Why Oh No! I’m Surrounded by Male Classmates! Still Has Strong Reviews

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Oh No, I'm Surrounded by Male Classmates, a free campus slice-of-life narrative game made by high school students in China, hit Steam on August 1 and quickly took off online. According to Gamersky, some sexual-minority bloggers are now boycotting the game over alleged discriminatory jokes about sexual minorities, a dispute that has gained traction on Bilibili and other social platforms.

Compared with most school romance or slice-of-life games, its rise has looked less like a normal launch than a short-video breakout. The hook was simple: free to try, made by students, and built around a youth-focused premise, with no major publisher push behind it. After the alleged jokes drew scrutiny, discussion shifted from player impressions to what the game treats as acceptable humor. Steam reviews, however, have moved less dramatically than the social-media argument.

As of publication, Gamersky says the free game's Steam rating does not appear to have taken a major hit. It remains at "Overwhelmingly Positive," while its Simplified Chinese reviews sit at 97% positive, also rated "Overwhelmingly Positive." Before the controversy surfaced on August 7, both the overall positive rating and the Simplified Chinese positive rating were 98%. Both have now fallen by 1 percentage point.

That one-point dip suggests the controversy has reached the review section, but it has not yet broken the game's core support. The recent review text may say more than the percentage does.

Among recent positive reviews, many players still praise the game's youthful feel, while quite a few also mention the recent controversy directly. Some positive reviews come from players with relatively short playtimes, suggesting they may not have played deeply and are instead posting positives to support the development team. The newer negative reviews, meanwhile, mostly argue that the game contains discriminatory material, though most of those players also have short total playtimes. A very small number of new negative reviews appear to be joke reviews: negative on the surface, but positive in intent.

Compared with other free indie games in this lane, the advantage of Oh No, I'm Surrounded by Male Classmates is obvious: trying it costs almost nothing. Its risk is just as clear. Once a text-driven game breaks out beyond its original audience, its jokes are judged by much larger audiences.

Steam's review system on PC makes that process more visible than most mobile storefronts. In a short span, support, boycott responses, and meme reviews can all appear in the same public rating. Bilibili and other platforms amplify the argument, while Steam leaves a more concrete record of what players actually did.

The useful takeaway is straightforward. If you mainly care about a free campus slice-of-life game, download it and judge for yourself. If you are sensitive to the disputed jokes, wait to see whether the development team revises the text.

This is not, at least for now, a normal collapse in its quality reputation. It looks more like a small-scale project suddenly being forced into a much wider public argument. PS5 and Switch players do not need to worry about platform choice for the moment, because the argument is still playing out on Steam and social media.