Main game
3.80 average rating based on 5 ratings
A nice interactive tale about grief and the way it impacts not only one “main” character but a whole community around them. It’s inevitably a bit incoherent because of it’s multiple choices structure but it’s also full of nice ideas and interesting characters. Also, it uses the rhythm game mechanics as a narrative tool in a very effective way. Overall it’s a good game and there’s a single thing it does from a visual standpoint during the epilogue that is one of my recent favourite video game moments.
This is a hard one to play, knowing that this is the final game Mohammed Fahmi worked on before he passed. It strikes me that his last two games, What Comes After (which I still very much need to play) and this deal with the subject of death, and what happens after we lose loved ones. It's also hard because Afterlove EP clearly carries connections to Fahmi's own experiences with illness and the game feels incredibly prescient given its story and Fahmi's cause of death. He was clearly writing from a place close to him, and it's incredibly sad that his death mirrors that of the fiction he created for his game. Nonetheless, anyone who enjoys slice-of-life stories should certainly give this a try, even if its subject matter is difficult.