It’s easy to be cynical about After Us, and I am indeed quite cynical about After Us. Created by Barcelona-based Piccolo, the studio behind Arise: A Simple Story, it’s an ecologically themed platformer about a child goddess rescuing animal souls from ravaged cities full of petrified human beings. As I learned from Piccolo, the overall aim is to restore hope to discussions of environmental catastrophe, without waving away the hard facts. But the game couches all this in vague, “universal” terms, as though it were trying to avoid entangling itself in the very debates it wants to channel.
After UsDeveloper: Piccolo StudioPublisher: Private DivisionAvailability: Out 23rd May on PC, PS5 and Xbox Series
Based on a couple of hours with a pre-release build, it risks becoming a Game with a Message but not necessarily anything to say. Rather than specifics about the workings of phenomena such as climate change, After Us prefers to deal in heavy symbolism – the hub area is called the Ark, and your character’s mum is a talking tree – and well-travelled eco-fable cliches such as oil oceans and burned-out cars. It amasses some historical context in the shape of recoverable memories of a bygone world, but the storytelling is largely wordless and somewhat cheesy. The protagonist, Gaia, certainly lays it on thick: she looks like she’s permanently on the brink of crying her eyes out.
At worst, the game feels like it’s just cashing in on the existential funk generated by the global ecological crisis. It also disagrees with itself a little at the level of mechanics. The jump-and-dash controls are well-wrought and feed into some engaging, Prince of Persia-esque traversal puzzles, but the “combat” oscillates fretfully between satisfying expectations for third-person action games and subverting them. There’s no killing, strictly speaking, but there are corrupted humans or “devourers” you must “redeem” by lobbing your glowing heart at them. It’s essentially the “friendliness pellets” joke from Undertale played straight.
After Us – Gameplay Trailer | PS5 Games Watch on YouTube
Get beyond its over-earnest flourishes and vibes-based eco-messaging, however, and there’s more going on in After Us than topicality for topicality’s sake. For starters, there’s the act of singing to magically carpet the ground in plantlife. This is used to clear away pools of toxic gloop and knock back attackers, but it’s more compelling simply as a means of playing with the geometry – turning toppled factory chimneys into flickering green boulders, and bag-strewn alleyways into verdant canyons.