#afterplace

1. Id (Afterplace).

2. Spamton (the city is known as an urban forest, so it counts) (Deltarune).

3. Snatcher (A Hat in Time).

4. King Rhoam (Breath of the Wild, he was actually the first one, cause I played BOTW back in 2021).

Indie game rec alert! Afterplace is an adventure game for phones that’s all about discovering a big beautiful world, discovering secrets, and unraveling a very intriguing and cool plot!!!

Every single thing you do feels like you’re discovering a secret. It feels kind of like an old game in that way. There were many times where it felt like, how is it possible that doing this was necessary to advance the plot? It felt like I had discovered an optional secret

Clover: I was hiding in the bathroom stall, so I didn’t see their face. But I heard them, they were singing along to the music in the bar.

Id: Do you remember what they were singing?

Clover: I think it was the song “I want it that way”?

Id: Backstreet boys, I’m familiar.

Id: Number one, can you please sing the opening of “I want it that way”?

Hooded guy: Really? Okay. You are, my fire.

Id: Number two, keep it going.

Gorgax: The one, desire.

Id: Number three.

(Small computer that was hooked up in the small cave): Believe, when I say.

Id: Number four!

Masked Guy: I want it that way.

Id: Tell my why!

All four: Ain’t nothing but a heartache.

Id: Tell me why!

All four: Ain’t nothing but a mistake!

Id: Now number five~.

Yu: I never wanna hear you say!

Id: Whoo!

All five: I want it that way!

Id: Ah, chills, literal chills.

Clover: It was number five. Number five killed my sister.

Id: Oh! Yeah, I forgot about that.

I kept up my streak from June of trying more than 20 different games, though that wasn’t a number I was consciously aiming for nor a rate that I really feel is sustainable. It’s a natural consequence of my increasing prioritization of niche experiences that are usually shorter in length or I’m quicker to bounce off of, but I’m also sure that sooner or later I’ll find a 40 hour monolith to eat up most of my bandwidth. Expedition 33 will probably do that once I get around to it.

Satisfactory – I tried this back in May but only really got it working/had time to devote to it starting in June. The game’s still good. The graphical fidelity, breadth of scope with exploration and automation, and map scale is second-to-none within its niche. Factorio never clicked for me but Satisfactory always has, though I’m definitely starting to feel the strain as the combat is overtuned and too much of the game is pulled between providing challenges through resource constraints and architecture (though sky platforms really lessen that burden) vs. challenge through sheer number of enemies and environmental DoTs. The other wrinkle is the pocket dimension where items can be uploaded to the cloud, and although there’s serious logistical hurdles and caps you’re still able to pretty trivially keep yourself fully supplied on the things that matter regardless of location which is riding the razor’s edge between Quality of Life and Missing the Point. Satisfactory wouldn’t be compelling with a Creative mode, and the easier it gets to operate at scale with blueprints and resource doubling and downloading virtual concrete the easier it is to peel behind the curtain and see that this is cookie clicker with extra steps.

Ex Vitro – When it comes to metroidvanias, it’s usually palpable if the devs started to make a metroidvania because they liked SotN/AoS, because they liked Super Metroid, or, within the past decade, because they liked Hollow Knight. This is a game whose influence starts and ends with Super Metroid, and never really attempts to do or be anything more than that. However, it feels like a shallow imitation and more of a character study or a student sketching a copy of a painting. The lines are rougher, there’s odd decisions throughout, but it has the earnestness of an amateur play rather than the tired profiteering of a rehashed bootleg.

Sheepo – Kyle Thompson has made essentially the same game three times, and this is the first one. I broadly prefer Islets the most, but all three are charming. It’s a little rough, the platforming is messy despite its simplicity and some of the areas are a real hassle to get to if you’re a completionist, but there’s a real charm to the worldbuilding and dialogue that’s hard not to appreciate. Any time you go into an artist’s older works it’s easy to only see the weaknesses they’ve improved later, but you can also see the throughlines of their strengths. I do wish the transformation gimmick had a bit more oomph like in Biomorph or Shantae but I get keeping it simple.

Jivana – The more student projects I play the more fascinated I get in the way various teams design their games in various orders; levels, graphics, character design, animation, etc. This game is short and half its length is fully voice-acted cutscenes with varying levels of animation, but the main character is Katara with the serial number filed off and there’s only two levels. Some games need an editor but many more need a project manager who says ‘hey before you do that for a week we need to plan what we’re going to do in total’.

