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.

Reviewed on Jun 04, 2023


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