After Us Review

With the countless quantity of videogames on the market that takes place on either a desolate or an overgrown landscape, with stories that endeavour to tell the player cautionary tales about nurturing nature or it will die from oil spills or some other MacGuffin, you’d be spoiled for choice in your finger-wagging industrial apocalyptic fantasy. My personal favourite title in this sub-genre, Biomutant, takes the approach to the ‘save the trees’ message with diverse biomes, flora, and fauna that both look similar to real life. It also has bipedal rodents that wage war and fight with martial arts, all while a gentle-sounding narrator translates dialogue and explains lore to the player. And now the game After Us, developed by Piccolo and published by Private Division, which takes place over a vast expanse of levels of platforming and exploration, might be my favourite.

After waking from their slumber, the character you control — a forest nymph named Gaia — begins a journey into the unknown after all the animals that live in a floating forest with her (called the Ark) pass away, and the Ark’s tree requires their trapped life force to perform a rebirth. To do so, you must travel to the long-forgotten world which has been destroyed by a sentient, black goop called the Devourer to recover the lost souls of eight major animals, as well as plenty more beings. Along the way, you will also recover other souls — the life force of sculpted stone giants possessed by the goop that are hostile to you.

Using the map, your ‘Lifelink’ to the tree, souls are marked along a thin blue line, indicating how far you are through each stage as well as a star chart showing you how many you’ve collected. Once you’re close to one, you echo-locate it by harmonising as butterflies flutter directly to its location. Blue-coloured butterflies fly to animals, while gold-coloured ones fly to the corrupted giants’ memories, giving a little backstory to the game. Once the animals have been freed, their blue spirits linger around the map, both in the Ark and the regions you found them in. And for the animal lovers, yes, you can pet them. It’s even encouraged in an achievement to greet and pet 50 animals in one playthrough.

Besides the giants impeding your mission by throwing cinder blocks and punches or grabbing you when you’re stunned, obstacles are a constant in After Us. General environmental anomalies (like the translucent, acidic sludge that blocks you from areas) can be easily removed with a charged AoE (area of effect) blast that covers the radius of the character in grass and flowers for a brief period. Yet in each region, themed barriers require the player to dodge and hide rather than face head-on. However, the main antagonist (The Devourer) cannot be fought with your abilities. When near it, tentacles will jut out to suck you into the mass in a blink of an eye, so you must steer clear of it like the plague it is.

The controls are noticeably smooth, considering the game demands a controller to play on PC. Movement, like wall-running and platforming, run fluidly with the rare misstep or wrongfully judging where you’ll land only to fall. After Us prevents this by having a glowing halo show the player where they’ll land, but if you’re in the air looking for the next platform, wall to run, or wire to surf, it’s as useful as an umbrella in a hurricane. This becomes apparent in the later stages of the game, where you have to make precise jumps and dashes onto narrow platforms.

After Us’ gameplay is very linear, with little dialogue outside of cutscenes. Instead, the visuals and ambient music orchestrating your adventure are forced to carry the whole game on their own shoulders. The collaboration of synth and classical instruments in the soundtrack is atmospheric, emoting the sadness of the world and what remains of it while expressing the calm of the Ark. Juxtaposition to the melancholic music is your character’s voice. As said before, your character sings to find collectables so the small soulful songs don't feel out of place accompanying the music. The representation of this can also be seen clearly in the design of After Us’ regions. Every part of this game (even in the Ark’s absence of animals) has its own personal pollution that covers it from head to toe. From the countryside layered in trash and oil tanks to the sunken cities covered in home appliances and fishing hooks, the message of the game seems to be “humans are killing the planet” at first glance, but After Us demonstrates this message differently.

Everywhere you go in the game, you’ll find tons of the stone giants frozen in time, stuck in their final moments. Some in the high-rise areas sit on ledges as if to watch the sun rise and set, or droves walking in a line towards an unknown destination, or simply waiting for the train. My favourite example of this is at the start of the game when you first encounter them, as they are coming out of the ground like zombies rising from the dead. Without saying a word, the game illustrates that ‘humanity’ trapped itself within its own creation. But unlike the ghosts of animals going about their business, the stone giants won’t be set free to live again in the rebirth. When you remove the sludge from their bodies, they disappear into dust.

The only humanoid that has any life to speak of in After Us is you. Though, as you begin recovering life forces, Gaia begins to develop visible cracks on her face. Another aspect that differentiates her from the giants is her figure being towered over by everything in this game to a point where she’s probably smaller than a Smurf; this only adds to the visual storytelling, as everything you do leaves a piece of nature behind. Your tiny footsteps, where the ranged attacks and blasts land, and even your falling body hitting the floor leaves a trail of vibrant greens and yellows of plant growth that stand out from the muted colours around you.

Alone, these two factors tell the same story, but together, they play on each other to convey an enthralling narrative that had me wanting to play more with each new region. This is a title I highly recommend for people who like these types of stories or just playing short videogames.