When developing a game, having high ambitions for your project can be a double-edged sword. On the one hand, when all the relevant elements work together to execute on a well-defined creative vision, magical results can be achieved. However, if any of the things you’re trying to achieve miss the mark, each failure shines brighter and draws attention to itself. Developer Piccolo’s After Us sits somewhere between these two extremes, doing well in some ways but dropping the ball in others.
In After Us, you take on the role of Gaia, a nymph-like creature on a mission to restore life to a desolate planet. Humans are born and die, leaving only traces of ignorance and waste. The world is a polluted and dangerous wasteland, devoid of life and optimism. And in it, Gaia must seek out the souls of dead animals and release their essences, thereby releasing life into the world again.
To that end, the game utilizes a very standard platforming control scheme such as jumps, double jumps, and dashes. None of the movements or controls feel bad, but the room for improvement is clear. Jumps feel floaty, sprints can be hard to gauge, and movements are generally unrefined. This is exacerbated by the fact that many of the platforms require the utmost precision, without which you face instant death. Many environments are surrounded by toxic sludge and creeping vines that grow on Gaia when approached. But the game’s definition of “too close” is inconsistent. Sometimes you can get snatched at a distance that you think is safe, but sometimes it’s perfectly fine at a distance that feels dangerous. Still, it’s more fun dealing with this than fighting.
Many humanoids still roam the wilds, but they are polluted and poisoned by the world they once called home. You use Gaia’s powers to save them, attacking with various life-giving powers that bring light to the world’s darkness, mostly through ranged and area attacks. Enemies attack on sight and often swarm, but there are many problems. First and foremost, very few environments actually feel designed for combat. Narrow corridors where it’s hard for the camera to track you aren’t the ideal place for 15 enemies to pounce on you, but the game does this on a regular basis. There are more open areas in certain biomes, more on that later, but again, the enemies don’t feel intentionally placed here. The arena and combat encounters never feel like they were made with that kind of intention in mind. Instead, combat feels like an afterthought, and it seems like the game was designed with exploration in mind, with a handful of randomly placed enemies to ensure plenty of action. It feels like the game had no combat at all at one point, but that might have been a better experience.
Not only are combat encounters not fun or satisfying, they also come with performance issues. Every time I encountered a battle involving three or more of her enemies, the framerate immediately started to drop noticeably. In some particularly busy moments, frames dropped to his single digits, and at least once per play session, combat would cause the performance to drop significantly, crashing the game. This contributes to the combat feeling shoddy, which is particularly frustrating as it gets in the way of the game’s best elements, mainly environmental design and non-combat exploration.
The art direction is incredible. The game is peppered with stunningly surreal environments that take mundane objects from our lives and turn them into dark and disturbing icons that represent our own excesses. The game is also surprisingly vibrant given the gloomy nature of things. Sunlight casts a pleasingly warm glow on grungy, abandoned buildings, helping to create an exciting duality that works on both an artistic and narrative level. Each region of the game, too, whether it’s the nightmarish alleys of a sprawling city, a landfill that Gaia must manually clear a path through, a place constantly threatened by acid rain, or the deepest Each one is different, even the depths of the dark sea. Discovering the spirit beasts at the end of each biome is rewarding, and the final-moment rendition is impressive, with the area ending in the shark being particularly striking. If you can find these endpoints, it is possible.
The game’s level design has a very flexible structure. This is both a blessing and a curse, as it allows you to approach puzzles and goals freely, but the game does a poor job of communicating where the user wants to go. There are occasional environmental cues that gently nudge you in the right direction, but not quite enough for our tastes. It ends up leaving the game free, repeatedly returning from dead ends or accidentally jumping off to death because what looked like the next leg of the journey was actually nothing. . Yet, at least, it all looks and sounds beautiful while it’s being done.
In addition to great art direction, the title has an extraordinary soundtrack, evoking both Gaia’s hope and the world’s despair in equal measure. The overall sound design is also exceptional, giving most environments an unsettling low-pitched hum, occasionally punctuated by Gaia’s humming or singing. The game has many elements, but sound design is not one of them.
Conclusion
With lofty ambitions and some great elements, After Us both wins and disappoints on multiple fronts. Gorgeous art direction and a commendable anti-pollution message aren’t enough to make up for boring combat, performance issues, and an open-ended level design that lets things go a little too loose. If you’re itching for an experience like this, there are better options, at least until After Us’s performance issues are worked out. We have the core of a great experience here, but it’s not ready yet.
