Kraken Academy!!

The time loop has become one of the most overused ideas in indie games. It’s cheap to build, easy to market, and too often an excuse to make players sit through the same content again. So credit where it’s due: Kraken Academy!! knows the trope is worn, and it gets around the problem by being charming.

The game comes from Happy Broccoli Games and was published by Fellow Traveller, the label behind a string of narrative-first indies. It launched on Steam and Nintendo Switch on September 10, 2021, as a $9.99 paid release. The setup is deliberately ridiculous. You’re the new kid at a high school where ghosts haunt the art department, cultists meet under the monkey bars and crocodiles eat students. A magical Kraken ropes you into a crisis: the world ends in three days unless you unmask the Traitor, a villain who could be anyone on campus. A time-manipulation amulet lets you rewind those three days as often as you need.

That framing matters. This isn’t a puzzle game with story on top. It’s a social simulation built around knowledge. You don’t get stronger between loops. You get better informed. You learn who is where and when, what people want and what they’re hiding, and that knowledge is the only thing you carry forward.

In the market, it sits in a busy but distinctive space. It shares a school setting with the Persona games, a repeating clock with Majora’s Mask and a fondness for absurdist comedy with the Adult Swim-adjacent indie scene. It’s lighter and much smaller than any of those, and it doesn’t pretend otherwise. That honesty is part of its appeal.

• Three-Day Time Loop: An amulet resets the clock, so the school runs on fixed routines. Learning those routines is how you progress.
• Four Club Storylines: Music, Art, Sports and Drama each carry their own arc. You form a rock band, put on an exhibition, compete and stage a play.
• Traitor Whodunit: A hidden villain could be anyone on campus. That gives every conversation a quiet undertone of suspicion.
• Side Content and Friendships: Parties, side cases and staff members’ personal goals fill out the loop beyond the main mystery.
• An Eccentric Cast: Standouts include the musician Vladimir, the grumpy bassist Simona and the troubled Broccoli Girl.

The Gameplay Loop: Knowledge as Currency

The core design choice is also the smartest one: information is the only thing that persists. In a traditional RPG, progress means bigger numbers. Here it means a mental map of the school. If you know Simona is sulking in one spot at a certain hour, you can reach her before the moment passes. If you know what someone wants on Day Two, you can set up a result on Day Three.

When this works, it should feel great. You go from bewildered new student to someone who knows the school’s schedule cold, and the game rewards that knowledge with story instead of stats. Each loop becomes a small planning exercise, and a successful run pays off in a way leveling up never could.

The downside comes with the structure. A three-day window means backtracking is built into the design. Once you’ve seen a scene, replaying the setup to reach a new branch can feel like paperwork. The game softens the problem with short loops and a small campus, but it can’t remove it. Some repetition is the cost of the premise.

Clubs as Structure

The four clubs are the game’s main organizing tool, and they’re a clever one. Music, Art, Sports and Drama each work as their own chapter with a goal, a cast and a tone. The rock band arc thrives on the friction between Vladimir’s enthusiasm and Simona’s grumpiness. Drama leans into theatrical absurdity. Art gets to play with ghosts.

This structure gives a looping game something it badly needs: a sense of forward motion. Even while you repeat days, finishing a club arc feels like a milestone. It also stops the Traitor mystery from dragging, because each club reveals more of the school and more suspects.

The trade-off is uneven quality. Each club brings its own minigames, and they vary. Some look genuinely fun. Others read as filler between the writing that matters. When a minigame is weaker than the dialogue around it, it becomes the part players will want to skip.

Onboarding Friction and Objective Clarity

The biggest real problem is objective clarity. Detective-style games constantly have to balance respecting the player’s intelligence against leaving them lost. Kraken Academy!! sometimes tips toward lost. You know what the world needs, but not always what to do next or where to go.

In a linear game, that’s a minor annoyance. In a time loop, it’s worse. Wander aimlessly for a day and you haven’t just wasted time, you’ve spent part of a limited window and may need another loop to recover. A clearer hint system or a better journal would have made a real difference. The game isn’t broken here, but it’s less considerate than it should be.

Writing and Tone

The game earns most of its appeal through its writing. The humor is offbeat, sometimes surreal, and it aims more often than it misses. Crocodiles eating students is played deadpan, which is the right choice. The writing also knows when to get sincere. Beneath the cultists and cephalopods is a story about friendship and belonging, and the quieter beats with characters like Broccoli Girl add warmth to what could have been a one-joke game.

Mixing absurdity with sincerity is hard. Many comedy games settle for one or the other. Kraken Academy!! mostly pulls off both, and that’s why its cast is built to stick with players after the credits.

Runtime

This is not a long game, and anyone expecting a Persona-sized campaign should adjust. Whether that counts against it depends on what you value. A tight game that ends while players still like it beats a bloated one that wears out its welcome. Still, the side content, including parties, cases and staff goals, is what stretches the playtime, so completionists will get the most out of it.

The pixel art is expressive and loose in a way that fits the humor. Characters read clearly at small sizes, and the campus is packed with visual gags that reward attention. It’s a style built for personality rather than spectacle, and it works. Many indie games treat pixel art as a budget compromise. Here it’s a clear creative choice.

The interface is serviceable rather than smart. Given how much the game depends on tracking schedules and objectives, the UI does too little to help. That’s the same objective-clarity problem showing up in the menus.

On the technical side, a 2D game of this scope is light on hardware, and nothing in the design suggests serious stability risk. That’s about what you’d expect from a small narrative game.

Steam (PC): Low-intensity 2D pixel art shouldn’t stress modern hardware. The time-loop structure, which can involve re-checking schedules and occasionally looking up hints, fits a desk setup where a second window is a keystroke away. Controller and keyboard both suit a dialogue-heavy adventure like this.

Nintendo Switch: The format arguably fits the Switch better. Short, self-contained loops match handheld play: finish one run on the couch, pick up the next on a commute. The trade-off is that the game’s small, dense pixel detail and schedule-tracking may be harder to read on a handheld screen than on a monitor. For players prone to losing track of objectives, the lack of a quick browser tab on Switch makes the clarity problems harder to shrug off.

Kraken Academy!! understands what most time-loop games forget: repetition is only tolerable when the world you’re repeating is worth getting to know. Happy Broccoli Games filled its three days with enough odd, warm and funny people that learning their routines should feel like making friends rather than grinding a schedule.

It isn’t flawless. Unclear objectives cost loops that shouldn’t be lost, backtracking is part of the design, and some minigames drag. The game is also over sooner than its premise suggests. We rate it a solid but unremarkable effort whose flaws matter: a strong comic voice, a clever knowledge-based loop and a memorable cast, wrapped in a package that’s over quickly and occasionally confusing. It’s a small game that knows its size, and we recommend it to the right audience — comedy adventure fans with patience for vague objectives.