They follow an Ordinary High-School Student named Alex, who is a very poor student that needs to cheat off the one geek in his classroom to pass his tests. This involves evading the teacher's field of vision as they patrol the room, functioning pretty much like a Metal Gear Solid guard. The trilogy eventually starts growing a solid plot.
The Classroom's trilogy contains examples of the following tropes:
- Acceptable Breaks from Reality:
- Realistically, at least one of the students would alert the teacher of the player's not-so-subtle cheating, but they're all basically props unless the plot needs them to be a distraction.
- The teacher should notice, even if the player is out of their line of sight, that they are not in their seat when they check there (which they do semi-frequently); at the least, they would've noted there being a seat with a test and no student in it.
- Art-Style Dissonance: The games use a minimalist art-style and every character is represented by colored circles, but these games also contain bullying, murders and suicides.
- Big Ball of Violence: In the first game, there's a level where two students get into a fight, which is represented by a cloud of violence.
- Bribe Backfire: One student tries to bribe Mrs. Henningan. She gets angry and threatens to shoot the student who attempted to bribe her if someone else tries to pull the same stunt. She might've meant "any" student, but she specifically motions to the culprit and used the "him" pronoun, implying she'll shoot specifically the one who made the bribe in the first place.
- The Bully:
- Alex is this to Jake the Geek, which explains why the latter let the former cheat off him.
- Samuel makes you cheat on him by force if you refuse to do it.
- Call-Back: The second classroom from the second game is similar to the classroom from the first game.
- Cerebus Syndrome: The first game started off as innocent and lighthearted, when all of a sudden a student kills himself in front of everyone (although this is Played for Laughs), the classroom is bombed, killing everyone but Alex, two other students, and the teacher, and then the classroom is shot up by one of the students, which Alex narrowly survives.
- Chromatic Arrangement: Blue, yellow, red and green are colors used by all the characters in the first game: Alex the protagonist is blue, Jake the Geek is yellow, the teacher is red and the other students are green. The second game introduces new characters with their own unique colors and Jake is absent since he's dead, removing the color pattern for that game. The third game, which is a prequel, re-uses this pattern again, aside from the flashback taking about half of the game and the level where Alex sneaks inside the school at night.
- Circling Stars: The teacher from the first game gets circling stars when knocked over by a grenade.
- Color-Coded for Your Convenience: Alex is blue (black in the night level of the third game), the students are green, Jake the Geek is yellow, the teachers are red, Samuel is peach, James is orange, Melanie is pink, and guards/janitors are a different shade of blue than Alex.
- Crapsack World: Public suicides, terrorist bombings, horrific chemistry accidents, school shootings, Mexican Standoffs in the bathroom, sociopathic teachers, and of course, cheating is all just a walk in the park at the high school and university that Alex attends.
- Deliberately Monochrome: A big part of the third game is monochrome to show that a flashback is taking place.
- Disproportionate Retribution: Mrs. Henningan threatens to shoot a student because he tried to bribe her.
- Driven to Suicide:
- The fourth level of the first game is interrupted with one of the students crumbling under stress and jumping out the window.
- The shooter from the last level in the first game shoots himself after killing the teacher and another student.
- Mr. Henderson from the second game is also overwhelmed with the stress of the standoff at the end of the game, so he jumps out of a window. Samuel notes that this must be a deja vu for Alex.
- Et Tu, Brute?: Twice in the second game:
- The first time happens just before the final test, where Samuel reveals he is working with Mr. Henderson and betrays Alex.
- The second time happens when Samuel's own gang betrays him to ally themselves with Alex at the end.
- Explosive Results: While in chemistry class, a student's experiment explodes. Unlike most examples of this trope which are comedic, the student is seriously hurt by the explosion.
- Get Out!:
- In a level from the first game, the teacher takes a student's exam copy and appears angry about what the student did (though we don't get to see what he did), then the teacher orders the student to leave the classroom.
- In the final level of the first game, a student arrives late and the teacher orders them to leave. Then the student pulls out a gun and shoots the teacher.
- Homework Slave: The premise of the game involves you cheating through tests with the help of somebody. In the first and third game, it is a geek that helps you (he is dead in the second). With the third game being a prequel, it is revealed you forced the Geek into doing such.
- Karma Houdini: Due to her small role in the plot, Mrs. Henningan does not face any repercussions for making a death threat to a student.
- Laser-Guided Karma: Samuel, who betrays Alex, finds himself betrayed by James and Melanie in a Mexican Standoff at the end of the second game.
