Research notes
How HALL PASS was designed.
Before designing HALL PASS we read what players of the genre had already written: 72,908 Steam reviews and about 1.5 million Reddit posts and comments. Then we built a playtest lab that replays the same seeded nights, so balance changes could be measured rather than argued about. This site shows what we found, what we built because of it, and where each piece stands.
- 72,908Steam reviews across 10 survivors-likes
- 1,466,627Reddit posts and comments across 8 communities
- 428deterministic playtest experiments, 227 findings
The first thing the numbers showed
People who praise a game have played it for a long time. People who complain mostly have not.
Across the whole corpus, the median reviewer behind a praise theme has 45 hours in the game and the median reviewer behind a complaint has 26. Most negative reviews describe the point at which someone gave up rather than a broken game, and the hours attached to each theme tell you when that point comes. Some themes lose people in the first evening; others only show up after thirty hours. We treated the two groups differently, and the mechanics page is organised the same way.
Reasons people leave early median 25 hours or less
- progression grind23h1,719 reviews
- content drought repetition16h1,054 reviews
- UI readability clutter14h401 reviews
- depth autopilot15h344 reviews
- controls input7h179 reviews
Problems that hit veterans median over 25 hours
- balance RNG34h1,903 reviews
- bugs crashes saves31h1,379 reviews
- difficulty curve28h818 reviews
- performance late run27h432 reviews
- monetization DLC48h389 reviews
- abandoned devs36h353 reviews
Across the genre
What players praise, and what they complain about.
Weighted counts across 58,156 positive and 14,752 negative reviews. A review's weight is one plus the natural log of one plus its helpful votes, so widely endorsed reviews count more without drowning out the rest. Every theme name on this site opens a page that gathers it across all ten games and eight communities.
All 53 themes ยท The tables, per game, with the reviews quoted
The scoreboard
The ten complaint clusters, and where each one stands.
The first harvest in August gave each cluster a status for this game. This is where they stand now. The percentages are our own estimate as of 2026-09-19; nobody has a measurement of solved.
73% average across the ten, 7 shipped or tuned, 2 watching, 1 measured continuously.
How it happened
Four weeks, in order.
Research, decisions, what shipped and what got measured, on one line.
The mechanics
17 decisions, in three groups.
Why people keep playing
Positive Steam reviews come from people with a lot of hours; the median behind a praise theme is 45 hours. These are the parts of the game built to earn that kind of time.
- Periods, stars and the coin bankTuned
- One night, ten roomsShipped
- Cursed Energy and the five things you can doTuned
- The card deckWatching
- The ClubPartial
- Bosses and the held bellShipped
Why people stop
Negative reviews come from people with fewer hours, median 26. Each theme below is a reason players gave for leaving a game like this one, and what we did about it.
- How difficulty is tunedTuned
- Study Hall mercy and ClutchTuned
- Saves, resume and the Club CardShipped
- School Run, grades and elitesWatching
- Spawn rules and the density taperTuned
- Web first, phones secondShipped
- The store rulesWatching
- Music and slidersShipped
- ControlsShipped
How we check our own work
The biggest complaint in the genre is balance. Rather than tune by feel, we built a lab that measures the same sixteen seeded nights every time a number changes.
- The playtest labOngoing
- Staying reachableWorking practice
The night
Ten rooms, one hour each, 9 PM to First Bell.
9 PMThe Yard
10 PMThe Gym
11 PMThe Library
12 AMSecond Floor
1 AMThe Cafeteria
2 AMThe Pool
3 AMDetention
4 AMThe Boiler Room
5 AMThe Science Wing
6 AMThe Rooftop