The Dangerous Back-to-School Season

The Dangerous Back-to-School Season

Z · September 29, 2024 · RPG, Education, Casual, Pixel Graphics, 2D

The Dangerous Back-to-School Season is free to play — no purchase needed. We track it so you know if that ever changes.

PC
Mixed69% · 13
This game is free to play. Get it on Steam →

Screenshots

The Dangerous Back-to-School Season price

The Dangerous Back-to-School Season is free to play — there is no purchase price, on Steam or anywhere else we track. We keep watching it, so if it ever stops being free the price history on this page will show when that happened and what it changed to.

About The Dangerous Back-to-School Season

✦ AI summary

The Dangerous Back-to-School Season is an RPG where you guide a university-bound protagonist through cybersecurity challenges like phishing, ransomware, and cyberbullying using dialogue choices and mini-games. It combines pixel art storytelling with hands-on puzzle and strategy gameplay to teach real online threat recognition in an engaging narrative format.

The Dangerous Back-to-School Season
In this RPG, you’ll guide the protagonist, who has just received a university acceptance letter, through a series of cybersecurity challenges. On their journey to enroll, they’ll face threats like phishing attacks, ransomware, password breaches, and cyberbullying. By making the right dialogue choices and completing various mini-games, you will help the protagonist recognize and overcome these threats, ensuring a safe and successful university enrollment.

Key Features:

Pixel art style inspired by the real world
Unique focus on cybersecurity
Multiple outcomes unlocked through dialogue and choices
Levels themed around common cybersecurity threats, including phishing, ransomware, password attacks, and cyberbullying
Mini-games blending puzzle-solving and strategy
This game is perfect for teens and adults interested in cybersecurity and is a great way to raise awareness about online threats.

The Dangerous Back-to-School Season — game info

Platforms
Windows
Player modes
Single-player
PC Game Pass
Not included

What Steam players say

Recent verbatim reviews from Steam — separate from playze.io community reviews below.

✦ AI summary

Players appreciate the pixel art style, intuitive controls, and clever cybersecurity education concept, but widely criticize the game for being extremely short (completable in under 20 minutes), overly simplistic with minimal challenge, and having a weak story with limited consequence for player choices. Most reviews note that wrong decisions lead to instant game overs rather than branching paths, and the correct choices are sometimes unclear or contradict actual cybersecurity best practices, making replaying feel pointless.

Recommended Jun 28, 2025
⠀
8 found this helpful
Not recommended Jan 4, 2025
Not for me. It's buggy and the story is not good enough.
2 found this helpful
Recommended Jan 4, 2025
[h1]#tinygamereviews[/h1] [code]A cute little cybersecurity exercise that's just a step above reading an e-mail to watch out for phishing.[/code] [list][list] [*][b][u]Overall Score[/u][/b]: 2/5 [/list] [hr][/hr] [h1][b]Curator: [url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/42137521/]Nostalginauts[/url][/b][/h1] [h1]Full Review[/h1] [table] [tr] [td]Playability[/td] [td]3/5[/td] [td]Some wonky borders (that you can sometimes walk around and out-of-bounds, anyway) and looping points in gameplay.[/td] [/tr] [tr] [td]Difficulty[/td] [td]1/5[/td] [td]There's nothing to it. Heck, it even interacts with half of the things [i]for you[/i] when you get close enough.[/td] [/tr] [tr] [td]Graphics[/td] [td]3/5[/td] [td]Pretty good on the whole for a free RPGMaker title; some mismatched art between backgrounds and sprites (and even among sprites - especially portraits), but nothing horrible.[/td] [/tr] [tr] [td]Sound[/td] [td]2/5[/td] [td]Extant, but track styles seem mismatched and sometimes less-than-appropriate to the setting.[/td] [/tr] [tr] [td]Story…
1 found this helpful
Recommended Sep 21, 2026
Extremely short. A dev tried to make an actual game out of those cybersecurity PSA's that work makes you watch. If I encountered this at work I would be a lot less bored, lol.
Not recommended Dec 14, 2024
In a time where many projects suffer from an over-abundance of ambition, this game suffers from a SEVERE lack of it. It could be a masterpiece if it had an actual story written for it. The art style is nice, the sound design and animations are pretty good, the concept is AWESOME, but i finished the game while taking i believe all possible paths in less then 20 minutes. Also the game offers you choices but essentially forces your hand, making the wrong choice just leads to a game over instantly. This is made worse by the fact that the correct choice is often unclear, as sometimes you HAVE to make the wrong choice from a cybersecurity standpoint for the game to proceed (inputting your data to a computer that is clearly not in a good state and appears to have been tampered with). I hope the dev learns from this projects and builds an actual story-line and a full length game, i think there is a lot of space for a game of this type. I feel if these issues were rectified and the game was to be re-released with an appealing plot and a lot more explanations of actual cybersecurity it could be both incredibly fun and have a huge positive impact on society, and i encourage the dev to pur…
Recommended Oct 18, 2024
The Dangerous Back-to-School Season is a story about your protagonist as you guide him to get through of cybersecurity threats and cyberbully players must help the protagonist make the right decisions or get hack by the hacker it a ok game it very short game and a good side about this game is it show you what to be careful of link and qr code or trusting some random person

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