izigame.me

I really really want to give this game an awesome review but I can't.
The game's visuals are freaking amazing. So many scenes in this game could be put in art books and they'd be viewed as prime examples of surrealist masterpieces. The game is ten out of ten on that basis. The only reason I kept playing so long was to see more of these visuals. The bird cage area was amazing.
What does the game do wrong? Well... pretty much everything else.
The game is a very artsy piece and it lacks a lot of things you'd probably expect a 'game' to have. You spend most of your time just platforming from point A to point B. That's fine as a mechanic for progression but there isn't anything even resembling a story here. Thematically, game reminds me a lot of Ori and the Blind Forest or Little Nightmares. Unfortunately, where those games had deep and engrossing stories and good fight mechanics, After Us doesn't have any of that. The fights that there are, are very forgettable and the story is on the same basis as Super Mario Brothers: a paper thin excuse to go platform through N worlds for a few hours.
The world is huge and you have ample opportunities for exploration but the games fails to give incentives for exploration so you likely won't do it. Most of the stuff you can find during exploration in the game is pointless from a gameplay perspective and there is no real narrative that the extras could provide bonus material to. The game excels at environmental story telling but without actual characters to provide some kind of hook, it doesn't land as hard as it could.
I know that these guys were trying to do an art house game and more power to them but the game really needed a better player experience to sell us on continuing the game. It doesn't have it. Visuals do not an experience create. Even a modest story like Ori and the Blind Forest or Little Nightmares could have provided fertile ground to keep the player engaged. The game feels a lot like its trying to take a page from Prince of Persia(2008) where each level cleared feels like a real accomplish and like your cleansing corruption from the world. The thing is that game had great boss fights and a very likable pair of characters to hook us into the game and keep us going. When we cleanse an area in this game, we don't feel like we're striking a blow against evil, we just feel like we're hit a checkpoint.
Should you play it? Honestly, I found the game boring. And that sucks because I loved the visuals so much that I kept playing long after I was bored to tears before giving up.