After Us Review

Piccolo Studio started off like any other game development studio, a small team with big dreams. However, when three friends leave an already successful advertising agency to pursue their dream and hit the ground running right to the top with their first release, you know anything else they put out there is going to be epic.

The aforementioned friends, Alexis Corominas, Jordi Ministral, and Oriol Pujado, founded Piccolo Studio in 2015. After some time and some team expansion, they released a masterpiece of a game in 2020: Arise: A Simple Story.

Shortly after the release of Arise: A Simple Story, Piccolo Studio announced and teased its latest upcoming release, After Us. It is a surrealistic take on a world that has been swallowed by oil, greed, and disregard.

After quite a lot more teasing, they finally released their creation into the world on 23 May 2023. Buckle up and grab some tissues, this game is not for the lighthearted because this game has a touching story that melt even the hardest of hearts.

After Us starts with a gorgeous cinematic showing of Mother’s Ark, all the many animals and insects that inhabit it, and Gaia, our protagonist, waking up from a nap in a meadow. Our protagonist is a nymph of sorts, small in size, with long white hair, and innocent as can be.

You’ll see her greeting a deer calf, which, shortly after she gives it some attention, fades into smoke. This is where things take a semi-dark turn and where Gaia’s happy paradise comes to a standstill. One by one, all the animals in the Ark fade away in the same way until none are left.

In a panic, she runs to the center of the Ark and calls out to Mother. Now, Mother, in a metaphorical sense, is like Gaia but also a separate entity. She controls and maintains the Ark that houses the spirits of animals and insects alike from the world.

Mother responds and tells Gaia that the Ark is dying and that the Devourers have destroyed the world, causing all the animals to die off. Mother used her Life Force to protect them, and as they died, her Life Force became trapped within their vessels. This is where you, as Gaia, will have to set off into the world to retrieve Mother’s trapped Life Force by finding the vessels so she can restore life to the world.

Unfortunately, this is easier said than done. The world you’ll have to travel through isn’t the world we know, and it’s a surrealistic version of what we know that’s been overrun with oil and desolation. However, you don’t have to brave the world empty-handed.

Mother will give you her heart, and you’ll need to use its power to help you on your journey. From there, your journey begins with Gaia in what looks to be a twisted version of an underground parking lot.

So, it goes without saying that After Us is an incredibly approachable game because of its adaptability and tutorial alone. There are many other amazing aspects to this game, but those two are what stand out most right from the start. Naturally, with Gaia being a small creature, you’d think she has to do some serious climbing to get anywhere. Well, yes and no.

Powered by Mother’s heart, she soon discovers just how much it helps her in her journey to restore the Ark. The first thing being that jumping isn’t set in stone, there is a maximum height while you can also choose how high you want to jump. This might seem a little insignificant at first until you see how it comes in handy later on, and knowing this can save you a lot of frustration.

For all those who love powering through a game as fast as possible, this is for you, the glorious and ever-loved sprint. Granted, Gaia’s sprint doesn’t just give her speed but also a Sprint Jump. In short, you’ll get a lot more distance but not as much height.

Combining this with her Double Jump and Glide abilities opens up your options for exploration, but it doesn’t end there. Sooner or later, you’ll get another fun ability to help you get around the wild world at hand, the Air Dash. As the name suggests, while in the air, you can essentially dash forward to get a little extra distance for those hard-to-reach places.

With so much focus on the many different ways to get around, it might seem a bit odd or make the game come off as a walking simulator, though there’s a very good reason behind it. During your search for the vessels, you’ll come across trapped spirits of extinct animals and insects.

With the help of Mother’s heart, you can free the spirits and allow them to roam around in their spirit form again. As you progress through After Us and Free Spirits, you’ll see that the world isn’t as empty or devoid of life anymore. This is a bit of a double-edged sword because it’s unnerving how much has gone extinct, but it’s also heartwarming to watch them roam around again after freeing them.

Speaking of Mother’s Heart, it comes with other uses, too, the first one being Burst Of Life. This alone serves several purposes, such as – Stunning Devourers, clearing trash, clearing tainted water/oil, and even breathing life into the sprouts you’ll find scattered throughout the world. It does come with a slight downside, though; it has a very short charge time.

However, while you’re charging Burst Of Life, you can’t sprint, wallride, or even somehow make an effort to defend yourself. This can, unfortunately, leave you open if there’s not enough distance between you and the devourers.

