Afterlove EPis the latest game by Mohammed Fahmi, a game designerbest known for his work on theCoffee Talkgames. While you can certainly get a whiff of theCoffee Talkformula inAfterlove EP, the latter is at once more nuanced, sobering, and relatable than the urban fantasy duology. These differences are enough to makeAfterlovea breath of fresh air for anyone who bounced offCoffee Talk, but still familiar for returning fans.
Taking place a year after the death of the protagonist’s girlfriend Cinta,Afterlove EPoffers a stark and honest look at the grieving process, made all the more poignant by the unfortunate passing of Fahmi in 2022, when the game was only partially completed. The loss of the game’s creative lead may have had a material impact on the final product, which is marred by at-times devastating bugs and a general lack of polish, weighing down an otherwise heart-rending experience. But looking past these shortcomings will reveal a painfully earnest and endlessly charming story that burrows in the mind, not to be forgotten about any time soon.
I’ve played throughAfterlove EPtwice now—logging a total of about 14 hours in just two days—so perhaps the greatest single-sentence compliment I can pay the game is that I wanted to continue living in its sketchy, vibrant world, even into the wee hours of the night. Indeed, it’s surprisingly compelling, though players lacking a tolerance for slower, less dramatic narratives and stripped-down gameplay might want to look elsewhere. But if you’re looking for something original that can pull on your heartstrings, thenAfterlove EPmight just be up your alley.
Afterlove EP: Sticky Grief
Afterlovecenters on Rama, a young manstruggling with the passing of his girlfriend, who we only get to meet properly during the game’s prologue. The details of her death are never fully expounded, but suffice it to say that it was traumatic by virtue of its suddenness—the first eerie parallel between the game’s story and Fahmi’s real-world death. But despite only seeing Cinta for a few minutes at the start of the game, she is a constant presence, both literally and figuratively: Rama hallucinates her speaking to him.
Afterlve EPis about grief, but it’s not shouting-at-the-sky, pulling-your-hair-out grief. It’s mature, complex, and messy grief that doesn’t let its victims move on, even while the world keeps moving around them. This is the conundrum Rama finds himself in at the start of the game, when he feels inspired to bring his old band together with a renewed creative vigor. This driving force—his passion for expressing his grief about Cinta—is stunted by the emotional and creative needs of his friends and bandmates, who have moved on with their lives in the wake of Cinta’s death. Rama’s trauma, manifested in his hallucinations of Cinta, stands in the way of his empathy for these bandmates, who he once considered his closest friends before he faded into a year-long depressive miasma.
It’s in these awkward and down-to-earth interactions, wherein Rama is usually in the wrong, thatAfterlove EPis at its best. Rama is effectively learning how to function again after the loss of his partner. The hallucinations of Cinta serve a starkly pragmatic purpose, but this phantasmagoric shell blocks the light of the outside world as much as it keeps psychic threats from breaking in. This complex interplay between Rama’s desire to move forward and his reluctance to let go of the past is what informsAfterlove’s intimate storytelling, which feels infinitely authentic and charming, even as the game reveals some of its cracks.
The Moment-to-Moment Afterlove EP Experience
Afterlove EPhas been marketed as a cross between a visual noveland a rhythm game, but that might send the wrong message. The truth is,Afterlove EPis almost entirely a visual novel with some dating sim mechanics sprinkled on top: the meat-and-potatoes of the experience is the player’s interactions with its NPCs, all of whom are instantly lovable and surprisingly complex.
After a second playthrough, I’m happy to share that the player’s decisions doalter the course ofAfterlove’s story. Dialog options don’t often do much to steer conversations in a particular direction, but who Rama spends his time with will certainly impact the overall narrative. These alterations take the form of pure narrative content—you’ll miss out on impactful scenes with Satria if you choose to romance Mira, for example—but they also factor into the game’s finale. This mostly takes the form of a different final scene and epilogue, but it’s still nice to see how Rama’s future may be molded by your in-game choices, even if most of the actual differences feel isolated from the core of the narrative.
The rhythm game slice of theAfterlove EPpie is unfortunately understated, to say the least. These gameplay sections, which usually take the form of band practices or live performances, are few and far between, and you’ll usually go several in-game days before running into one. When you do get to engage with these minigames, they hardly pose any mechanical challenge. They are all straightforward, and even players with little to no experience with the rhythm genre will cruise through them with ease. There’s a persistent lack of variety and surprise in these gameplay sections, and they can sometimes feel like an afterthought. But if you view these passages more as punctuations for emotional story beats, then their minimalist design is a bit more forgivable.
It helps that the music, courtesy of Indonesian rock band L’Alphaalpha, is genuinely fantastic, making it easy to melt into the deep emotion of the broader narrative. But at the end of the day, the rhythm minigames are little more than extended quicktime eventsset against a banger soundtrack. They’re nice if taken at face value, but they aren’t mechanically interesting. My interpretation of them as glorified cutscenes was confirmed when I tried to intentionally fail a few of them and found you can’t. Even if you miss every single note, the performance will go on, and characters in the subsequent scenes usually don’t comment on your fumbles.
Bugs Plague Afterlove EP
The fact that Cinta is the only human voice you hear—outside the rhythm sections, of course—helps to better establish her as an obtrusive, overpowering force in Rama’s world. It’s unfortunate, then, that I ran into a repeated glitch that skipped all her dialog, as if I hit the fast-forward button. The only way to fix this bug was to close the game entirely and boot it back up, but it proved to be pervasive, repeatedly cropping up for no obvious reason. Other immersion-breaking disruptions included character portraits not lining up with who Rama was speaking with, and characters talking off-screen.
But these inconveniences pale in comparison to the biggest glitch during my first playthrough. Throughout the game, players can choose to speak with a therapist, who will grant insight into what Rama may be going through at a given point in the story. Towards the end of the game, when I was reaching the climax of my chosen romance subplot, I decided to visit the therapist, only to watch in disbelief as Rama recounted scenes that had yet to occur in said romance subplot, spoiling its finale. In a game that lives and dies on the back of its narrative, this sort of issue is tantamount to game-breaking.
Afterlove EPlacks meaningful gameplay, and its bugs can range from inconvenient to apocalyptic, so it says a lot that it’s still worth recommending it to anyone who likes smaller, story-driven games. Make no mistake, the aforementioned issues do drag down the overall experience, but at the end of the day,Afterlove EPis more than the sum of its parts. Its music, charming characters, nuanced portrayal of grief, and beautiful manga-inspired art design are all worth the price of admission. If developer Pikselnesia can hammer out its more troubling bugs, thenAfterlove EPhas a chance to become an all-timerin the visual novel genre.
WHERE TO PLAY
Afterlove EPis currently available on Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, PC, and Nintendo Switch. Game Rant was provided a PS5 code for this review.
