A VR horror game with a promising start, but ends up ruined by some unbelievably awful stealth sequences.
Forming part of the World of Darkness mythos (along with Werewolf: The Apocalypse and, more famously, Vampire: The Masquerade), Wraith: The Oblivion - Afterlife has you playing a recently deceased spirit, trapped in a Los Angeles mansion. You have no memory of how or why you died, and you have to explore the mansion to collect documents, take photos and unlock your memories. That concept on it's own works for a spooky walking simulator, and it's during these quiet times when the game excels. The story is drip-fed to you through tableaus in which you see character models recreating the events leading up to your death. It's a better way to tell a story than reading endless notes, documents and diaries, at least.
The visuals are great - some very effective use of lighting and prop placement lends itself well to the VR format. I was constantly doing double-takes because I was sure I had seen something spooky out of the corner of my eye. The sound design is equally effective, utilising stereo sound to creep you out with whispering and other atmospheric noise to keep you on edge.
As said previously, the game works best as a spooky walking sim - when the "run-and-hide" sections start, the game absolutely falls apart. I know there are a lot of horror fans who bemoan games where you can't fight back - I am not one of them, believe me. I count Outlast, Amnesia and SOMA among the greatest games that the genre has to offer. However, "run-and-hide" horror has to be done right, or you risk these sequences becoming boring and/or frustrating. Sadly, Afterlife fails on both counts.
There are a few different sections during the game where you'll suddenly be in danger from "spectres", who will spawn in the area and roam around looking for you. Now, credit to Fast Travel Games, the spectres all have unique designs and are pretty creepy (the image of the Broken Woman shuffling out of the darkness was actually very scary - initially). But these encounters quickly go from fearful to frustrating.
The first issue is for the game generally - you move at an agonisingly slow speed, and sprinting feels like it barely makes a difference. For Afterlife's atmosphere-building early sections this is fine, but if you're running from something that's trying to kill you it's incredibly frustrating - especially when most of the spectres are just that little bit faster than you. If they catch you, it's pretty much an insta-kill - there's a health system, or "corpus", but it's basically useless. And because the game has incredibly infrequent auto-saves - and a few oddly-placed manual saving areas - you're likely to lose a ton of progress and have to replay sections over and over. Also, you're not given a map, which means you get lost frequently. The devs explained that they did this to make Afterlife feel more realistic, but in a game where I play a ghost and other ghosts are trying to kill me, I don't think a map is going to break my immersion.
The enemy AI is not good either, compared to other games of this ilk. Take the Traeger section in Outlast, for example. In that sequence, Traeger roams around the entire area, giving you a fair chance to move around and escape. Contrast this with the "Tall Man" in Afterlife. You're told at some point that the spectres can "hear" you, and it's not really specified what this entails. Slamming doors? Running? Speaking into the headset mic? It's not clear, since at some points the spectre made a beeline for me for seemingly no reason. If you make a noise and then manage to hide from the enemy, they have an annoying habit of just sticking around wherever you're hiding and never leaving, making escape that much more difficult. You have a flashlight (not a very good one) that you can use to stun the enemies, but you move so slowly that by the time you're able to get moving you're caught again.
I gave up at the Broken Woman, in which you're forced to wander around in the pitch black while a spectre (who actually does have an insta-kill) zones in on you. Oh, and the aforementioned flashlight stun? Doesn't work on her. Without the use of a map to know where to go, you're just wandering around in disorientation and bumping into walls before being killed. After doing this around 20 times I lost patience and uninstalled.
It's a real shame. Afterlife has a lot of potential, but its poorly-implemented stealth mechanics turn what should be the most tense sequences into boring, frustrating slogs. I'm afraid I can't recommend this.
Forming part of the World of Darkness mythos (along with Werewolf: The Apocalypse and, more famously, Vampire: The Masquerade), Wraith: The Oblivion - Afterlife has you playing a recently deceased spirit, trapped in a Los Angeles mansion. You have no memory of how or why you died, and you have to explore the mansion to collect documents, take photos and unlock your memories. That concept on it's own works for a spooky walking simulator, and it's during these quiet times when the game excels. The story is drip-fed to you through tableaus in which you see character models recreating the events leading up to your death. It's a better way to tell a story than reading endless notes, documents and diaries, at least.
The visuals are great - some very effective use of lighting and prop placement lends itself well to the VR format. I was constantly doing double-takes because I was sure I had seen something spooky out of the corner of my eye. The sound design is equally effective, utilising stereo sound to creep you out with whispering and other atmospheric noise to keep you on edge.
As said previously, the game works best as a spooky walking sim - when the "run-and-hide" sections start, the game absolutely falls apart. I know there are a lot of horror fans who bemoan games where you can't fight back - I am not one of them, believe me. I count Outlast, Amnesia and SOMA among the greatest games that the genre has to offer. However, "run-and-hide" horror has to be done right, or you risk these sequences becoming boring and/or frustrating. Sadly, Afterlife fails on both counts.
There are a few different sections during the game where you'll suddenly be in danger from "spectres", who will spawn in the area and roam around looking for you. Now, credit to Fast Travel Games, the spectres all have unique designs and are pretty creepy (the image of the Broken Woman shuffling out of the darkness was actually very scary - initially). But these encounters quickly go from fearful to frustrating.
The first issue is for the game generally - you move at an agonisingly slow speed, and sprinting feels like it barely makes a difference. For Afterlife's atmosphere-building early sections this is fine, but if you're running from something that's trying to kill you it's incredibly frustrating - especially when most of the spectres are just that little bit faster than you. If they catch you, it's pretty much an insta-kill - there's a health system, or "corpus", but it's basically useless. And because the game has incredibly infrequent auto-saves - and a few oddly-placed manual saving areas - you're likely to lose a ton of progress and have to replay sections over and over. Also, you're not given a map, which means you get lost frequently. The devs explained that they did this to make Afterlife feel more realistic, but in a game where I play a ghost and other ghosts are trying to kill me, I don't think a map is going to break my immersion.
The enemy AI is not good either, compared to other games of this ilk. Take the Traeger section in Outlast, for example. In that sequence, Traeger roams around the entire area, giving you a fair chance to move around and escape. Contrast this with the "Tall Man" in Afterlife. You're told at some point that the spectres can "hear" you, and it's not really specified what this entails. Slamming doors? Running? Speaking into the headset mic? It's not clear, since at some points the spectre made a beeline for me for seemingly no reason. If you make a noise and then manage to hide from the enemy, they have an annoying habit of just sticking around wherever you're hiding and never leaving, making escape that much more difficult. You have a flashlight (not a very good one) that you can use to stun the enemies, but you move so slowly that by the time you're able to get moving you're caught again.
I gave up at the Broken Woman, in which you're forced to wander around in the pitch black while a spectre (who actually does have an insta-kill) zones in on you. Oh, and the aforementioned flashlight stun? Doesn't work on her. Without the use of a map to know where to go, you're just wandering around in disorientation and bumping into walls before being killed. After doing this around 20 times I lost patience and uninstalled.
It's a real shame. Afterlife has a lot of potential, but its poorly-implemented stealth mechanics turn what should be the most tense sequences into boring, frustrating slogs. I'm afraid I can't recommend this.