Spoilers only at the very end

Video games have been used as a medium to tackle existential topics for a while now: questions like what it means to be human, good vs. evil, and the existence of an afterlife are just some of the many. From its title, you’d think What Comes After would embrace that latter subject, but that isn’t the case. Developed by dual developers Pikselnesia and Rolling Glory Jam, WCA is instead about the present and why life is worth living. It centers around a young woman named Vivi who finds herself on a train bound for the Hereafter. As she awaits course correction, she gets to chatting with the other occupants, who in turn cause her to reflect on her own existence back home.

It’s a fascinating premise, using the age-old Ghost Train trope to spin a relevant tale about overcoming depression when the whole world feels against you. Yet at less than an hour, and with poorly-conceived ideas about its characterizations, WCA can’t help but fall very short, no matter its good intentions. A game like this needed to be successful on at least one of its two ventures: the hero’s journey of acceptance and the individual anecdotes from the supporting cast.

Let’s dive into both so I can better explain why WCA falters, starting with the first. Vivi’s arc is pretty clear-cut: she enters the story melancholic about her continuance and leaves with a newfound appreciation, like she just survived one of Jigsaw’s traps. The problem is we are never given a definitive answer as to what brought about this despondency: she briefly laments about being a burden to her family, yet immediately admits that none of her relatives actually believe or say this. Outside of that, she is barebones- we don’t know anything about her career trajectory, social interactions, schoolwork, nothing. No hints at all that would subtly indicate at least one of them to be the source of her qualms.

No, in place of such direct explanations, I have to believe she is suffering from clinical depression, and it is here that the writers drop the ball. See, the amazing resolution they conceive for her ailment is to just be grateful for this chance at vitality because it doesn’t matter whether you have biochemical deficiencies in your brain that literally make it impossible to do so: if you see the positives in living, it’ll literally overcome any cognitive cancer eating away at your mind. WCA indulges in outdated postulations about dysthymia, and in doing so presents simplistic solutions that would be detrimental to afflicted individuals if the game wasn’t wrapped up in such innocent motives.

Some may retort and say I’m reading too much into things, that the creators definitively intended the narrative to be about the typical blues periods everyone goes through when placed in prolonged circumstances of negativity and NOT about mental illness. To this I would present several counterpoints: one, as stated before, you aren’t given any other grounds to ascribe Vivi’s low state-of-mind to outside of self-perceived encumberment to her household, and considering that is blatantly not true from the perspective of her kinsfolk, it stands to reason that the only kind of person who would believe this is someone with MDD; two, at the start of her odyssey, Vivi, reckoning herself to be dead due to the status of her fellow passengers, remarks that that isn’t such a bad thing (if you don’t believe that you are worth living, you aren’t just gloomy, you are suicidal); and three, during her encounter with a sentient tree, the Tree claims that Vivi didn’t arrive on this special metro by accident, but because her thoughts placed her close to the edge. Of course, nothing specific is stated, but using common sense gleans that she was almost certainly considering taking her own life.

So yeah, the devs wanted to go this route and ended up folding to the sophistry that is optimism (aka escaping the black hole of mental disorders by way of simply focusing on the good around you). If things were that simple, Freud and Jung would’ve gone bankrupt.

On the second front, you are going to spend the majority of your playthrough chatting with the spectral passengers on this phantom express, and their personalized stories just aren’t up-to-par with the lofty expectations I assume Pikselnesia and Rolling Glory Jam had in mind. While there is some heterogeneity in terms of attitudes, the vast majority of the people are either morbidly happy-go-lucky about their predicament or at peace with what transpired and subsequently looking forward to their final destination. The purpose behind this was obviously to provide foils for Vivi, but it comes with the consequence of making the travelers bland- it’s hard to get excited for the next major beat when you know it’s essentially going to be a retread of prior material, no matter the variations on the teller. It’s a shame, too, because you get hints at larger sociopolitical motifs that would have been great to explore by way of the perspective of a deceased person reflecting on the overly-complicated, partly-nonsensical inner workings of modern societies.+

I had two other issues with the story that involve spoilers, so I’ll tag them down below.++

The writers also make the oddball decision to mute the cause of death for most of the commuters. It’s not that they keep it hidden from you, but more that it’s generally not dwelled on or fleshed out beyond a quick sentence. I get that the devs wanted to inspire happiness and hope in players instead of putting them in a flurry of misery, but when it comes at the cost of sanitizing your subject matter, I feel it goes too far in the other direction. “Only in the darkness can you see the Stars” to quote Dr. King- throwing players into a pool of shadow would have made the light above them that much more bright and sanguine.

