Ultimately, it becomes a rewarding journey of redemption. As they grow, they re-adjust their expectations of themselves and of their relationships. Lola, Milo, Satan and other characters are forced to face their limitations and their (ahem) demons. Despite its shortcomings, Afterparty’s faults are balanced by a genuinely good story. During the game, I occasionally find myself unsure who is actually speaking.Įven so, this is a game worth playing. Indeed, much of the game’s voice-acting is wonderful, but sometimes fails to fully connect with comparatively primitive on-screen visuals. He’s also brilliantly voice-acted with a deep, self-loathing baritone that evokes Orson Welles. It’s instructive that the funniest NPC is Satan, who is rendered with a distinctive visual frame and is much larger than all other characters. They fail to stand-out against a gaudy backdrop of flames, lava and neon-sleaze.
Many of the characters are rendered as walking jack-o-lanterns, lacking distinctive features. It doesn’t help that, as a modestly-funded indie game, Afterparty’s visuals are basic, and so lack the (expensive) human element of facial expression. Afterparty’s punchlines sometimes come with odd pauses, ruining the joke, because I haven’t quite maneuvered a character into the right place. Famously, timing is everything when it comes to humor.
#AFTERPARTY REVIEW FULL#
Unlike linear media such as television and film, games are notoriously unsuited to comedy, and the limitations of the form are on full display here. The bad news it that it only sometimes gets there.
#AFTERPARTY REVIEW TV#
This is a game that wants to sound like an adult TV cartoon or a sophisticated sitcom, and the good news is that it sometimes gets there. Cultural references and absurd archetypes of modern society abound.
Sometimes, characters get into funny to-and-fro arguments which degenerate into single-word exchanges that cleverly reveal touching relationship dynamics. “It was like I’d been caught hiding Nazis in the basement,” he says. I loved this line from one of the Devil’s closest associates: “Yeah, Satan watched The 30 Years War like it was the freakin’ Super Bowl.” Another time, Milo recalls losing the family’s TV remote. After a while, Lola and Milo’s sarcasm becomes tiresome. While much of the dialog is recognizably comedic, it often feels like a background snark of mean remarks and put-downs that reduces to verbal noise. Sure, the writing is snappy, but the actual delivery of laughs is sporadic. Unfortunately, they are also often not funny. So are the side characters, who are wise-crackin’ demons. This is an ambitious and laudable attempt to square the circle of merging video games with sophisticated, scripted humor. Yes, this has been a good year for funny games, with the releases of Untitled Goose Game and Chuchel, but while those games rely on visual slapstick for laughs, Afterparty’s humor is almost entirely centered on the dialog. So Afterparty features a lot more chat than Oxenfree, but it also takes on the gargantuan task of being funny. One game is a version of beer-pong, in which I aim the ball into the cup like Angry Birds. Mostly they amount to simple, physical puzzles vaguely associated with drinking. The mini-games barely register, and hardly affect the story at all. In Afterparty, dialog is the dominant mechanic. Oxenfree’s range of mini-game puzzles are as much a part of its experience as its dialog. The fun here is in subverting social situations, and prodding characters to see how they react.Īfterparty takes the bold and risky route of placing speech at the center of its experience. Despite divergent dialog moments, the story rarely wanders far from its central thread. These interactions trigger NPC responses that range from friendly, to malleable, to scathing. Verbal exchanges are often choices between being formally polite, evasively circumspect, a bit rude, or provocatively rude. A certain drink might give me flirtatious options, or turn me into a vaudeville jokester. I can also influence the choices I’m offered by drinking powerful cocktails. Like Oxenfree, Afterparty leans heavily into speech-bubble gameplay, in which I choose from two, or three, potential verbal responses to any given situation.
Dialog choices happen in real-time, generally illustrated by dynamic speech bubbles that offer various choices.
Oxenfree is a game about teenagers who explore a mysterious island. Afterparty was made by developer Night School Studio, which is best known for Oxenfree, a 2016 game that significantly advanced dialog as a gaming mechanic.
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