There's the bully on the playground, and then there's the behemoth Hollow Knight: Silksong – I doubt Team Cherry meant to force every other indie dev to flee the early fall release calendar after announcing its surprise September 4 drop, but that's what's happening, and highly anticipated JRPG Demonschool is joining the exodus.
"Demonschool was set to launch on Sept. 3," says publisher Ysbryd Games in a statement posted on Bluesky, "but after much anguished consideration on our part, we've made the decision to move the game's release to Wednesday, Nov. 19, 2025."
Ysbryd, which also once published my favorite Junji Ito-like World of Horror, continues to say that, after all its years of toil, it can see 2025 "has been or will be as brutal as market conditions can get when it comes to releasing a game. Crueler still, that we should find out with such short notice that Hollow Knight: Silksong will launch just one day after our planned release for Demonschool."
Demonschool developer Necrosoft Games echoes this point in a Bluesky post of its own, emphasizing that it "would've liked to fight Silksong," but Team Cherry "dropping the GTA of indie games with 2 weeks notice makes everyone freak out."
"We hope you'll still support us through this delay," Necrosoft continues. "It's tough on everybody as we were doing a massive push to the finish line here, and now we're looking around like zombies.
"But you'll get more game, more polish, and we'll try to make it worth your while."
The biggest JRPG news today somehow missed the Nintendo Indie Direct: Persona-inspired tactics RPG Demonschool is out in just a few weeks.
