#afterimage

Afterimage is a narrative-driven game that delves deep into character development, complex personalities and psychological layers through the player's choices.

You play as a detective in Graybridge, a bustling metropolis inspired by the fast-paced energy of New York. The plot is carried by a series of mysterious murders happening around the area, and it's your job to follow leads and uncover the truth behind it all – or not.

Inspired by Detroit: Become Human, Law & Order: SVU, Zodiac (2007), and Se7en (Seven).

🔍 Detective D. Jackson

Mid-30s | Male/Female | Dylan/Dina | RO

Your newly assigned partner at the 11th Precinct. Stubborn and relentless, Detective Jackson has a reputation for digging deeper than most. Their intense stare and cranky facade might keep people at arm's length, but once you've earned their trust, their loyalty is unwavering. Route: Slow-burn - Love after tragedy.

🔭 Officer Lilian Harris

Late-20s to early-30s | Female | RO (female MC's only)

The energetic beat cop that strives for more. Curious, clever, and highly skilled, Lilian has been dreaming of being a detective ever since she joined the precinct. Her friendly approach and contagious smile makes newcomers warm up quickly, but her eyes twitch slightly at the mention of how "better" she'd be if she followed in her brothers' footsteps.

Route: Friends-to-Lovers - Mutual Pining.

🩺 Thomas Lopes

Early to mid-30s | Transgender man | RO

The annoying downstairs neighbor who's always knocking at your front door. Hard-working and impatient, Thomas is training to become a surgeon at St. Brigid's Memorial Hospital. Petty complaints, delivered in a soft Brazilian accent, are often the first thing you hear after the pounding on your door, though you can't help but wonder if, deep down, he's just a lonely man looking for attention.

Route: Enemies-to-Lovers - The Insufferable but Hot Neighbor.

🚬 E. Lavigne

Early 30s | Male/Female | Elliot/Evelyn | RO

The noisy journalist who flirts like it's a sport. Charming, bold and annoyingly good at getting into places they shouldn't. Lavigne's flattery may come off as playful and uncompromising, but behind the calculating eyes and cigarette-tinged breath lies a lifetime mission: to serve social justice and expose the dirty secrets of those who deserve it.

Route: FWB / One Night Thing - Innocent Flirting Turns Real.

⌚ Detective Asahi Kurosawa

Mid-30s | Non-binary

The missing partner. Their unexplained disappearance led to your assignment with Detective Jackson, and whispers about their case echo quietly through the precinct. What really happened to them remains a mystery.

🍁 Dr. C. Rivers

Mid-30s | Male/Female | Cole/Célia

The kind coroner who works closely with Graybridge PD, and Detective Jackson’s closest confidant. Gentle, thoughtful, and surprisingly caring for someone who spends their days among the dead, Dr. Rivers can light up a room even with a quiet smile. Some wonder whether their bond with Detective Jackson is purely friendship... or something more.

Important: Rivers' gender will always be the opposite of Jackson's.

🚔 Captain Lenora Vélez

Mid-50s | Female

With an earnest attitude and the patience of a saint, Captain Vélez runs the 11th Precinct with a steady hand and a commanding presence. She may look stern, but her thoughtful approach towards her officers reveals genuine care.

🥼 Dr. Marla Wess

Mid-40s | Female

Analytical, sharp and understanding, Dr. Wess is the precinct's assigned psychologist, tasked with assessing every officer and staff member at GPD. Knows more about you than you think she does.

You might meet and flirt with other characters, such as:

Thorin Andersen, Zain Rafiq, Iris Blake Gallagher, Adam Collins, and Wyatt Fernsby.

In this game, you will:

Choose your gender, sexuality, and appearance.

Customize your past: choose your former division, the reason for your transfer, and how it shaped your reputation and skills.

Build your personality with meaningful dialogue choices.

Investigate crime scenes: solve a mysterious killing spree that's been hunting the department - and now you.

Romance your partner, your neighbor, the flirty journalist who's way too nosy, or one of your cop colleagues (with two gender-selectable choices)!

Access confidential personnel files to glimpse the minds and motives of those around you.

Have a sibling: choose their gender and how close you are after the tragedy that has shaped your past.

Keep your own secrets - what brought you here, and what you're running from.

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Hanzawa wakes up with nothing but the memory of music. That, and lights. The pattern-matching part of his brain rouses, and concludes, karaoke, which he does then remember.

But he doesn’t remember how he got home. He’s still in his clothes from last night, which are now sleep-rumpled, but otherwise intact. The headache throbbing at his temples and the queasy feeling in his stomach suggests a hangover, but that would require mistakenly getting blackout drunk off of someone else’s order. And getting so spectacularly drunk that he wouldn’t remember any part of the getting drunk, not even the part where he picked up someone else’s glass, but not so spectacularly drunk that he couldn't arrive home in one mostly-together piece. What an unlikely concoction of events; he can’t believe in it. Of the many stupid things he’s done in his life, this is not one of them. In a few months, he’ll turn twenty and can make those stupid, blackout-drunk decisions all by his lonesome, but for right now, he’s safe.

He rubs the sleep out of his eyes, ineffectually tries to straighten out his clothes, and pokes his head out of the bedroom. Alcohol or not, the inside of his mouth feels disgusting. He’d like to freshen up before anyone finds him.

The world is not on his side, because his older brother just has exited the bathroom, and notices him immediately.

Hanzawa suppresses a groan, and tries to finger-comb his hair down into something less embarrassing as Masaomi lopes over.

His brother is sporting a huge grin. This bodes terribly. “Wild night last night?”

Humorless, Hanzawa squints back at him. “How’d I get home?”

“You don't remember?” Masaomi asks. “Your girlfriend dropped you off.”