- Lighter and Softer: The third game, which is a prequel, is pretty tame compared to the first two. Some of the biggest teacher distractions in this game include a car accident outside and a student's cellphone ringing while the first game had a student commit suicide and the second game had a lab experiment blowing up on a student. Even the plot is just about Alex bullying the Geek to help him, while in the first game you escape a school shooting and the second game ends with a Mexican Standoff.
- Living Prop: In cases where they don't serve as mere distractions, the green students are only here to make the classroom feel less empty.
- Made of Iron: Alex gets ran over by a speeding car at the end of the first game, but has fully recovered (at least physically) by the second game.
- Marijuana Is LSD: Alex has a trippy, extremely vivid hallucination recreating the accident from the first game in the second game after smoking pot in the bathroom with the crew.
- Mexican Standoff: The crew all have their guns pointed at each other and Alex at the end of 2, when Alex suddenly reveals he's packing heat as well and blows Samuel's head off.
- Misplaced Retribution: Mrs. Henningan's death threat. While it's not entirely clear if the "him" part was directed at the student who bribed her (she was standing next to him when she made that threat), it could still count as an example, because it could have been interpreted as such, due to how insane the teachers in this trilogy are.
- Moral Myopia: An entry in Alex's diary ironically shows his chagrin over a bunch of students cheating on an exam by spying on the Geek, despite Alex himself using said geek to cheat (and bully) ever since they met.
- Murder-Suicide: The school shooter at the end of the first game kills himself after shooting the teacher and another student.
- Named in the Sequel: The Geek isn't named in the first game. The third game reveals that his name is Jake.
- No Name Given: The teachers from the first and third games aren't given names, unlike Mr. Henderson and Mrs. Henningan from the second game.
- Nonstandard Game Over: Go ahead. Stand next to the grenade in Level 9 of the first game, or stand in front of the school-shooter's gun as he shoots the other student in Level 10. See what happens.
- No Peripheral Vision: The teachers have awful perception, to put it simply. The guards/janitors from the third game are no better; you can outright walk very near them as long as you are in the dark. Downplayed with the teacher in the first game, whose actual field of vision is much wider than what the visual indicator displays.
- Pink Girl, Blue Boy: At the end of the second game, Alex, who is blue, hooks up with Melanie, who is pink.
- Pink Is Feminine: Melanie, the only female main character, is pink.
- Sadist Teacher:
- Mr. Henderson is a massive Jerkass who straight up yells at students to "shut up" when an explosive lab accident blinds an unfortunate victim. He also participates in blackmailing Alex so he can get his job back.
- When a student tries to bribe Mrs. Henningan, she retaliates with the aforementioned threat above. It is unknown if she would have followed up on it, but it was still a death threat to a student.
- School Is Murder: In the first game, Alex's classroom goes through a student committing suicide, a grenade attack and a school shooting, all in a week. In the second game, a teacher commits suicide and a student is shot during a Mexican Standoff.
- Skewed Priorities: A student just committed suicide? Nearly the entire class just died in a bomb explosion? You still gotta finish the test because your teacher doesn't give a damn! This also applies to Alex, who still tries to cheat despite what just happened, though he does at least acknowledge the horrific nature of these events in his diary entries.
- Small Role, Big Impact: In the third game, a random student named Mark encourages Alex to use the Geek to cheat during tests. Even if Mark is quickly forgotten, he actually sets up the plot of the whole series.
- Speaking Simlish: Unimportant dialogues during levels utilize this, but plot-related dialogues have no sounds to keep the scenes serious.
- Sucky School: During his school days, Alex witnesses a suicide, a grenade attack in the classroom and a teacher making a death threat to a student, narrowly survives the Murder-Suicide of another student and ends up blackmailed because of an explosive incident in lab class he is not responsible for. It's notable that most of these horrible things are shrugged off.
- Top-Down View: The games are all seen from above.
- Treacherous Advisor: Samuel is revealed to be working with Mr. Henderson.
- Unexpected Gameplay Change: The last level of the first game is entirely different; you're running from an Ax-Crazy school shooter.
- Villain Protagonist: The goal of the games is to cheat tests, and in the first and third games, the protagonist bullies the Geek to force him to help with that cheating.
- Yank the Dog's Chain:
- After escaping a school shooting, Alex goes outside in a panic and barely avoids being hit by a speeding car. After a short moment of relief, another car runs him over. The sequel reveals he survived, though.
- At the end of the third game, once the school year is over, Jake appears to be disappointed when Alex tells him they're going to the same high school, implying Jake thought he'd be free of Alex's bullying.
