After Us Analysis – A Very Dark Future for the Human Race

After Us is the second game from Barcelona studio Piccolo Studio, a platform title that depicts a planet totally destroyed by our own race

A hot topic today is the damage humans are causing to our planet. Issues such as climate change, pollution, or animal extinction are on the agenda, and despite this, it seems humans aren’t doing anything about it. GOOD After Us is the representation of everything that will happen to our planet if we humans continue with this attitude. The second title from developer Piccolo Studio, after Arise: A Simple Story, is a bigger, more ambitious title, vindictive platforming, puzzles and combat, with spectacular graphics. If you want to know everything about this very personal game, in this analysis you will know everything.

Gaia, savior of souls

In After Us, we will be Gaia, a spirit of life represented by a young woman with long white hair. Mother (a representation of Earth) has lost her life energy, so Gaia must recover it, freeing the souls of the animals that once populated the planet, but are now only blue forms of light. This process will not be easy. And it is that the path to reach these souls will be very complicated, since the planet is totally destroyed, and it will be full of many dangers.. Also, Gaia, every time she releases these souls, she seems to get weaker. A feature of the title is that most of the plot of the title is told contextually. It is true that he has a few cutscenes to explain the main things of the plot, but it is through images in his world that we can get an idea of ​​​​what happened to the planet, and give greater context to everything. It’s a game that everyone can interpret differently.

The main plot isn’t bad at all, but it’s certainly not surprising, as is the message the game wants to convey and how it conveys it. The game leaves very cloudy images and impressions. Those who were once human find themselves in the world petrified, naked, and all with a face of pain. Many of them seem to follow the crowd like sheep, straight to their self-induced end and extreme capitalism. Some of these scenes resemble many others that we see today and it is something very frightening and upsetting.

we get what we get

As we have already mentioned, After Us is a platform title, and therefore throughout the adventure we will carry out actions typical of this type of game. Our protagonist Gaia, At the beginning of the adventure, you won’t be able to perform many actions, just jump and run, but as we progress through the adventure, new mechanics and abilities will be introduced.. This is something very positive, since, although the game is not complicated at all, nothing is done in a repetitive way and we constantly have the feeling of progressing. For example, in one section the fight with enemies is introduced, in another the possibility of running along the wall… there is always something new to learn and discover. If we talk about combat, it’s quite anecdotal. It is true that each time they appear, they do not disturb, but they do not bring anything either. It gives us the feeling that if the game didn’t have them, we wouldn’t miss anything. If there’s anything to fault the gameplay, it’s its camera. This is placed in very strange places that don’t allow you to see clearly, causing you to die because of it.

After Us is a fairly linear game, although the scenarios seem quite large, they have practically nothing to do, we can only collect the souls of animals hidden throughout the scenarios, something very simple since we have a ability that tells us where they are hidden. Despite these rather corridor scenarios, The player has some freedom in the forks, and there are times when we have different paths to take, it’s our decision to take one or the other first.. The duration of the game is around 10 hours, or a few more hours if we go for all the collectibles.

A devastated and beautiful world

After Us is a beautiful game. Although it depicts a destroyed and dark world, this one is simply beautiful. The game, which was only released on next-gen consoles, has some very outstanding graphics. This shows that they have focused on new consoles. The game’s art design is spectacular, with totally outstanding storyline design. It’s not perfect, for example, the design of our protagonist, I think, is not the right one. This one is pretty basic, giving a plastic feel.

The performance of the title itself is more questionable. After Us has a quality mode, which will run at 4K and 30 fps, and a performance mode, which will run at 2K and 60 fps. We played it in quality mode, because due to the type of game I didn’t think the performance of the title was so important and in this mode it’s not a disaster, but it doesn’t work too well either . There are a lot of freezes, frame drops and even in some of these freezes I had to restart the game because it was not working. Hopefully this will be fixed soon with patches. If we talk about its soundtrack, it’s pretty good, it perfectly accompanies the action that we see on the screen. For example, there are very melancholic melodies, perfectly accompanying the images of destruction that we see.

After us Conclusions

After Us is a very personal title that will touch you if you are the least bit sympathetic about it. A somewhat simple platform game, but which never falls into repetition because they continually teach us new mechanics. It is true that it has serious problems, such as the use of the camera or its performance, but we forget all this when we see the beautiful and at the same time terrifying images and impressions that the game leaves us. A graphically and artistically impressive title that, after finishing it, will leave us with a terrible bad body and make us reflect on the direction we are taking as a society.