Finals Week: Studio Cimosa Announces a “School Cheating Sim”

Studio Cimosa has unveiled Finals Week, its new single-player and multiplayer game, with an announcement trailer. The good news: it takes you back to school in the ’90s. The bad news: it drops you right into final exams.

So, when was the last time you used a crane to put your homeroom teacher’s car on the school roof? That wasn’t entirely hypothetical, by the way: one particularly enterprising graduating class at my school actually pulled it off sometime in the late ’80s.

Finals Week doesn’t go back quite that far, which is probably for the best considering how prehistoric communication technology still was back then. After all, a creative “school cheating sim” needs a little more to work with than answers scrawled across your hands and crumpled-up scraps of paper.

Cell phones, for example—which naturally exist in Finals Week’s ’90s setting. There’s still a hint of the ’80s in there, though, since your cheating arsenal also includes walkie-talkies and binoculars.

Pointless PR Stunt

Studio Cimosa’s new game could be a lot of fun, especially with its multiplayer focus. That’s certainly how Finals Week is being marketed: as an online co-op game that has “already gone viral on social media.” Don’t worry, though—if that claim from DESTINYbit’s press email were actually true, I probably wouldn’t be covering it.

In reality, the game is still flying well under the radar, as my own digging quickly showed. And that’s a shame even for single-player fans, because Finals Week also includes a solo mode. At least, that’s what the game’s Steam page says. The developer hasn’t shared any details about it yet.

What We Know About Finals Week

But back to what we do know: your goal is to pass a series of increasingly difficult final exams despite the small inconvenience of not having studied for them. While a teacher patrols the classroom or other exam areas, you’ll need to get your hands on the answers and pass them around without attracting too much attention.

You can find answers in textbooks, among other places, or get them from classmates who were crazy enough to actually study. You can simply copy from those weirdos—or perhaps not. Sometimes the “nerds” refuse to play along, in which case you can either break out the binoculars or knock them unconscious. So no, you won’t exactly be leaving a trail of bodies behind. Just a trail of unconscious students.

You can communicate with classmates using the aforementioned walkie-talkies and cell phones, while answers can also be written on scraps of paper, walls and even other characters’ faces. You can get a particularly good look at that last option in the announcement trailer embedded a little further down.

Teacher of Death

Get caught cheating and you’ll be hit with punishments, including the Cone of Shame and various other handicaps. The teacher can also throw erasers—and with enough force to send students flying out of their chairs in spectacular somersaults. This unfriendly educator also reacts to chatter picked up through your microphone; fittingly, Steam even lists a microphone as “strongly recommended.”

Between exams, the school hallway serves as a hub. There, you can play basketball with other students, toss baseballs around, decorate statues or prepare for the next test. Passing exams also unlocks additional outfits and accessories for your character.

For now, Finals Week is only planned for PC. There’s no exact release date yet, but the press materials at least provide a rough launch window: 2026.