While Burst of Life is nice, it’s not always practical, especially if you’re rushing toward your objective and need to clear a path through oil. In cases like this, you can also throw the heart and recall it back to you. However, you’ll also run into devourers who need to be redeemed, or they’ll do anything in their power to snuff you out.

Redeeming them is simple: throw the heart through them, and they’ll lose more of their oily covering until they’re clean and redeemed. Redeemed devourers fade away into smoke or dust the same way the animals did at the start, but in this case, it’s as if you’re freeing them from their suffering.

After Us doesn’t really give you much in terms of guidance, it’s a semi-linear game even though the world is so massive, it’s actually quite easy to get lost in it or get turned around. While this doesn’t help much, it can sometimes prove useful when you’re at a fork in the road to decide where you want to go.

Gaia and Mother being who they are, you’ll also have access to the Lifelink. It’s basically a map combined with a constellation of sorts. It’ll show you the vessels you’ll still need to find and the path you’re on. However, it serves a second purpose… Glorious and very much beloved by all gamers, Fast Travel.

Typically, any form of linear game doesn’t require fast travel because the path is straightforward or the world is too small, but After Us has a world that splits into different paths, and the world is gigantic. Naturally, it would be a pain to have to backtrack to get to a different path if you’re a completionist or you want to go after a different vessel.

Though this is where things become a little technical, you can only fast-travel to a permanent oasis that you’ve opened up. To do this, you’ll need to shut down drills that are typically guarded by the Devourers.

Aside from the Devourers, there are other threats to look out for, such as something that looks like a type of tar. This tar can’t be cleared away with Mother’s heart and should typically be avoided, or it might pull you in, literally.

Falling to your doom is one thing or being snuffed out by devourers, but the tar will literally grab hold of you and suck you in. It can best be described as a black sea of tendrils; get too close, and they’ll grab hold of Gaia and well… You know how it goes.

With everything said and knowing what to look for or what to avoid, finding the trapped spirits isn’t as easy as it sounds. Lucky for you, Gaia can sing to get a short trail to point you in the right direction of nearby trapped spirits or even idle Devourers. The idle Devourers don’t do anything, they’re frozen in time so to say.

Redeeming those, in particular, will unlock memories for the area you’re in, and the memories give you a hand-drawn glimpse of a time before the world became the way it is. Sometimes, the memories are of a simpler time, others are more innocent and love-oriented, and some are hard truths that nobody wants to accept.

The most important thing that Piccolo Studio did brilliantly was the diversity and difference between the areas, going from the Suburbs to the Countryside shows a clear difference between the two even though both are still very run down and follow the same metaphorical theme of what the world outside the game is turning into.

However, as you get closer to a vessel, the area will also take on aspects of what led to its downfall. For example, the area of the eagle vessel is mostly bird cages that you have to climb. Sadly, not much else can be said without giving away spoilers.

Everything about After Us on the visual front is just breathtaking and shocking; it’s a surrealistic version of the world with a lot of metaphorical themes that show what the world will turn into while maintaining an undertone that there is some hope. The overall color palate, being mostly focused on dull or dark colors, really helps to highlight the state the world is in while there are also the bits of green nature that Gaia brings in to brighten things up, and this lightens the overall atmosphere.

The world design is second to none, and every measure was taken to make it as open to exploration as possible. Even the collision mapping is detailed, and this is normally done quite roughly. Where the game shines just as much is with Gaia’s expressions during cinematics; the details of her emotional state are always as clear as day, and you can sometimes feel what she’s feeling just through her animation quality.

After Us might not exactly be voiced, Gaia does have some vocals, but she’s not voiced. This doesn’t detract from her as a character or the game, though; it instead maintains focus on what matters while highlighting it. However, on the sound engineering front, After Us takes the top spot for its soundtrack.

The somber music of the game is constantly shifting, and it also creates a very eerie atmosphere that gives you the feeling that the world is essentially dead. The music does shift slightly when you’re facing off against the Devourers, yet it still maintains that light feeling with some urgency underneath it.

Overall, After Us is one of those rare masterpiece-level games that need to be experienced; with an incredibly touching story, amazing gameplay, and drool-worthy music to accompany it, you might come for one thing, but you’ll likely stay for it all, or maybe just to see the story through to the end. After Us has nearly endless layers underneath the overall design, but going deeper is what makes every second spent playing the game so much more rewarding.