Afterplace – It’s rare, with the number of games I play, for one to grab me by the collar and throttle me. Indeed, nothing in Afterplace is something I hadn’t seen before; mechanically it’s a simple dialogue heavy isometric adventure game, the map has some neat non-euclidian twists but isn’t more complex than Hyper Light Drifter or Fountains, the characters and writing are above average but fairly by-the-book. I was only drawn to it in my library after getting a dozen games in the summer sale because I was going in alphabetical order. Despite that, this game enraptured me. Even in retrospect I can’t really describe why, but if I were to try I’d say if playing a game by a solo dev is a chance to have a conversation with them, this was a conversation with a stranger on a train that you remember for the rest of your life. Also a sarcastic bunny girl with a floating axe the size of her body does things for me.

Creepy Castle – I did not know going into this that Creepy Castle was a relatively early kickstarter title, back in the era when getting $8k from strangers was a runaway success. I mostly bring that up because it has a veneer of the hyperspecific “I’m making an X clone please finance this” campaigns for Xbox games you’ve never heard of, except I presume this is for an Atari game I’ve never heard of. It’s mechanically stiff, gameplay is a war of attrition with health management and healing item sequencing taking priority over any other gameplay, and in that way it feels more similar to a puzzle game than a platformer. I hope whoever this was made for loved it because I bounced off it in under a half-hour.

Elephantasy – I think this was recommended to me in the same post that recommended Creepy Castle and either they have more patience than me for NES platformers or they have more patience AND more nostalgia. Movement is sluggish and progression comes not in what items are available (you start with access to almost all of them) but in how many you can carry simultaneously. This makes it all but assured you get somewhere, double back to the start to get the right items, progress a little, then realize you need an additional item and are wasting your time. It also means the decision space shrinks as you get access to more items, as soon there are fewer choices of what to leave behind than there were of what to take. I do begrudgingly respect the game recommending you increase the clock speed of the game if you felt it was slow, but playing at a speed that made movement feel brisk made the ice area and boss fight unplayable.

Copy Kitty – This is someone’s favorite game. It’s a bizarre time-attack megaman/Kirby hybrid with levels comprising of only a few rooms with destructible terrain, and most of the levels boil down to killing enemies to get their powerups to make a gun that kills everything, then you kill everything while zipping around before it ends 30 seconds later. Then you do it again. The closest I’ve come to playing something else like this was newgrounds flash games, even if most of them were like Interactive Buddy.

Gravity Castle – I bustered out of Metro Gravity because its bosses were kicking my ass, but was in the mood for some more gravity puzzles and this looked interesting. It was certainly “interesting”. Barely functional between glitches and poorly telegraphed mechanics, what puzzles existed were all the sort that took multiple steps with precise timing and often took multiple steps to reset after a failed attempt. On the plus side, steam’s ability to dynamically remap controller inputs to keyboard buttons meant that playing it was fairly straightforward even with its wack controls, even if I ultimately bailed quickly.

INAYAH – Life After Gods – I need to trust my gut more when it says that a game won’t be my speed or if it needs more development time. I’d held off on this on release because something about it didn’t pass muster, and then picked it up despite that in the summer sale. I bought it because I love big dumb gauntlets and the main character has them. The big dumb gauntlets feature heavily in the story. I finally get through the tutorial that features not one but two dead father figures and unlock my weapon – for some reason there are three choices, and the worst one is the gauntlets. You can have gauntlets that lock you in place to attack in a game where every enemy and boss is hypermobile, a large flail that swings slowly with the aforementioned speedy enemies, or a sword with quick attacks, a parry, a pogo, and several combos. This isn’t to say the sword feels good to use or is fun, it is merely bad as opposed to offensive. I didn’t give up until the game gave me a drone companion that was going to be yet more visual noise and yet more insipid dialogue, and the only real takeaway for me was the question whether being this kind of straight-up mediocre was better or worse than the frustration of missed potential.

