After Us

My first hour with After Us convinced me this game knows exactly what it wants to say, and it says it loud, through crumbling highways, frozen human statues mid-embrace, and oil-black creatures called Devourers hunting the last sparks of life on Earth. You play as Gaia, a nymph-like Spirit of Life, and your mission across eight distinct environments is to track down the souls of eight extinct animals and return them to Mother's Ark. There are no dialogue trees, no quest logs, no cutscene exposition dumps. The story is told entirely through what you see and where you run, in the same wordless tradition as Journey or Flower. That approach lands far more often than it misses. The core move set builds sensibly as you go, jumping, dashing, gliding, and wall-running unlock gradually rather than all at once, and each major area introduces one new traversal wrinkle to keep things from going fully autopilot. One environment has you sprinting between covered shelters to dodge acidic rain. Another has you teleporting through a graveyard of abandoned televisions tuned to the same static channel. The environmental puzzle design is light but clever, and the level art is genuinely striking: a mix of monochrome decay punctuated by bursts of color whenever Gaia cleanses a patch of corruption. Combat exists in the form of tossing Gaia's glowing heart at oil-soaked Devourers, but most reviewers and players land in the same place on it, it feels tacked on, offers no lock-on or lateral movement, and the best strategy is usually just to sprint past and ignore it. Treat the Devourers as a nuisance to outrun rather than a system to master and you'll enjoy the game far more. Where After Us runs into trouble is the same place it's always running: the platforming itself. The jumps are floaty, depth perception in cramped spaces is genuinely unreliable, and the camera has opinions about angles that don't always match yours. Deaths tend to come from slipping off ledges rather than from any real challenge, which shifts the frustration from satisfying-difficult to irritating-fiddly. It's also worth flagging that the PC version requires a controller, there is no mouse and keyboard support. On the positive side, playtime lands around 8 to 10 hours for a straight run, up to 20 if you chase every collectible memory fragment scattered across the stages, which is an honest length for what the game is. For players who lean into games as atmosphere and emotional experience first, After Us punches well above its budget. The art direction and the ambient, synth-driven score by Daniel Elms build a world that is bleak without being oppressive, and genuinely haunting in its best moments. Steam players rate it Very Positive at 85%, which tracks, this is a game that rewards the right audience. If you bounced off Journey because it was too short and too hands-off, After Us gives you more to actually do. If you need tight, precise platforming at the center of your adventure games, the slippery controls will grind you down before the credits roll.

Alex · Scout Team

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