➤ After Us: review of an excellent, sometimes naive, platform game 🕹

Talking about environmentalism in a video game is always complicated and the After Us review tells us that the game only succeeds to a certain point.

After Us is a great platform game. It's versatile, precise, creative in level design, and very forgiving when you make mistakes. It could have been a great platformer if it weren't for the large number of environmental clichés it decided to populate its levels with. Titles that raise awareness of environmental problems are needed, but in our opinion this is not the case, because an overly simplistic approach sets the entire debate back for years.

Developed by the Spanish Small Studio, this game has a noble mission and tells its story with levels that are very picturesque to see, very fluid to navigate and with the right amount of collectibles for those who want to explore the proposed locations even further. The plot has its own reason as well as the progression that immediately makes clear the commitment that each level requires and completing the game, which took us around 15 hours. The only real problem (aside from some sporadic slowdowns and a single crash) is that, given the way it chose to talk about the environment, this title seems stuck in 2008, the year Wall-E was released.

In this After us review We will tell you the many ways in which this game can entertain you thanks to its excellent platforming system, as long as you can tolerate too many moments in which the blame for the destruction of the Earth falls on the individuals, called devourers, guilty of having consumed too much.

Precise and fun platforms

After Us: review of an excellent, sometimes naive, platform game — In After Us the tools available are many and varied but above all they make the exploration very fluid, fun and without punishment.

Before talking about the subtexts we must look at the background and After Us is, without a doubt, a good 3d platform game. In fact, during the first two levels, those playing have access to all available skills and are therefore free to explore the game's levels as they see fit. There are connected sections that require the use of specific talents, but otherwise the exploration is very fluid and fun. It also helps a lot that there is no game over screen, no health points, and many barriers that interrupt the flow of the game have been removed. The developers told us that they approached the level design with the aim of penalizing errors as little as possible and this results in very frequent saves that allow you to interrupt the game at any time and respawn points that are never too far from where you are. fallen.

In addition to the classic jump, double jump and run, After Us will allow you to walk on some special walls, ride on electric cables and other steel ropes like Sonic and Ratchet and even teleport using old cathode ray tube televisions. Each of the levels then introduces a new mechanic that acts as the protagonist of that section of the game and returns at later moments to add more and more variety to the experience. From this point of view, After Us really did a great job of design because we have not found one section the same as the other and each new mission managed to give a new perspective to the skill set we already took for granted. Many parts of the game are one-way so it is not possible to retrace your steps but, through the oasis system (forests that act as checkpoints created by the protagonist's life force), it is possible to revisit previous sections of the game in case you are left behind as a collector's item.

Determination and perseverance

In After Us you will take on the role of Gaia, a nymph who has been tasked by a creative spirit with saving the life energy of extinct animals to rebuild the ecosystems that humans have destroyed. This mission will take you through ruined cities, burning shopping malls, abandoned power plants, and many other environments that you will want to embody. The impact that humans have had on the natural world.. To purify the corruption brought by man, which almost always takes the form of a black oily substance similar to petroleum, Gaia has at her disposal a pulse of vital energy that covers everything around her in grass and plants. Initially this power will help you activate oasis and unlock points inaccessible due to corruption, but then you will have to learn to use it in combat.

In fact, during the first mission you will meet for the first time. devourers, human beings so consumed by corruption that they have become part of it and are now bent to its will. These creatures (of which there are several types with varying degrees of strength) want to eliminate you and will try to take you away to destroy you. With your boost of nature energy you can repel them but to purify them you will have to use the heart of Gaia, a light that she can cast and call to herself. Hitting enemies and eliminating them will return them to normal and see them dissolve. More powerful opponents will give you access to one of the two. collectibles available in the game that is, memories, comic-style images that tell of the corruption of that place and are one of the first places where the developers' naivety emerges. The second collectible hidden in the most inaccessible parts of the levels (and often requiring additional platforming sections) are the spirits of the animals that need to be saved. To find them, however, you can make Gaia sing, whose voice will generate small pieces of colored paper that will guide you to your destination.

A partial approach

The main problem with After Us is that it comes out almost fifteen years late. Its approach to the environmental problem is not only partial, it is outdated because for most of the game it aggressively points the finger at individual human beings and generalizes the discussion about what can be done for the environment and what is important to talk about . When Wall-E appeared in 2008, he gave a big boost to the environmentalist fight because a great production represented, although with clichés, a serious problem and until then largely ignored. However, this way of representing man's impact on the planet has long been considered obsolete because experts believe that making people feel guilty does not achieve tangible results.

It is true that everyone's commitment is necessary to help the environment, but without systemic interventions by institutions it is difficult for things to change. After us, however, wants to make us all feel guilty for living in the present, idealizing a bucolic past where nature flourished, ignoring the limitations of that type of society.

Conclusions

Tested version PlayStation 5 digital delivery Steam, playstation store, Xbox Store Holygamerz.com 6.5 Readers (6) 8.0 your vote

After Us is a fun game, but it doesn't effectively address environmental issues. It has an excellent platform but between one level and another it believes that it is making the player aware of environmental problems when, in reality, it only exasperates the so-called "climate despair" or that feeling in which we feel condemned to oblivion due to the changes. climate change and there is nothing more we can do about it. It's a real shame because between jumping, dodging, exploding vegetation, and skating on power lines there's a lot of fun in this game. If you can ignore this aspect, After Us will entertain you and will be very beautiful to look at thanks to excellent art direction and very well done ambient and lo-fi music.