If you’ve read any of my reviews, you know I have a major criticism of the Metroidvania genre. While games in this genre, especially indie games, often have beautiful settings and unique stories to tell, they fail to innovate on the genre’s aging gameplay. It almost feels like many of these games just want to tell you a story, and tack on the gameplay afterward to use a game as their method of telling their stories.
So how does Afterimage, a new and self-proclaimed Metroidvania title from studio Aurogan Shangai, hold up to this phenomenon?
Afterimage follows the story of a fantasy world recovering from a great catastrophe, one that returned great beasts and titans to the world, devastated the environment, and perhaps most important upset the natural order of death. Countless souls are unable to return to the stream where they belong, becoming lost in the land of the living and not knowing peace.
You play as Renee, a spiritual warrior tasked with freeing these trapped spirits and returning them to the afterlife. On a routine mission, Renee encounters a dangerous beat, far too close to her village for comfort. After losing her life in the battle, Renee discovers she has a special gift; The ability to subvert the natural cycle of death and be reincarnated. With knowledge of this ability, Renee seeks out to discover more about herself and the world around her while attending to her duty to lost spirits.
At least, that is what I believe is going on. Afterimage uses a type of storytelling that I’m not a big fan of, which just throws the player into a fantasy world completely different to ours with little to no similarities to latch onto. The game employs a massive glossary of terms that you will more or less learn through context clues, which can make the world and dialogue between characters feel alien.
At worst is when this glossary has something to do with gameplay mechanics, which can make the game a little more confusing to navigate. Thankfully, you will retain many of these mechanics without having to memorize the meanings of many of these new words.
Gameplay in Afterimage is pretty straightforward and honestly is as cookie-cutter as you can get with the Metroidvania genre. Each level is a platformer that you must run and jump to navigate through. You have an attack button and a back-dodge button that assist in defeating enemies, which have telegraphed attacks.
Defeating an enemy is as simple as learning their attack pattern, dodging their attack, and then spamming the attack button until they are dead. A cool feature that I had some trouble pulling off at first is the ability to use the attack button after jumping to force Renee to hover on the stop, giving you significantly more air time.
Simple, tried-and-true gameplay that isn’t going to surprise anyone. Afterimage is yet another example of a Metroidvania title without the inspiration to change or evolve on the genre’s aging gameplay. For fans of the genre, this is probably not a problem, but I just don’t understand how it isn’t getting old for people.
The game also features a talent tree, allowing you to customize how Renee takes on the world around her. Unfortunately, I would say this is one of the most uninspired parts of the game, as every single talent is pretty much just a flat percentage increase to one stat or another. You have one branch for health, one for damage, etc, etc.. Thankfully, if nothing else assigning talent points allows you to interact with the game’s beautiful HUD.
As I described earlier, what I call the “Metroidvania Problem” is the phenomenon of platforming games to recycle aging, uninspirational mechanics to create games with unique settings and beautiful graphics. It goes without saying that half of that so-called problem isn’t actually a problem at all, and Afterimage definitely lives up to this idea.
The game is gorgeous. There is not a single person who is going to play this game, see its beautiful hand-drawn environments and think what they’re looking at is mediocre or boring in the slightest. The worlds you explore in Afterimage are vibrant and alive, and even the enemies you have to slay along the way are colorful and pleasant to look at.
The HUD is super animated and has a nice, cool black and blue color scheme that feels like a nice, contrasting escape from the Afterimage overworld. Navigating the menu to check equipment or level up talents is a pleasant experience that can serve as a relaxing little break before a big boss fight or further exploring.
The game also does a good job of blending its platforming puzzles in with the environment in a way that makes them feel like natural set pieces in the greater world of Afterimage. These puzzles, in addition to being believable-able, are also pretty competent and will test your platforming ability without being too frustrating.
The worst I had from this experience was one segment where an enemy was camping along a ledge I needed to get through, but this felt like an intentional challenge on the game’s part.
To cap the discussion of the game’s great looks, I want to say the animations and overall character design of Renee is great, and I never found myself getting tired of seeing the sword-swinging animation, which was bright and fun and made my attacks feel like they mattered.
With so much in Afterimage that clearly works, it’s all the more frustrating that the game plays so generic to other titles in the genre. The developers poured so much obvious passion into the title, it’s hard to believe they didn’t have the desire to innovate on the generic Metroidvania gameplay. Is it that they were unable to, or are they just such huge fans of the genre that they didn’t care to change anything?
In addition, the purposefully vague and un-relateable manner of the worldbuilding (something I believe was popularized by Dark Souls) doesn’t really pull off the intention of making players feel in awe; It never really does. Instead, the world feels alien and strange, and with nothing to ground me within it just felt like I didn’t belong there.
The Final Word
Afterimage excels in its presentation but suffers from a genre-wide reluctance to innovate on its gameplay. The story can feel a bit alienating but is nevertheless interesting and presents characters you’d be hard-pressed not to love.
Try Hard Guides was provided with a PC review copy of this game. Find more detailed looks at popular and upcoming titles in the Game Reviews section of our website! Afterimage is available on Steam and Nintendo Switch.
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