AlienAfterlife

If you liked the quiet, poke-around-and-listen rhythm of Everybody's Gone to the Rapture, AlienAfterlife is that shape with the solemnity stripped out and replaced with lo-fi sci-fi comedy. Jeremy Couillard built a first-person afterlife that looks like someone melted a 90s CD-ROM and a black-light poster together, and you wander through it while strange characters explain the bureaucracy of being dead. There is no combat, no fail state, no inventory. You walk, you look, you listen, and occasionally the world does something so unhinged you stop to check you saw it right. Controller support is full, which matters more than usual in a game where your only verbs are movement and curiosity. What it does exceptionally well is texture. The writing is genuinely funny in a deadpan, gallery-installation way, and the art direction commits so hard that even the ugly parts feel deliberate. What it doesn't do is give you much to hold onto. It is over in a sitting, the pacing sags whenever a monologue runs long, and if surreal art games strike you as pretentious rather than playful, nothing here will change your mind. Go in wanting a strange short story you can walk through, not a game with systems.

Alex · Scout Team

Catch-all

Be the first to comment on AlienAfterlife.