Ever gotten really into collecting something? How far would you go to get it all? Well, in Schoolbound, if you want to complete your trading card album, you’ll need to brave a school full of ghosts. You know, the average day of a collectible card enthusiast. We know some MTG players who’d do that.

This free game with a charmingly janky PS1 aesthetic takes place in Cobolo Primary, a school you attend. A school with its fair share of dark secrets, and a collection of cards that seems to be the dark heart of the place’s curse, and now, it’s time for you to discover its mysteries.

Things Change After The Bell Rings

The game has two phases, the day and the night. During the day, you can wander the halls of the school as normal. Normal-ish. You can also visit the school bookstore, where the unsettling white-eyed lady who runs with store will sell you the haunted cards.

Where do you get money for cards? That’s the second phase of the game.

You return at night, after the school shuts. Hunting around here lets you find lost and discarded items forgotten by students, which you can sell for a profit to feed your collectible card habit.
Be careful though, strange things walk its floors after the sun goes down, students who never left.. even in death. You need to avoid the restless spirits of Cobolo to get what you want and escape with your life.

A Small Dev Project

The whole thing has a charmingly unsettling low-poly aesthetic and some genuinely unsettling monsters. It gave us a few vibes of games like White Day: A Labyrinth Named School, but it manages to stay very much its own thing with the spooky card mechanic.

Schoolbound was created by a small group of Singaporean students, and the game is available for free via the itch.io page. If you like the sound of it, check it out and show them some support. If you’d like to read about some more cool indie horror games, take a look at our news on The Children Of Clay.