Bully: Scholarship Edition review (Rockstar Vancouver, Mad Doc Software, 2008, PC, Xbox 360)
Bully: Scholarship Edition is a remaster, featuring additional content, of Rockstar’s school-set open world action-adventure Bully (2006, Playstation 2). You play Jimmy Hopkins, a pitiable fifteen-year-old slaphead sent to Bullworth Academy, a not-so-elite boarding school that’s probably in New England during an unspecified time period that suits the quaint Harvard-tier school architecture.
This is an interesting setting, and the game does a lot with it. There’s a weekly class schedule which, even if only a handful of the classes actually give you useful bonuses (compare how Chemistry class gives you weapons while English class gives you relatively inconsequential social bonuses like apologising to students better’ and being able to kiss girls with and later without gifts, things I didn’t even do in my last playthrough), is neat. Every student has a name and a personality, and they form romantic relationships with each other. The weapons are creative, and creating combos with them is fun; the right ones can almost feel like speed-run strategies - stink bombs and firecrackers are surprisingly effective here.
My favourite part of the school setting is how it’s structured around the school year. You start in Autumn, progress through Winter, Spring, and Summer - that’s how seasons work, if you haven’t been paying attention. This isn’t just cosmetic - the sound effects change as you traverse the world, and the roads are slippier in Winter when you’re biking or skateboarding. The differences aren’t huge, and they are most noticeable in Winter, when you have things like missions set around the holiday and the ability to make snowballs to use as weapons - but it’s still a meaningful system. Autumn has greyer skies, the spring is brighter, and you do get the sense that time is naturally passing as you play.
Perhaps by virtue of being set in a school, mind you, the plot is total bobbins and there are no stakes. The clique warfare stuff is very capital-a American, but as an aging person, Bully’s ‘King of the School’ narrative makes me roll my eyes the more I rinse it - I’ve got more experience with Bully than most of the games that I’ve reviewed in here, having either any-percent or hundo-percent completed it closer to two handfuls of times in over a decade.
As I replay it, I notice more and more about the writing that grates on me. The game’s main antagonist succeeds at antagonising me, but they’re absent for much of the game’s 5-chapter structure. Hopkins is performed well too, but several other performers rush their lines, usually while delivering some hamfisted corporatist satire - itself a regrettable element that it shares with Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto games. One improvement Bully has over Grand Theft Auto, at least the 3D trilogy, is the health system. I’m happy to be corrected because I simply haven’t played those games anywhere near enough, but in those early-ish Grand Theft Autos I always find that it’s very easy to die, and there aren’t anywhere near as many health pickups as you really need for the game to be fun, or anything other than frustrating. Here, enemies drop health frequently, which makes the combat feel forgiving, and it’s always fun.
It is fun to beat people up in this, and to shove them in bins and flush their heads down toilets. I’ve always found it quite odd that the game is called what it is; in narrative, you’re not a bully, you’re trying to stop bullies, and it’s odd to me that this is what the controversy around the game’s release focussed on, rather than the missions where you’re photographing a teenage girl, or breaking into the girls’ dormitory to steal ‘laundry’ for a detestable gym teacher - who, to be fair, does get his comeuppance eventually. The reason why Bully has lost its shine with me as I get older is its nihilism - which works when you’re fifteen; the clunky satire makes you feel like you’re being shown a side to the world that you’ve never seen before, like you know something about it that nobody else does, or wants to see - but that’s not what I look for in storytelling at this point in my life, it feels literally sophomoric. In the span of single cutscenes, characters can like each other, hate each other, then like each other. Should you take how characters act at face value (the game itself lacks compelling subtext or themes, so why not?), men are manly and women are mushy, or purely out to manipulate men; the game’s authority figures are depicted as comically corrupt even when they’re actually insidious and dangerous. Here’s an angry dwarf.
If I had to guess, there hasn’t been a sequel (despite at least one attempt at it), because there’s no compelling answer to Where do you take Bully’s worldview, which is overbearing even for Rockstar’s own brand of smarming at the world while simultaneously believing in nothing, and what interesting things do you and can you do with the setting?
I saw a Steam review of Bully recently that said that it’s ‘probably somebody’s comfort game’, and until recently, I’d probably have said it was mine. Part of it is the school setting, which I find merges really well with the game’s odd reluctance to commit to when it’s set, but also I really like Shawn Lee’s music, to the point that I regularly have the soundtrack (free with all Steam purchases, by the by) on rotation when I’m not playing it. Your man also composed the music for The Getaway, and he reuses a track from it here to great effect.
So many elements coalesce in Bully to set the feel of it out really well. It’s an open-world game, but it feels relatively compact and manageable in a way that your Ubisoft and even later-period Rockstar open-worlds just don’t. I don’t feel overwhelmed by it, I actively enjoy exploring it, which is why it’s one of the few games I’ve repeatedly rinsed to one hundred percent. The school, while not huge, is brimming with personality, and the town of Bullworth doesn’t detract from that, because it’s also not a vast open space. I compare it to Hogwarts Legacy, which takes you out of a vastly recognisable setting brimming with mystery to complete busywork around identikit rural settlements. There’s a little bit of that here, in that there are collectables out in the world, but you never feel too far away from the school while in the town because both areas share a dark academia vibe - at least until the story reaches a total creative nadir and you end up platforming through a chemical plant beating a man with a metal pipe before the game cuts to Hopkins’ nth “Who’s the daddy?” speech. I’m sighing as I write this all down, but I do like Bully - honest. I just fear that I’ve outgrown it a bit.
So, what next? For games set in schools that aren’t retelling Revenge of the Nerds (a film I have never seen and yet somehow absolutely see that it had an influence on Bully), I’m looking forward to Witchbrook, Chucklefish’s life-sim that was recently announced for Winter 2025. Maybe that’s what I’m after - a cosy vibe. A Rockstar developed cosy-academia game just does not compute, so what I feel I really want is a spiritual successor that puts Bully’s aesthetic and Stardew Valley’s sedation together. I think that’d be good. I’d buy it.