It’s not just the writing that diminishes the impact of these conversations, but the lack of voice acting. If any game would’ve benefited significantly from a cast of performers, it would have been WCA as a talented actor could very well have laced the idealism in the dialogue with a litany of emotional subtexts: maybe tongue-in-cheek sardonicism or inferred sadness or infectious cheeriness. Instead, you get dull text bubbles that have an annoying “babble” sound accompanying them as you scroll through list-after-list, the only voice acting being Skyward Sword-esque shouts uttered by the voyagers when you greet them (though even that noise lacks variety, with maybe four variations for the dozens of individuals).

There’s no real SFX besides your footsteps. If you stop walking, I guess it’s kind of cool being able to hear the rumbling of the train (despite it blatantly being on a loop), but nothing else.

The music is too quiet for its own good. When you hear it, particularly during the climax, it is beautiful and inspiring, but barring those moments, the tunes are pretty indiscernible. I was also not a fan of the main menu theme as I felt it didn’t occupy the ethereal nature that embodied the concept and story.

Graphically, WCA is sorely lacking. Despite being constructed in the Unity Engine, it comes across like an old Flash Animation project from back-in-the-day, with the same simplistic model and facial animations reused for 99% of the human NPCs. It technically serves its purpose of providing avatars to speak to-and-from, but when you see the same clothing on the same-looking people, old or young, happy or lowly, you can’t help but view the endeavor as shortchanged.

Luckily, one of the places that WCA excels at is in its art design. When you first start out, you get a mundane working-class wagon, chock-full of achromous greys and tints of desaturation. When the plot shifts to the supernatural, gorgeous purples, violets, and blues overtake the interiors, overcasting the game with a phantasmagorical tone. And finally, when you enter the arboretum at the end, you're gifted a verdant liveliness via green everywhere that elicits the themes of resprouting and thriving in life. I also appreciated how the train riders themselves were all transparent, speaking to their spiritual composition.

As there is no real gameplay aside from using the arrow keys and spacebar, I can come to my final verdict, which is sadly a no. Not only is the pricing relative to gametime ridiculous, but the myriad of problematic hindrances in the story prevent me from recommending What Comes After to gamers, particularly those who suffer from some psychological illness.

Notes
-The presence of face masks is kind of amusing, grounding the game in the height of the COVID-era where the absence of vaccines warranted such coverings. In doing so, though, WCA loses its evergreen appeal for future generations of potential players. I also have to wonder if the writers were taking a slight jab at the required dressing by tying it into the isolation Vivi feels at this point in her life. If so, well, I’m going to keep my mouth shut lest I say something I come to regret.

-Is Vivi a play on the third person conjugation of the Spanish verb for “to live”?

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+One Soul criticizes the draining nature of toiling away for a boss, a small jab at Capitalism that is sadly just a touch.

++There are animals and plants on the train, indicating that non-human entities get the same treatment as humans in this mythology. Except, there are references to eating meat or meals with meat in them, so how exactly does that work? The game wants to have its meat pie and eat it too. The self-aware vegetation also leads to some haphazardly thrown-in environmental themes that don’t land well.

A couple years ago, I personally lost a close family member, and since then (and even before, really), I've struggled a lot with self-worth and self-doubt. I sort of stumbled upon this game out of nowhere during a Steam sale earlier this year, and bought it since the premise seemed interesting. And after playing through it... it really hit hard, more than I expected it would.

This isn't really a "game" in a traditional sense - at the very least, it's very narrative heavy and the gameplay pretty much takes a backseat to everything else (sort of like Night in the Woods). It's also pretty short - something you will most likely beat in about an hour. But that doesn't change how sincere and impactful it feels, especially after the beginning. I will say the first 10 minutes or so do start pretty slow, maybe a bit exposition heavy, but I felt all the way through it was building up to something and the pay-off at the end especially really ends up hitting home for me in a lot of ways.

Those feelings are aided by a nice art style, NPCs you can talk to that feel realistic, each with their own stories, and just a very "comfy" setting that helps drive the themes this game is going for. Even for how short this game is, it's message is one I can see sticking with me for a while, and I would honestly recommend this to anyone who deals with the same kinds of issues I personally do.