Rabi-Ribi – For the past goddamn decade every time I looked at a list of recommended metroidvanias Rabi-Ribi was somewhere in the top 20. I finally caved. I don’t get it. I’m the first to admit that I don’t like bullet hell and Touhou doesn’t do it for me, and by 2016 standards this is a fairly good map, but it’s just so tiring to play. Your movement is slow relative to the size of the levels, every character has the same look and personality so telling them apart is impossible, town eventually fills up with them and you can’t tell who is selling you a temporary buff, who has a sidequest, and who is going to teleport you to a boss fight. Maybe it’s more compelling at higher difficulties where spamming lasers to build combo and then hammering the shit out of enemies doesn’t get the job done, but I also had zero interest in trying to actually dodge most of the bullshit bosses were putting out. I did beat the game, which is more than I can say for a lot of these.

Everdeep Aurora – I wanted to love this game. It’s aesthetically beautiful, the character is cute and has a big drill, and I felt like Steamworld Dig 2 left meat on the bone in the minetroidvania space; dig out tunnels being careful to mind your traversal, and as your traversal improves you can mine more aggressively. This has hints of that, but unfortunately it makes some damning mistakes. Instead of being smart about its level design to prevent softlocks, there’s a button to summon an NPC to rescue you. Your drill takes fuel, but it’s so abundant as to be effectively infinite and not inform play. Drilling through the map to create your own tunnels should help you forge a sense of place, except every time you visit a save station the terrain resets. Sidequests in theory advance your interactions with NPCs and give the world texture, but saving the game also advances the in-game date and reaching various unmarked depths will progress story flags and lock you out of sidequests. I constantly felt punished for attempting to care about the game and explore, whereas if I’d just beelined straight down and ignored all the systems I likely would’ve beaten it in 3-4 hours. The frustration is bittersweet.

Museum of Mechanics: Lockpicking – This is by the same devs as Where the Water Tastes Like Wine, a game that I wish was the sort I liked to play because it looks interesting but if I was going to do that I’d need to play Citizen Sleeper 1 and 2, Kentucky Route Zero, and Disco Elysium first. I don’t think of myself as a mechanics-first lunkhead who doesn’t care about story but one could be forgiven or thinking otherwise. This, meanwhile, is purely mechanics, as it is a curated reproduction of the lockpicking minigames from several dozen video games. As an act of study and preservation it’s genuinely fascinating and I hope it’s something that has sequels because this sort of historiography is gravely lacking within the entire archetype of interactive entertainment. What a shame that the reproductions themselves are clumsy and full of glitches, and the placards are full of editorializing and far from neutral descriptions. 10/10 concept, 5/10 execution. That still averages out to 7.5/10 and Cs get degrees.

The Vagrant – I’m still trying to find the ur-game for … Sorry, I had to look up that prefix and apparently I just internalized that 15 years ago back when I spent entirely too much time on TVTropes. That explains a lot. Does Tumblr support footnotes? I’m going to make a blog site just to abuse footnotes like a fucking Bartimaeus book. Regardless. The progenitor for this style of Chinese hack-and-slash metroidvania-ish thing. Vigil, Afterimage, Awaken, and dozens more are all in this same mold of very specifically strange animation and level design. (Additional aside, I should probably play Dragon’s Crown at some point, I’ve got a hacked PS3 and everything). Part of the reason I’m so distractable here is the game’s got nothing going on. Combat’s fine if underwhelming, areas are fine if underwhelming, I eventually just straight up got bored and realized there was nothing mechanically or thematically to look forward to so I bailed.

Insect Adventure – This is the sort of game that vindicates me when I try playing things with 20 reviews that I find god knows where. It plays like a YouTubePoop of a normal metroidvania; your speed is delusionally fast, combat is mashy with constant sound effects, enemies go flying on death, and everything has a frantic weight that is infectious. Your combo count is also a damage multiplier, so one I got the ability to throw out multiple boomerangs damn near everything melted. There’s some pockets of frustration with the nastier speedbooster sections and I’m sure a few rooms were gear checks that I failed to understand, but overall this was an incredibly unique gameplay experience with enough going for it to muscle through the flaws.

