After Us Review (smeredith)
This is a Yes, but with some warnings. Read these carefully before deciding whether to pick it up or not.
① If you're uncomfortable with seeing animals hurt, you might want to avoid it. The major animal spirits in each region depict how that animal died, and it can be pretty graphic. Details: The dog and bear starve to death, the deer is caught in traps and shot, the whale was killed by nets and harpoons, and the pig was killed in a factory butcher.
② The camera is rough at times, if you have motion sickness issues or vertigo it might be a bit too much. I have persistent vertigo, and while I was able to power through it, some areas I couldn't play for long. Examples: During the power plant, you have to ride on power lines and switch between them. The camera can be painfully uncomfortable during these rides. In the ocean, you're taken into some water areas where you have 360º movement in tight passages. These are very uncomfortable to navigate, and require a lot of camera movement. When you're captured during fights, the camera will zoom out a bit and sometimes place itself inside of walls or the ceiling. It also wobbles around quite a bit during some fights which can make sensitive people nauseous.
③ The game requires the use of a controller, keyboard controls are NOT supported.
While beautiful, in a bit of a gruesome way, it's overall a bit of a depressing game. The themes of environmental destruction and extinction are very vividly on display.
The gameplay is mostly platforming, overall it's on the easier side but there are some tricky areas. These areas require tight timing or precision. This is especially noticeable anywhere near bubbling goop, as tentacles reach out to grab you from it. The really narrow passages between goop/oil is sometimes hard to tell where is safe and where is not. There are a few other platforming sections where you are clearly on a platform and you still get grabbed. One area in the mine requires fast movement and well aimed shots of your orb to deactivate some traps. While the checkpoints are usually pretty good, there are a few areas with poorly placed ones. There are some puzzles but they're not usually super difficult to figure out.
This is a semi-indie game running the Unreal engine, so it's not super optimized. While most areas run decently well, there are a few areas which stutter heavily. This is most visible in the Power Plant, since you have large puzzle and object dense regions with a lot of particle effects. The stutters and frame rate drops are extremely bad on one of the puzzle regions.
It ran well on my Linux desktop with the standard Proton and no other changes. On the Steam Desk, you may need to lower settings due to it being not very optimized.
Overall, I enjoyed it but consider the warnings carefully.
Edited: Formatting broke, just updated the formatting to be more easy to read.