After Us

Set in a world that died, After Us is a great example of an industrial apocalypse story done correctly — standing strong in its story, visuals, and ambiance that breath new life into the genre.

Besides being a fun game, After Us also offers a very interesting setting. Some technical problems in controlling Gaia do not negatively affect the experience, making it a recommended game for those who love to visit complex worlds platform after platform.

After Us serves as a compelling reminder of the far-reaching consequences of environmental neglect. While there are stories to glean through memories, the game is primarily a tactile experience, emphasizing parkour and puzzle-solving over delivering a strong narrative. The game has approachable puzzles and straightforward controls that should be easy for most to pick up. Its engaging gameplay mechanics, stark visuals, and poignant message make for a satisfying puzzle-platformer overall.

Ultimately, the new Piccolo Studio game, after the excellent Arise: A Simple Story, is another little gem that could delight fans of platform adventures, especially if sensitive to the passionate environmental message that the title tries to convey for the approximately 6/7 hours necessary to complete it. While generally solid, the gameplay shows its side to some critical issues, especially in the combat phases, but the breathtaking artistic direction alone is reason enough to embark on this bittersweet epic.

After Us is an artistic, moving, and affecting game about a world transformed by human indifference to nature. It’s a slightly heavy-handed cautionary tale, but a powerful one. As a puzzle platformer, it’s a little less successful, with controls that feel imprecise and levels that need more gameplay variety. After Us has a potent message and offers innocent hope for a planet in trouble.

The surreal world design of After Us' dystopian world carries the game, encouraging you to keep going even when the momentum-driven platforming and creative puzzles give way to tedious combat. Gaia isn't all that compelling a protagonist, but the stories she uncovers--whether they're of the Earth's final animals or the Devourers who killed them--make up for it, inviting you to delve deeper into the dark of After Us' dying world and uncover exactly how it all fell apart.

After Us combines stunning vistas of environmental decay with a dreamlike flow to its light platforming challenges. Despite some missteps, such as ill-fitting combat, exploring and affecting its world is a gratifying process that comes with a wave of emotional ups and downs.

There's a fascinating game hiding in After Us. The melancholy tale of resurrecting a desolate Earth makes for an interesting premise, but it isn't told in a way to make you care much about it. The platforming generates some good moments, but it is also clunky in places due to the physics and lack of explanation in the tutorial. The combat is rather unnecessary and unexciting, but it is functional, while the presentation remains fetching. Patches are still being created to tweak the game, and there is some potential to fix the technical issues experienced in the early portion of this playthrough. For now, it isn't a game that you need to seek out and play if there are other options to tackle.

Compared to Arise: a Simple Story, After Us represents an evolution. Despite that, the game fails to accomplish its mission and remains a step back from the modern games standards.

It doesn’t help that my PC struggled to keep a consistent frame rate and no amount of fiddling with the settings really helped. This, admittedly, isn’t super uncommon with pre-release games on PC, but it seems like some of the Steam reviews have said the same thing, so it may need just a little bit more time in the oven.