Afterimage - A Breathtaking Experience Without Any Guidance

Afterimage is a visually stunning metroidvania set in a massive world full of interesting areas to explore and many secrets to uncover. The story is honestly pretty hard to follow sometimes, but to summarize it, a lot has happened in the past, like conflicts between Goliaths and humans and eventually a huge explosion that wiped out almost everyone. You play as Renee, the only survivor of the attack on her village and her mission to find her lost mentor could change the fate of this broken world. This game has multiple endings, so you can imagine you will only unlock the real ending if you have explored the whole map, but good luck with that, because this world is overwhelmingly massive and finding the right way is going to be a challenge.

I said in my top 10 most anticipated games of 2023 video that I really hoped it would be like Aeterna Noctis with less punishing platforming and impressive combat and I must say it feels a lot like Aeterna Noctis, but did it live up to my expectations? It sadly didn't, there are a lot of flaws that really harmed my overall experience. The presentation is great though, like the visuals, the animation, the sound design and the world building, but exploring this world and progressing through the story doesn't feel as smooth as it should be. The game doesn't hold your hand at all, so most of the time you have no idea where to go and sometimes you just literally fall in an area full of enemies that are a lot stronger than you are, so the best thing you can do is just ignore them and try to survive. It sometimes shows you the recommended level to travel through an area, but often it doesn't, so most of the time you have no clue if you are supposed to be there already.

Another thing why exploring in this game isn't as fun as it should be, is because default fast travel is only unlocked after a specific point, so in the beginning you can only fast travel by using certain consumables that you can not buy at a shop. You can imagine this makes it really hard to backtrack and the lack of waypoints makes it really hard to find your next objective, so in my honest opinion the exploration in this game is pretty terrible in the beginning, but becomes a lot better later in the game.

Just like Aeterna Noctis, dying makes you lose your experience you have gathered since your last save and returning to the place where you died without dying again lets you get it back, but what it doesn't give you back is your consumables, like health and mana potions, so make sure to only use them if you really need them to survive a boss fight or a difficult section. This game's skill tree, called Talent Tree, is also a bit weird and gives you barely any freedom to upgrade your character the way you want and the map only shows save points, so keeping track of everything is mainly all up to you. The Steam achievements also stopped working for me after like 2 hours, so I got no sense of accomplishment while playing this game. All of this can be fixed with a patch, so hopefully the developers will make this game more enjoyable in the future.

For now I can't recommend this game to casual players, it's too difficult for the wrong reasons. I really enjoyed the variety of weapons you can use though, you have six different weapon types that all feel different and are fun to use and the same goes for your sub weapons that are basically just magic spells. I went for the longer ranged weapons because there is contact damage in this game, so I wanted to keep my distance while fighting enemies and bosses. And speaking of bosses, I liked many of them, even some optional boss fights, but there are a few that are really brutal and analyzing their attacks is going to be a challenge.

So in general Afterimage is by no means a bad game, but it did disappoint me a lot because of the flaws I've just mentioned. I really wish I could recommend this game to everyone, but I can't in this state. It's way too difficult for casual players, so only if you are experienced at metroidvanias and don't really mind exploring a massive open world that is full of much stronger enemies and bosses and you don't even know if you are even supposed to be there in the first place, then I would recommend this game to you, even with all these flaws.

The overall presentation is amazing, the level design is pretty great and the combat is fun and responsive. Finding the right build and the weapon that suits your gameplay the best is really enjoyable and unlocking new moves for these weapons and trying them out, made the combat very impressive for sure.

So be ready for an overwhelming, but breathtaking experience, that is really going to remind you of Aeterna Noctis. Thankfully it's less punishing, but make sure to keep track of everything, because finding your way through this massive world is going to be a challenge!