“Girlfriend…?” It’s not that Hanzawa doesn’t remember Tashiro—he’s not the type of person you just forget, even when all-nighter karaoke sessions tend to blur into each other as a matter of principle—but he hadn’t been crossdressing last night. Not during the parts Hanzawa remembers, at least.

Masaomi furrows his brows. “Yeah, Tashiro-chan,” he says, slowly. “You must be really out of it, Maa-kun.”

Lying so bald-facedly to his family should weigh on him more than it does, but the way Tashiro-chan sounds, so nice and believable, softens the sting of it. Opting for calculated vulnerability, Hanzawa admits, “…I guess I’m more tired than I thought.”

“That’s what Tashiro-chan said,” Masaomi notes. “She says you don’t rest enough.” By the look of it, he agrees. “Have classes been… hard, lately?”

He shrugs, noncommittal. Not more so than usual, he thinks. Academics are the easy part—everything else is what’s hard to handle.

It at least settles sleep-deprivation as the reason for his spotty memory. “…She’s probably right. I’ll have to thank her.”

It doesn’t settle why Masaomi seems to still think he has a girlfriend. Does Tashiro just carry around a change of girls’ clothes with him? And last night, he’d the wherewithal to swap into them, dodge any questioning from their friends, and what, drag Hanzawa back home? What a convoluted turn of events; it’s hard to believe.

Maybe Masaomi just has a particularly favorable girl-vision of Tashiro. That, Hanzawa can believe—it would be a shared vision.

“You should. She carried you all the way here—barely broke a sweat, though! I was impressed.”

Maybe Masaomi has an extremely favorable girl-vision of Tashiro. “She does sports,” Hanzawa says. He searches his memory for the sensation of being on someone’s back, of feeling their warmth, and comes up distressingly empty.

“What kind?” Masaomi asks.

“Ping pong,” Hanzawa says, and Masaomi’s eyes light up with a knowing glint. “And track and field. And karate. A little bit of everything, in middle school.”

“But mostly ping pong?”

He can’t read his gaze. “Mostly ping pong.”

“You ever played against each other?”

Hanzawa laughs. “I win every time.”

Masaomi looks surprised. “You should let her win at least once,” he says. “You’re a sore winner—doesn’t she get mad at you?”

“She gets annoyed, but she’s never really mad. She would be, if I went easy on her.”

“Oh, so you’re both competitive, then,” Masaomi says, which isn’t exactly the truth, but Hanzawa doesn’t know how to explain that Tashiro is the sorest and bestest of losers, and that when he gets frustrated it’s the kind that makes you simultaneously want to cheer for him and tease him, and that when he plays ping pong, the emotions on his face are always so open and easy to read. He has the words for it, because it’s easy to talk about Tashiro, but he can’t so easily tell the truth.

“Yeah,” he lies. He wants to head into the bathroom, wash the grime off his face, and finally strip out of his old clothes, but Masaomi keeps nodding to himself like he wants to say something. So Hanzawa waits, hackles raised.

It’s impossible, after all. These days, Tashiro is taller than him, and even when he was shorter, he’d never been mistaken for a girl. In a picture it doesn’t read so badly, and these days you can edit those as you like, but in person, the illusion thins. Even if Hanzawa had always believed in it, the image forever at the edges of his vision, that can’t be the case for everybody.

“…So that’s your type, huh?”

“…What?”

Masaomi grins and makes an ambiguous gesture. “You know, the type of girl who could take you in a fight. A really strong woman!”

The glower on his face must be formidable, because Masaomi instantly raises his hands up in surrender. It’s not even undercut by the heat that swarms Hanzawa’s face at—at whatever implication that is.

“Alright, alright, Maa-kun,” Masaomi says. “Dropping the subject. Won't say another word.”

“Good,” Hanzawa says, vehemently.

Masaomi’s expression softens into sincerity. “Really,” he says, “she seems… good for you. I’m happy.”

Still flushed, Hanzawa manages a stiff nod, and shuffles off to the bathroom instead of the mortal coil. The hard, white lights and the mirror highlight his imperfections—the bags under his eyes, the pallor of his skin, the crust in his eyes he hadn’t rubbed out, the wrinkles in his clothes he hadn’t smoothed.

Tashiro is good to him. He’s probably good for him, too. He’s more good for him than Hanzawa is for himself, considering the last couple months of his life could be counted as his strangest form of self-sabotage yet. But even as he looks at the miserable state of his reflection, he can’t find it in himself to regret it.

What he misses is Gon-chan—who brought him home, and carried him, and talked to Masaomi, all with Hanzawa unseeing and unfeeling. She must have been something entirely beautiful—a stark contrast to who he’s taking stock of, now. He sighs, and pushes his hair—limp and unkempt—up so he can wash his face.

There’s a lipstick mark on his forehead. Not just any color—a green lipstick mark, stark against the pink his face goes when he first sees it.

Here’s what Hanzawa knows: before they’d started dating, he’d pressed a green eyeshadow palette into Tashiro’s palm. At the time, it hadn’t meant anything—he’d just thought that Tashiro’s favorite shade of spring green was just surprisingly hard to find. So it hadn’t meant anything when, months later, he’d come across a matching lipstick and bought Tashiro another gift.

Here’s what Hanzawa doesn't know: that she'd carried it. That Tashiro had kept that lipstick stashed on her person, and hell, maybe her eyeshadow as well, even though the colors were too crazy to pass as a normal girl. But in the dark, with nothing else but her wit and daring, she’d put it on, the color too bright to question, and taken him home. And almost like she knew he’d miss her, she’d left him a little stamp of her influence, like a blessing to tide him over. Like Cinderella—Gon-chan could make one magical transformation, but she couldn’t stay the night.

What a coincidental series of events; Hanzawa believes in every piece of it.