After Us from developer Piccolo and publisher Private Division is an artistic gamble that is really worth checking out. Players will “Explore the corners of a surrealistic post-human world to give life on Earth a second chance in this touching story about sacrifice and hope.” but does the game actually succeed at gripping you?
Is it worth picking up and playing through?
After Us
In After Us, players will take on the role of a female character. Gaia to be specific. The spirit of life itself. The game very clearly draws heavy inspiration from other titans in the action platforming genre it finds itself in and that’s not a bad thing at all.
Playing as Gaia, you’ll be able to run and traverse your environment using your abilities. Players will have to run, jump, dash and glide through the environment as they try to cleanse it from the filth that plagues it. After Us holds nothing back when it comes to emotional and environmental storytelling. This is a game that needs to be played and experienced to truly understand how moving it can be.
The environmental storytelling in After Us is honestly one of its best features and you will find yourself getting emotionally invested in trying to save the world here. Freeing animal spirits, cleansing the world and restoring life to the planet is the order of the day in After Us and the game makes this quite clear to you from the get-go.
Environmental Storytelling at its finest
After Us focuses heavily on some rather dark and sombre imagery. The world is screwed to put it lightly and you as the spirit of life need to try get through areas that really drive home the point that mankind has done something seriously wrong to the world. After Us can be a bit heavy because of this but the graphics combined with the game’s platforming and fantastic soundtrack means that this is a rather compelling game.
The focus on environmental storytelling means that the gameplay suffers somewhat. As a platformer, it ticks all the boxes that are expected of it but it does so in a way that keeps you coming back. This is a title that will be hard to stop playing once you start since you’ll want to get through the locales, discover more about the world and reach the game’s conclusion.
Using your cleansing powers, you will be able to force back toxic black sludge and cause grass to grow in the desolate wastes. This is beautiful and feels incredibly satisfying to do. There are however a few mishaps here with regard to the controls which I’ll get to in a bit.
Playing the game via Steam on PC on a mid-range PC (12th generation Intel i5-12600K, RTX 3060, 16 GB Ram), After Us looked beautiful and ran perfectly fine with zero frame rate drops. I did have some audio stutter but this might be resolved with a future patch. What is really disappointing though is the fact that the game has no keyboard and mouse support at all. You will have to use a controller to play it. The camera control in the game can also be a bit unwieldy at times due to its high angle.
The camera angle can lead to your untimely demise when jumping across platforms and you will definitely end up falling to your death quite often in this game. Dying can also be attributed either to the poor camera control or the lack of momentum built up when sprinting and jumping.
Jumping sometimes feels like it slows you down and you may miss time for some double jumps and glides. Once you get used to it though, it’s fine, but having mouse and keyboard support could definitely have been a thing here which could have helped mitigate this issue.
After Us is incredibly screenshot-worthy and there are plenty of areas where you’ll want to just soak in the environmental details. When freeing animal spirits, they may sometimes linger on in an area and it’s beautiful seeing them against the backdrop of a dark, ruined world.
A glimmer of life so to speak. Using your abilities to restore the environment around you feels incredibly rewarding and oddly therapeutic as you fight back against the disgusting filth that covers the land. It’s a travesty that the game doesn’t have a photo mode because it would have greatly benefited from having one.
After Us features some combat in the form of your playable character using some of her light to attack enemies but the game doesn’t really emphasize this too much. You’re a small, light spirit and you’re supposed to be quick and nimble on your feet. Avoidance tactics and playing defensively are required in some cases as you get through levels with enemies.
The soundtrack of After Us is filled with some truly great musical tracks that complement its visuals perfectly. There isn’t really any voice acting here but the game’s sound effects are great.
Final Verdict
Overall, After Us is an indie title that has a lot of love and attention to detail paid to it. The environments of the game, while dark and disturbing in some cases, hammer home the point that mankind really needs to do more to save and preserve our dying world.
Saving Animal Souls is incredibly satisfying and the game’s artistic style really draws you in and doesn’t let go for the 8 hours or so it will take you to finish it. It’s a shame that the camera control can be a bit unruly and that there’s no mouse and keyboard support here but other than that, After Us gets a recommendation from us. This is a game that needs to be played and experienced first-hand to really grasp how good it is because of the environmental storytelling.
After Us Trailer
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