Someone's finally making a spiritual successor to Bully, but I wish it wasn't inspired by some of the worst comedies ever made

Three lads rock up to a party in Agefield High: Rock the School

(Image credit: Refugium Games)

I'm surprised it's taken this long for someone to make a spiritual successor to Bully. Not only is it one of Rockstar's most fondly remembered games, but it's also the one least likely to get a sequel, except perhaps for Rockstar Games Presents Table Tennis. So credit where it's due to Agefield High for finally identifying that niche, even if I'm not convinced by how it's going about filling it.

Set in 2002, Agefield High: Rock the School sees you play as Sam, a new student looking to make friends, win over his dream girl, and generally leave his mark on the school social hierarchy. Like Rockstar's 2006 game, Agefield High is set in a school campus and a surrounding slice of open-ended suburbia, with a day/night cycle and a school itinerary you can choose to follow or flaunt.

Developer Refugium Games just released a new trailer, showing off in-game cutscenes and mechanics like Sam getting into fistfights, riding a bicycle around town and, well, that's about it, to be honest. The Steam page says the game will feature 32 main missions and 15 side missions/activities, and mentions you can buy things like "bikes, clothes, hairstyles" and "dirty magazines" but doesn't go into all that much detail about what you'll be doing in those missions.

Agefield High: Rock the School - Story Trailer - YouTube

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The bigger question mark for me, though, is Agefield High's inspirations. The developer says it's influenced by the "raunchy teen comedies of the era", namely films like American Pie, Road Trip, etc. I gotta say, I'm really not sure if that's a slice of millennial youth that needs excavating. Even at the time I was keenly aware those films were Not Good, though I understood their appeal as a teenager.

Now though, anybody who watched those films then is going to be pushing 40, while actual teenagers will surely have their own flavour of outrageous boundary-pushing culture that they'll feel embarrassed about in 20 years' time. Sure, you can argue Bully is an old piece of media too, but while it also had some edgy elements that haven't aged so well, it also had a pretty good story and generally higher ambitions, which none of those teen comedies of the era had.

But maybe I'm wrong. Maybe the Venn diagram between Bully fans and people who love references to Stifler's mom is a circle. In which case they'll lap this up like a slice of apple pie freshly destroyed by Jason Biggs' genitals. There's no firm release date for Agefield High, yet, but the Steam page says it'll land in the second quarter of 2026.

Rick has been fascinated by PC gaming since he was seven years old, when he used to sneak into his dad's home office for covert sessions of Doom. He grew up on a diet of similarly unsuitable games, with favourites including Quake, Thief, Half-Life and Deus Ex. Between 2013 and 2022, Rick was games editor of Custom PC magazine and associated website bit-tech.net. But he's always kept one foot in freelance games journalism, writing for publications like Edge, Eurogamer, the Guardian and, naturally, PC Gamer. While he'll play anything that can be controlled with a keyboard and mouse, he has a particular passion for first-person shooters and immersive sims.

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