The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds – A Link to the Past is one of my favorite games of all time, if not my favorite period. For better or worse, the Zelda series has not had a meaningful improvement on it in 30 years other than briefly including Midna. A Link Between Worlds was their attempt to re-enter the 2D sphere after Phantom Hourglass and Spirit Tracks were both divisive due to their odd controls and generally low quality, and as such it is nostalgia pandering of the highest degree. It’s damn near 1:1 with ALttP’s map, everything is a motif to the secrets and structure of the original, and it’s left with precious little space of its own even with its wall merging gimmick. What really damns ALBW is its baffling choice to provide all the items to the player as rentals which are returned on death, and then making them available for purchase (This prevents them from being reclaimed on death and allows them to be upgraded, though the collectable to upgrade them only appears when you go to a specific cave, bomb it open, and start a sidequest. If you miss that cave then get bent.) When every item is available, the progression curve goes out the window. When the game doesn’t know what item or items the player has even after completing a dungeon centered on that item, it mangles the progression further because you can’t have a lone bombable wall or a one-off hookshot target, every area is either laden with literal signposts of what item you need or is otherwise doable with the sword alone. The joy of a Zelda dungeon is the layers of discovery leading down to the dungeon item, and the ways it recontextualizes all the previous areas and puzzles on your way through the rest of the dungeon. This skips the first half and as a result has the potential to be more intricate and complex but rarely lives up to that expectation, especially because the tools can never be layered on each other even in this game’s equivalent of Ganon’s Tower. In a world where Echoes of Wisdom showed how to use this map, expand on it, and meaningfully alter how its encountered, ALBW is left feeling rather rote.

Hexcells – Polimines 2 is one of the best puzzle games I’ve played and after I finally got to the end of Proverbs I wanted more shapes to click on. This one is very clearly where Polimines got most of its ideas but I think the hex grid leads to some really hard to read diagonals and the game’s UI is rough in general. Polimines 1 was also just an extended tutorial for 2 so I expect similar progression here.

Dust: An Elysian Tail – I bought this game back in July 2013, back when being on Steam was enough to get an indie game attention and every one of them felt like part of a club. I came back to it a decade later to see if it held up or if I was just holding a torch for Fidget. I’m shocked at the degree to which the game still feels incredible. The combat and platforming are smooth even if the tornado ability is hard to control. The writing and voice acting are a bit corny but charmingly earnest. The map has some rough aspects but is still very well-structured with good use of vertical space. The crafting system is a bit tacked on with numbers on gear that get silly, but the game also isn’t intending to be very difficult. More than anything else what stands out to me is the degree to which this is clearly a metroidvania made before Hollow Knight and whose lineage heavily takes from JRPGs like Ys. I feel like there’s space for more elaborate sidequests and stories in the metroidvania sphere in the same way as Phoenotopia tried, to the point that I feel like there’s almost assuredly some subgenre I just have managed to miss entirely.

Hexcells Plus – As expected, the kid gloves are coming off. I’m having a good time with these but still feel like Polimines had a bit more oomph and a bit more QoL polish. Good games to zone out to a podcast to all the same.

Donkey Kong Bananza – I hadn’t really intended to get a Switch 2 with any particular urgency. To me it’s a $700 tax for playing Pokemon ZAZA with a playable framerate, and I’m only playing Pokemon so I can fuck around in Le Gai Paris with my gay Lucario. That being said, when I got the email saying my purchase slot I’d applied for months prior was up, I figured I may as well. Odyssey was the first Switch game I got and Bananza is Odyssey 2 in all but name. I don’t have any particular affinity for Donkey Kong outside of Donkey Konga and Jungle Beat, so when the nostalgic motifs play my first thought is usually Super Smash Bros rather than DKC or the like, but that makes it all the stranger when so much of this game feels more aligned with Splatoon in its musical stings and graphical presentation. The first level also has the same composition, terrain colors, and skydiving presentation as the sky islands in Tears of the Kingdom. It’s not going for a full ensemble series representation so I can’t tell if it’s a strange coincidence or what exactly is causing this. The game itself is pretty fun but it’s a little too easy to just burrow through terrain and beeline from objective to objective while skipping the puzzles. I imagine that’ll get less prominent as time goes on, but I have no complaints overall. I need to replay Ape Out.

Descenders Next – I liked the first Descenders well enough conceptually, though that concept started and ended with “it’s a roguebike – you bike down randomly generated hills and there’s permadeath” and even then I only played for about a half-hour. This one has a less fun portmanteau and a less fun set of mechanics, but it’s hard to say how much of that is me not knowing the genre conventions for controls in a snowboarding/skateboarding game and how much is this game going through a rough early access. Whatever it may be, they clearly prioritized the always-online elements and rendering other players who are on the same slope as you before things such as ‘clearly telegraphing the player’s height when falling rapidly towards a white slope with no depth perception’ and ‘making sure the player doesn’t get sent to the moon by physics when trying to grind poorly’.