...I would forgive a lot of these frustrations if After Us was simply fun to play, but it isn’t. At no point did physically playing this game feel good. There are some beautiful landscapes to walk around, and spirit animals are always fun, but everything from the controls to the level design to the structure of the game is badly done. There is obviously some heart behind this, but it feels like a poor execution on every level. I care about our environmental impacts as much as anyone and believe we need to be responsible for how we as a species have created hardship for other species, but I also believe that yelling “you and everything you love are bad” at people does about as much to inspire environmental activism as hitting them over the head with a bag of carrots.

Read my full review here: https://gameluster.com/review-after-us-maddening-mindless-menagerie/

I really tried to love this game. I really did. But I've never witnessed a game draining my energies this much before. I mostly think it's a problem of this games' pace. After Us has a lot of really great visual setpieces and I was in awe of many of them. But it stays way too long on the same page in terms of visual identity and doesn't manage to translate any of it into gameplay. Playing the game feels painfully uniform, you mostly jump from rock platform to pieces of junk to rock platform, the few gameplay ideas never managing to break this cycle in an interesting way. Shortening this (already relatively short) game by about half its length would have done wonders for it, I believe. That may also be because the best part about it is everything but actually playing the game. After Us has nice and creative visual ideas, a moody soundtrack and a nicely packaged but ultimately quite reductive message about pollution and climate change. But I think I can enjoy these parts more when I watch a playthrough on YouTube.