For the last few days, I've been playing a game called Afterimage. The art looked neat to me, and it's another sort of metroidvania that came without a note that it was hard. Oddly, the one thing that people consistently stated against it was "Hard to know where to go, you can wander into areas you're not supposed to be really easy." Well I happen to love when a game lets me make poor choices, and the game is (was?) on super-sale for $4, so let's do this.
Friends. There is a reason this thing was $4.
The general feel of the game is fine. Combat is pretty simple, and around level 50, the midpoint of the game, I achieved good enough armor and weapons to be functionally invincible against most fights. Exploration is also generally fine, with two notes. On the benign side, it was a little confounding how long it takes to get skills. Double Jump isn't too far in, but Swim, Break Floor, and Wall Climb were all fascinatingly late in the run (more mid-point than earlier game). This led to a lot of zones where I'm like okay need to remember like eighteen places to come back to. And then you don't.
On the more serious side, the game outright lies to you. There are hidden areas, but finding them is...obtuse. Mostly because there are, in several cases, no visual tells. The floor is continuous, and the wall perfectly aligned, but secretly you can dive into the floor or slide through a crack, and it's like...okay, how? How am I supposed to know that? Especially when the area doesn't show on the map. Most of the time, the map gives away a path, but there's one serious point where it severely messed with me. And to explain it, I have to talk about the story.
Story is why this is worth $4. Maybe it's somewhat poor translation, but truth be told I think it's just bad writing from the jump. You play as Renee and her little summon pal Ifree. You're defending your little village, but monsters attack, and a mystery girl steals your master's soul. Your objective is to find your master. There's a bunch of background lore about the god that made this world, and that humans broke that natural order by attacking the Goliaths, functionally elemental demi-gods that control the world to god's whim. None of this is important to finding your master, though. When you do find her, she tells you to find the Soul Shards for reasons.
One of them is so obtusely hidden I actually cannot believe it. There is an ice zone, very short, which you need to access from Holy Grounds. To do this, you have to figure out there's a floor to drop down when the map shows nothing, and there are no visual tells in that area. Then, you get stuck again, only to need to slide through a hidden crevasse. Well okay, I'm through, and I explored the ice area to 100% completion per the map. Except. I missed the soul shard that's hidden in a corner, where you have to Floor Break at a space with no tell. How did the zone say 100% when I missed treasure, you ask? Because the map completion percentage is based on what you've colored in. Which means in almost every map, the only way to get 100% is to find Super Jump and just hang out on the ceiling for days.
Anyway, you may be wondering what the soul shards do. So am I. They're necessary for a trio of endings in which you find the hidden sanctum where some organization is worshiping god, but like of the moon specifically from the motif? Which is weird because the mythology states that the golden crow is both the sun and the moon, so it's like why the distinction? The first ending, the guider kills you and then you're singing with the choir. The second ending, you got 1-2 shards and survive the attack, but then get stabbed by a red and evil version of you, who seems to absorb Ifree. The third you have all three shards, beat evil you, and then find out that blue you from earlier was eaten by red you, and you basically fuse into one, then kill and absorb the power of the guider. Why? Don't stress it.
The other trio of endings involves all the fire areas. You beat two fire bosses that reveal two things: Ifree is the Fire Goliath, and the fire people are still willing to fight their war against humans for disturbing the natural order and continuing to wreak havoc on the world. Valid. When you kill them, it unlocks this sealed area, where Ifree notes they have fused within an egg. This egg has a trio of endings. First: Ifree absorbs them and becomes Fire Goliath once again. Second: you invade their soul space, which is a thing you can do, and attack until Ifree fights you about it, at which point you beat him, and then it's implied you both died to stop the Fire Goliaths. Third: you attack twice for dialogue, but then stop and leave, and when you come back Ifree thanks you for being normal, tells you he can just give his Goliath heart to those two, and adventure with you just fine. Cool.
