060, there were sections of the game that were barely hanging above single-digit frame rates and utterly unplayable because of it. I did manage to maintain performance above 60 fps on a 4080, though, with DLSS enabled - so take that for what you will. Voice acting is dreadful basically across the board, though in fairness, the script does not give the actors much to work with. And the music is so generic that I'm not even going to bother. It's the sort of music you'd hear while on hold to talk to Walmart customer service.
I've gotten this far without talking much about the gameplay beyond the combat and test-taking, so you may still be wondering what you actually do in Agefield High: Rock the School. That answer is a boring one - you'll engage in basic stealth sequences requiring you to avoid a jock's gaze or tail a teacher without them noticing you. You'll walk around a party spiking everyone's drinks with ipecac as a prank. You'll engage in the most pointless dialogue options I've ever seen during phone conversations, where every slightly wrong answer will hit you with a game over screen and require you to start over. And of course, you'll play this Guitar Hero minigame which… I mean, come on, where do I even begin? Why do the notes move so slowly? Why do almost none of them match the music? Why are the controls mapped to the directional pad? Why does even Sam look bored?
What this all boils down to is something very strange indeed. Make no mistake - Agefield High is one of the worst games I have ever played. It's so comprehensively abysmal on almost every level that it's amazing it exists at all. But unlike other terrible games I've reviewed, I was constantly excited to play more of it. If you're a fan of “so bad they're good” films like Wiseau’s The Room, literally anything by Neil Breen, or 1983’s seminally unintentional comedy masterpiece Sleepaway Camp, Agefield High: Rock the School is the playable, coming-of-age version of those films. It may not have told a single joke; its idea of funny situations may be outdated and creepy; but when it comes to being unintentionally hilarious, every weird close-up, strange line of dialogue, or bizarre bike crash had me laughing like a hyena. It's truly the first time I've played such an awful game that it wrapped off and around the spectrum of traditional game scores like a confused python, somehow emerging out the other side as weirdly entertaining. I can't genuinely recommend it to anybody, especially anybody without decent hardware to get around its terrible optimization issues, but I'm not going to sit here and pretend it wasn't one of my favorite games to play while not sober over the past week.
Traditional game scores don't make sense for a game like Agefield High. Even I Dream of Indie’s scoring system barely makes sense for Agefield High. Nothing whatsoever makes sense about Agefield High. If that sounds like a game for you, you might enjoy what's on offer here. Everybody else should probably steer clear of what's easily the worst game of 2026 so far. Agefield High obviously gets the indie krampus.
Pros:
- Weirdly compelling in its blatant terribleness
- The town of Agefield looks decent at times
Cons:
- Possibly the worst melee combat system ever conceived
- Script feels like porn without the sex
- Characters all look dead inside
- Test-taking "minigames" are poorly thought out
- Too many absurd design decisions to count
- Atrocious story full of cliches
- Terrible voice acting
- Empty, generic open world
- Often terrible performance
Who's it for:
People who like unintentionally funny media
Literally nobody else
Comments