Afterparty
PC, PS4, Xbox One
The constant flippancy means the stabs at sincerity don’t land and would-be moral choices feel meaningless
Developer/publisher
Night School Studio
Format PC (tested), PS4, Xbox One
Release Out now
As Sartre once noted, hell is other people – especially at a party where you’re the only sober one. Afterparty’s setup is a peach: two highschool graduates unexpectedly find themselves in the underworld and have to outdrink Satan to earn their ticket back to the land of the living. But in practice, it’s like being dragged against your will into a conversation with a loquacious lush. If Night School’s goal was to prove that being drunk can be intensely irritating to others – the game’s stance on booze culture predictably boils down to ‘everything in moderation’ – then job done. If nothing else, you’ll have newfound sympathy for designated drivers, because here you’re effectively put in that role, and it really isn’t much fun.
Like a brief moment of lucidity from a garrulous barfly, there are occasions where it suddenly all makes sense. Oxenfree’s dialogue system, making a welcome return here, is lent an extra frisson by alcohol, which flows freely in these purgatorial dives. You’re offered a wide selection of tipples during your extended pub crawl, and many have different effects: one might make you flirty, another will have you making terrible jokes or talking like a pirate, a third will simply provide you with Dutch courage. And so you press the right bumper or trigger to take a swig and, inhibitions loosened, you’ll have an extra dialogue option – albeit rarely to any great consequence. The lines can be funny, but to deliver them you have to put up with a bog-standard ‘drunk’ effect, as the screen blurs and sways, fuzzing up the outlines and the text. There’s an in-fiction excuse for the immediacy of its influence – Hell’s booze is more potent than your Earth drinks – but the effect is mildly annoying. You find yourself weighing up whether it’s worth an amusing but ineffectual interjection for the sake of making everything look worse.
Not that the place is much to look at. Again, you’re exploring a three-dimensional world on a 2D plane, and while it’s busier, the environments are no substitute for Oxenfree’s watercolour backdrops; the characters, too, don’t stand up well to the scrutiny of Afterparty’s closer camera. There are some winning details – the ‘elevators’ that take you past the queues leading up to Satan’s party are cages carried by flying demons – but with flat lighting and weak sound design it’s desperately lacking in atmosphere. It doesn’t help that characters regularly clip through one another, while you’ll end up chatting to NPCs who are off screen if you’ve not walked over to the right spot. Three times we reach an exit before a conversation finishes and the button prompt to leave vanishes, convincing us we’ve gone the wrong way. These might seem like minor problems, but then for long periods walking and talking is all Afterparty has.
Most of that comes from our two heroes, Milo and Lola, played by Khoi Dao and Janina Gavankar, the latter’s performance perhaps the game’s biggest asset.
Afterparty spends plenty of time discussing their differences (he’s nerdy and shy, she’s more worldly and cynical) yet much of their dialogue is interchangeable. Still, if they aren’t really familiar with the notion of a comfortable silence, they both have a nice line in companionable snark, the kind you can only get away with when you’re truly close to someone. The rest, including old Luke himself, aren’t afforded nearly so much screen time, nor character development. Perhaps the largest role among the supporting cast belongs to Ashly Burch as Sam, your taxi driver between the islands of this underworld archipelago – and whose cab chatter sounds much like Chloe Price if she did her dissertation on the history of Hell. These exchanges rarely add anything enlightening or thematically relevant, beyond proving the writers did their research.
Sam isn’t the only one with a little too much to say. Afterparty never knowingly uses five words when a couple of hundred will do; the underworld, it seems, is in dire need of editors. And while plenty of jokes land, the constant flippancy means the stabs at sincerity don’t land and would-be moral choices feel meaningless. Despite all those words, not enough of them are used to properly contextualise your choices, which tend to involve damning someone to a terrible fate so you can get closer to getting out. It’s an easy choice – whatever gets you through, basically – and it’s unclear whether there’s an alternative once you’ve committed to a course of action. Either way, Afterparty simply doesn’t give us enough of a reason to care.
Yet it does its best to make us feel bad about it anyway – largely thanks to Wormhorn, a manifestation of the pair’s personal demons whose sole purpose is to play on their doubts. Every so often, you’ll be spirited away for a performance review, in which she’ll lecture you about your bad choices. Credit must go to Erin Yvette for making a deliberately annoying character so thoroughly infuriating. You’re usually afforded the gratification of a two-word response, but each time she returns we sigh in exasperation. We’re in Hell, we know, but this is surely the most irritating way a game has let us know our choices are having an effect.
If the journey is rambling, the destination comes close to making it all worthwhile. A subplot that’s been bubbling under comes to the boil, prompting some soul-searching. Yet even as Afterparty explores the role proximity and circumstance play in friendships, and how personal insecurities can widen any cracks in that bond, we remember Night In The Woods doing much the same, but far more succinctly. It ends on a high, with a fantastic closing zinger that’s almost worth an extra mark on its own. As for a return trip to Hell to see how alternative choices might have played out? It would have to freeze over first.