Agefield High, the indie heir to Rockstar’s Bully, gets its second shot on PS5

For almost two decades, the school-as-open-world has been a genre with one landmark and no sequel. Rockstar’s Bully turned a boarding school into a sandbox of timetables, cliques and detentions, and then the door to Bullworth Academy closed behind it. Agefield High: Rock the School walks into that empty hallway carrying a different era on its back: not the timeless prep-school satire Rockstar favoured, but the pop-punk, the awkwardness and the raunchy teen comedies of the turn of the millennium.

The premise is deliberately small. You play Sam, a senior with graduation on the horizon and a few months left to decide what kind of legend he leaves behind. The game’s organising idea is the timetable itself: classes exist, and so does the option to ignore them. Refugium Games builds the whole structure around that choice — model student, every teacher’s nightmare, or something questionable in between — with consequences that flow through schedules and routines rather than a morality meter.

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Around the school sits a fully open town. The campus gives way to a town centre, residential neighbourhoods and countryside, and the economy is teenage in scale: side hustles and mini missions for cash, cash spent on clothes, bikes and haircuts, and a running game of avoidance with teachers and the local police. More than 30 main missions carry the story. In the announcement, the studio frames the dialogue as a conscious throwback, keeping the corny rhythms of the millennium that players have, in its words, “grown to love (or cringe at!)”.

Refugium Games describes itself as a garage-band-style indie studio. It began as a solo developer fascinated by classic grey-alien stories, a vision that became the horror game Greyhill Incident in 2023, and the team grew after its follow-up, Vacant’s Mine. Agefield High is, by the studio’s own account, its most ambitious project yet — and a full open world is the most unforgiving format a small team can choose.

The console release arrives with baggage. The PC version launched on Steam in August, where it currently holds a “Mostly Negative” user rating after early coverage flagged technical problems. That turns the PlayStation 5 edition into more than a port: it is the version on which the studio’s Y2K fantasy meets a new audience, and a chance to show what the months since have changed.

Agefield High: Rock the School is out now on PlayStation 5, priced at £24.99, $27.49 or €29.99, and remains available on PC via Steam. The Xbox Series X|S version follows on October 2.

Whether that hallway was worth reopening is a question players will settle. The idea, at least, is plain to see: an entire town built around the oldest decision a teenager makes — whether to go to class at all.

Tags: PlayStation 5, open-world games, Rockstar Games, Agefield High: Rock the School, Bully, Refugium Games

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