Indie Game of the Week 406: Afterimage

We're already into the second month of this year and I haven't played and blogged about an explormer yet. It feels like I'm losing my sense of self; that regulars are reading my 2025 blogs and wondering who this new Mento is. Was he replaced by one of those billion-dollar AI that keeps repeating itself? Is this a misguided attempt at recreating himself in the manner of some New Year's Resolutions? Has he finally run out of explormers to play, at long merciful last? Was he replaced by one of those billion-dollar AI that keeps repeating itself? Or was it just the case that he knew he had Aurogon Shanghai's Afterimage on the docket for this feature—a gorgeously-rendered 2D explormer that clocks in at a svelte (if svelte meant something entirely different) 50+ hours according to HowLongtoBeat—and thought he should pace himself a bit for the rest of the year. It's probably that last one, given that I didn't see fit to conclude the sentence with a question mark.

So, this is probably going to be my whole week (of game time at least; I live a very busy and interesting life outside of those, believe you me). Still, what a way to spend that time, whizzing around an enormous map collecting treasures and traversal upgrades with which to reach further treasures, all the while fighting off monsters with a diverse selection of weaponry and combat abilities. Afterimage is pretty much made in the classic Symphony of the Night mold, complete with an overly-animated protagonist with a flowing cape and a whole RPG-lite system tacked on to provide a bit more variety in monster drops and chest content inventories beyond the usual handful of HP and MP boosts. I couldn't even begin to describe what the story is about—and this is after I'm some 20-25 hours in—but it relates to an amnesiac mage named Renee and her floating fairy companion Ifree who find themselves bereft of purpose after the kindly sorceress and her village that took them in are all massacred by some mysterious overpowered monster attack. Seeking answers, the duo take off after an unusual hooded figure seen interfering with the sorceress's corpse—an act that might not have been as malevolent as it first appeared—and find their way travelling to all sorts of towns, forests, ruins, mountainsides, and elsewhere.

From what little I've picked up from the overarching lore, we have a world that has seen itself struggle to hang on to any normalcy after its guardian goddess enigmatically dies and as a result hordes of undead have arisen from the bodies of those not carefully put to rest by way of being turned into "prism bones" by trained mages. Renee has the ability to do this too which, when combined with her flashy and official-looking white dress uniform, would suggest that she's someone of importance. I do appreciate a game with plenty of dense worldbuilding that is mostly going on off-screen somewhere until you find an item that explains it to you, since copious cutscenes aren't really this genre's bag (outside of a few notable exceptions like Iconoclasts and Nine Sols), but the game really seems to have embraced the obtuseness of Souls-adjacent games past: as evinced by the fact you rarely have any idea what you're doing or where you're going, barring what few breadcrumbs are provided by the quest log. Being an RPG, monsters tend to be levelled appropriately for the areas you're meant to visit in sequence; however, it's reasonably easy to get turned around and wander into one of these late-game areas and monsters far beyond your current ability to handle. In this, and in several other respects (including its Elden Ring-esque setting and the corpse run mechanic), we once again have another game cribbing from the Bible of From. Not that I'm liable to quibble about that any time soon: this format, which is often more a stylistic choice, seems to fit the 2D explormer genre like a glove.

A significant portion of the game is your standard exploration platforming, hopping around traps and using your mid-air dash and traversal skills to reach distant areas, prioritizing routes that are most likely to lead to dead ends or shortcuts in order to ensure you're not missing some vital map completion % somewhere, all the while stopping occasionally to mark your map for every barrier in your path or every chest tantalizingly out of reach. The map tech is interesting, in perhaps the more pejorative sense, as it's an icon-based interface that seems to misunderstand why people need icons in games like this. I don't need a chest icon to indicate where a chest is; what I'd prefer is an icon to indicate why it is that I cannot presently reach that chest. I've taken to using a bat-like graphic to indicate areas that need a double- (or indeed triple-)jump and an anchor to indicate where I need to smash through the floor in the manner of a heavy object such as an anchor. Ironically, or perhaps just annoyingly, I've just reached a part of the game where there's pools of water I cannot access and am now using a cooking pot icon for those since the anchor was already taken. I suspect the game wanted me to use the cookpot for where I can get some cooking done, but I'll just have to burn that bridge when I come to it and instead maybe use some demonic monster icon once that system is unlocked to metaphorically represent an oven. Speaking of which, and I know I said this in the lede but it bears repeating, there's a huge amount of game in this game. Not a grouse, per se, but an indication that you might spend a considerable amount of the early game picking up stuff you have no idea what it does, because the game's saving that feature for the mid-game and beyond so you don't get too overpowered too soon.

