AFTER US Review: Saving A Surreal Mystical Environment

PC Review Code Provided by Private Division

Delivering a surreal world leaves a lot of open opportunities for the creative aspect of any project. For Piccolo Studios and Private Division, they chose to take a naturalistic approach with their latest game After Us. In this title, players set out on an adventure to revive the spirit of life by venturing through apocalyptically destroyed sections of reality to find and regenerate life once more. The heartfelt reasoning behind the adventure was enough to pique my interest, but did the playthrough maintain the premise?

Story

The spirit of life has been destroyed and it is up to nature’s child to revive it. After being told the mission and the situation they are being put in, the heart of life is given to little Gaia so she can return life to the world. Heading through various locations, including cities, the skies, and underwater, she must collect the spiritual soul of various species as they head to the fallen icon of nature’s core animals.

Gameplay

This game introduces the various aspects of gameplay in one of my personal favorite styles; experience. Starting you, you simply have movement and can jump, but as you go through the game and new challenges are faced, new skills are learned. Eventually, your controls will include sprinting, jumping, double-jumping, air dashing, wall running, and rail grinding. There are controls for the spirit of life as well, which are basically the same button; press to shoot, hold to burst.

Understanding your spirit of life is the main thing you’ll need in this game. When you hold the button to make the burst effect, this will cause a small area of life to form. This means you’ll see grass cover everything in the area, much like the grass that follows your footsteps. Doing this next to certain things will cause them to react, such as glowing roots turning into trees or lines turning into rails. Shooting the spirit of life is how you collect the lost souls of species when you find them or interact with various things. These things include aspects as small as doors and as huge as creating an oasis. You will find a shining icon that indicates it will interact with the shot spirit. There is another use, but we will get into it when we get to the combat section.

When it comes to movement in this game, it is basically floaty parkour. There is a limit to how far you can fall before it is considered a death, but there are a lot of movement options to work with. This adventure is silent, for the most part, and so you will have to find your pathway on your own. It isn’t going to be obvious every time, but with a bit of context in each current surrounding, you should be able to find your way through. What helps a lot with guidance is how the developers have placed the two things you can find through each area; lost souls and memories.

As you head out through this journey, you can press a call-out button which will have little Gaia sing a short tune that sends up sparks. White sparks mean there is nothing nearby, gold sparks will guide you to memories, and blue sparks will guide you to spirits. If you are lost, you can typically find your way by following these guide sparks. If you are getting white sparks and lost, there is a chance you are overlooking something or forgot to head in one of the many directions you can go.

You may be wondering what a memory looks like. This slowly moves us into combat because before you reach any actual enemies to face, you will come across partially active humans. Throughout the game’s environment, you will find a large multitude of statued humans, but if they have a blue glow in their chest and eyes then they are partially active. You can free these souls by shooting your spirit of life soul through them. A handful of times, this will give you a new memory for the area, but sometimes it won’t.

After a few of these, you will finally start seeing enemies. They can be strange floating creatures, or blobs, that are easily killed with either form of the spirit of life. You can kill a bunch with the burst as they get close or hit them by shooting the spirit at them. However, there are human enemies too which seem to be controlled by the harsh remaining nature. These are a bit harder to fight and will grab you. You can rapidly press a button to free yourself, but too much damage and you’ll die. You can push these types of enemies back with the burst, but to actually defeat them you will have to shoot the spirit through them. They do evolve through the game and end up with various challenges, such as a TV stuck in them that acts as a shield so they can’t be attacked from the front.

As you complete areas, which means you freed a core animal spirit, you will be sent back to the hub. Moving through the game will require fast travel, which is set up in certain areas. When you find a tower, typically with fire on top of it, can be turned into an oasis. Each oasis is a fast travel location. There are other fast travel areas set up just by reaching them. After being returned to the hub, you can reach whatever section you want to go to next with fast traveling. The pathway to each core animal spirit branches often so there are a lot of ways to get to each animal, but you will have to make the journey yourself first.

Audio and Visual

This game has a very well-matched aesthetic and auditory design to it. The game pulls off a very surreal atmosphere by having a mixture of silence and sincere music behind the adventure, depending on what section of the game you are at. There are times when the music picks up and gets either more mystical for happy moments and more intense for nervous moments. All this happening while venturing through a semi-cartoon, semi-colorful world.

Replayability

I can’t say there is much replayability to the game. There are possibilities to miss some memories and lost souls, so for a perfectionist or completionist there would be a reason to keep playing, but once you beat the game and save the souls your task is complete.

What It Could Have Done Better

Pathing is a very important aspect of a parkour-heavy adventure game. While there were times that the levels were very well designed, especially considering it is a 3D open exploration game, there were plenty of times that it was a confusing mess on where to go. Sections where it felt like I was climbing up to a height just to find a hole or pathway leading me back down, sections where it felt like I could go in multiple directions but only one is correct, and various other moments just felt more like a hindrance than a welcome challenge. It didn’t happy a ton in the overall experience, but when it did happen it was frustrating.

Verdict

After Us is a delightful breath of fresh gameplay in the game industry! I absolutely love the premise and being able to save the spirit of nature is an easy plot hook to catch my interest. While the gameplay is pretty entertaining, it does have its frustrations and challenges to it. Even so, I enjoyed my whole playthrough of this game and hope to see this team keep this style up in future titles. This is definitely a game that I recommend for adventurous players to try out.

After Us is available now on PC via Steam, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S.