This unlocked NG+. Which is actually just a side story featuring 42, the mystery girl who stole your master's soul. Turns out, she was helping. Her deal is that she's the only successful experiment from the labs. When humans waged their war, the...I think Wind?...Goliath stopped producing Dew, which humans used as energy. They then found a minor Goliath creature called the Cloudworm, which they infused in people, until it took with 42. This allows her to produce energy crystals, but she also has to eat souls sometimes. She doesn't like it, so she's out for vengeance. The first she gets is defeating the woman who experimented on you, and then the entity behind her whose goal seems to be transcending humans to their next evolutionary level. The second involves talking to the Wind Goliath, who lets you fist-fight the Cloudworm into submission so you don't need to eat people.
From here, Renee has to find a magic sword to break barriers, a "guiding light," and five shards to produce a super mask that lets her access the fight 42 is having in Dream World. Upon doing so, you face off against the mastermind, who comments on choosing her successors well, and then you leave while 42 turns the whole tower to crystal.
Now, I'm sure you have several questions. Perhaps...why did you do this? What is the point? How did these things connect? Friend...no one knows. Literally no one. I can't really find answers, I think things just happen in this game.
I've never seen a game so bad at explaining anything. Like...okay, plenty of games are mysterious and rely on things like item descriptions to tell the full tale. But you generally have a sense of objective. In Hollow Knight, you may not know what you're specifically doing, but you know where you're going and the ultimate goal, which evolves from getting into the Black Egg, to facing off against Radiance. But you know very early on where you're going. In this game, once you've found your master...you have no fucking idea where to go. The soul shards aren't tied to major bosses or anything. It's completely free flowing. These shards also have nothing at all to do with anything beyond those first cluster of endings. Anything to do with Ifree is completely meaningless in the grand scheme of things.
To make matters worse, it never explains what things are for. There are several locked doors that require keys, usually found in entirely different zones. You may assume that they will tell you what the key is to. They will not. By far the most egregious, at least to me, is the Field of Water, where there's a lock wall but no indication of what's needed. The answer? You get these magic stones that act as heals. The more you have, the more heals you use. When you find one that's associated with water, that opens the gate. This allows you to, if you have the de-petrify skill, break free a golden crow who takes you to the Solar Birthplace, where you get Super Jump. I don't even want to talk about how long it took me to figure this sequence of events out.
It's so obtuse that some conditions are largely unknown at all. That "guiding light" thing? It refers to an item given by this giant turtle you can find at one point. The condition is to be level 80. Or maybe 75? It's unclear. Actually it might not be level but skill points, where you need 180. Or maybe 160? It's really unclear if they need to be spent or not. Actually, we're pretty sure you just need eight of the glyphs like you need for the fire egg endings. No one actually seems to know. The conditions are that obtuse.
And that doesn't even begin to touch the sidequests. As usual, characters move around and have their own adventures. Except there is never any indication of where they might be off to next. Literally none. They just show up places. Not too atypical, but. The mid-game opens up wildly. You get this manta ray thing, which can swim around a slight overworld map, and it opens up like five zones at once. Better get the order right, or you will be doing a lot of backtracking!
So many aspects of this game are highly specific about needing items or particular events that just give no hint or indication of what's needed. I got stonewalled trying to make the super mask because it turns out, the five items labeled Masks in my inventory were not the five pieces I required. Do you know what the missing piece was? The internet didn't until I found a reddit thread that linked a Steam page where someone took a guess at what might have been missed. There's a dragon statue you have to de-petrify to get an item somewhere. It's not even a mask shard. Oh, that other mask shard? Yeah that one's actually pointless lol.
It's not bad enough for me to claim it as one of the worst games I've ever played. But this game is decisively one of the messiest. I spent a lot of time in late-game just going "Where the hell am I supposed to go?" Which is not great, especially in a big open game like this one, where fast-travel is specific and there's no persistent run button. Add in a story that feels like a lot of lore with very little relevance or even internal consistency. It's sloppy, more than anything.
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