Which leads to the next sorta problem I have with the game: the vast world with its ample amount of off-piste exploration can't really manage a difficulty curve as a result, excepting those aforementioned occasions when you wander into a high-level zone you're not meant to visit yet. I died once at the tutorial boss—in true Souls style, I believe I was supposed to so the game could introduce its "Confluence" mechanic, which has me submerging myself into the sea of souls and resurrecting elsewhere as a handy if macabre form of fast-travel—and I've yet to die since. I can still see my "go collect your corpse here" marker on the map from the prologue of the game. The game tosses healing items at you on a fairly regular basis, but it also gives you a few healing charges that are replenished every time you rest at a checkpoint: the area I'm at now where the enemies are a bit higher level than me is the first time I've had to resort to some of my backup potions, and I've still got around a hundred of them in storage. Granted, it's a difficult thing to balance a game with so much extraneous faffing about to be done, because as a dev you want to keep the challenge level somewhat approachable for those odd types who play explormers but just make a beeline for every story-critical boss instead of actually, you know, doing any exploring but I still think they may have made things just a tad too easy. There is a higher difficulty if I ever decide to put my money where my mouth is at least, and I suspect the training wheels are about to come off regardless if this current zone full of jerkass teleporting ghosts is any indication of a future pattern, so I'll reserve judgement until I've reached the end of the game (and I'll be sure to append the usual "post-game post-script" once I've done so).

The combat is... so-so. Usual hitbox weirdness that tends to mar a lot of these games. I like that there's a variety of weapon types with their own mores and quirks though. I've taken to the whip pretty quickly due to its balance of speed and range (and because whips in games are just cool) but it has some odd mid-air attack patterns. One has you wildly cracking the whip from side-to-side while floating stationary though it doesn't always activate (it might be a mid-air neutral, as opposed to one where you're holding a direction) and it has this odd damage discrepancy where I think the idea is that an enemy has to be at the full length's distance to take the maximum damage and will take less if they're close enough to you but my damage output at various ranges doesn't strike me as consistent enough for that to be the case. You also have swords, blades (which is the confusingly synonymous way the game refers to katanas, which have a shorter arc but are faster), greatswords (which, as in IGAvanias, benefits from both its range and its wide arc), dual-blades (like the blade but there's two), and the always trusty scythe. You can equip two weapons at once which are assigned to two face buttons, so you don't always have to rely on one type, but given you can pour stat points into skills that directly grant new weapon abilities (usually with some manner of fighter game prompt, like down-right-attack) or damage specific to that weapon type it seems prudent to experiment early on and stick with the two you like the best. You also have a separate slot for spell usage (good for range, since there are no ranged weapons like bows, and your MP for them slowly regenerates as you move) as well as the usual equipment and accessories for stat boosts. Best of all, you can dodge cancel out of pretty much anything and it works like SOTN in that, when pressed neutrally, you slide back a bit. It's for the best because you have no invincibility on dashes and will take collision damage if you touch an enemy while sliding, which diminishes its utility to some extent. Doesn't take long to get used to the idea that you can't just whizz past enemies and attack their flank like you can in most other games made in this mold, just a habit that's a little hard to shake early on.

Afterimage is a truly substantial and vast game that I'll no doubt be pecking away at for some time yet. While it's graphically resplendent in that romantic flowy wuxia sort of way that many games from China tend to look like, the animation quality for most enemies and characters outside the protagonist tend towards the paper doll-like. The backdrops are detailed enough to serve their dual purpose of not only giving you something pretty to look at but also obfuscating well-hidden passages and other secrets unless you do some probing of the walls (and maybe use the crouch-slide just in case) to see which ones are actually real. Music's fine if unremarkable: it has that vaguely spooky supernatural orchestral ambience that you might get in a Harry Potter movie or some other fairytale-influenced yarn (the Trine games came to mind more than once), as well as the occasional theme that more befits its country of origin. As a package I don't think there's anything particularly wrong with it but the combination of its ambiguous narrative framework (at least so far; maybe they back-loaded that stuff) and its ample amount of ground to cover with boss fights and major story moments being comparatively sparse does make it feel like a game that's going through the motions for much of its run. Too much of a good thing, perhaps, though that hardly sounds like a complaint nor do I really mean it as one. Hell, I'm someone who thought Donkey Kong 64 was entirely adequate so maybe that's more my own gluttonous lack of self-control talking. For whatever it's worth, I'm going to stick with Afterimage because even if it's all a bit much it's still been a while since my last one of these explormers. Almost six weeks! I'm surprised I hadn't withered and died.

Rating: 4 out of 5.

Post-Playthrough Edit: Well, that story wasn't making any more sense towards the end there and most bosses move too quickly to adopt an evasive strategy, instead incentivizing you to pump your numbers up real high by exploring a lot and then just go for a battle of attrition each time. The weapon variety was cool and the magic system could've been interesting with a bit more customization—since you always want the wand/staff with the highest attack damage, you're kinda stuck with whatever spell is attached to it—and I did enjoy having those enormous maps to annotate and fully scrutinize. Just felt... kinda plain in a lot of ways, and not helped by just how much of it there was.