izigame.me

Afterimage is certainly no Hollow Knight. It's no Bloodstained, either. I'm sorry to say it's not even on the level of Ender Lilies, a game that itself was deeply flawed. While I ended up liking Ender Lilies enough to 100% it, I can't bring myself to want to keep going in Afterimage despite being nowhere near the end.
So, compliments out of the way: The game's really pretty. The art style is consistently great and every area is beautiful and visually distinct, even if the biome placement makes the world as a whole feel like generic fantasy setting #1701520 with arbitrary metroidvania obstacle courses every so often. The music's serviceable - none of it's memorable, but none of it's really bad either, with the sole exception of the miniboss music being the wrong kind of silly.
You'll notice I couldn't really mention anything good about this game without bringing up a flaw. That's going to be a theme here.
Afterimage's cardinal sin is its combat. Let's get the good out of the way - there's no stamina bar to deal with. Yep, that's it. As for the bad:

You take contact damage from 99% (but not 100%) of enemies, your dash animation is long with sizable endlag, and iframe access is build dependent for most of the game, but the bosses still dash around at hyperspeed and launch attacks with enormous hitboxes like they're going out of style. Several people are already typing "skill issue" but I don't mind hard bosses as long as they're good. Nightmare King Grimm is one of my all-time favorite fights, and he assaults you quickly and relentlessly, but everything he does has a distinct and obvious telegraph and can be reliably avoided. Afterimage's fights are not remotely on that level.
Bosses can chunk you in 2-3 hits, but they also frequently have 1/4 second windups or less, have nearly the same windup for 2-3 completely different attacks, and can commit to an attack what feels like 1 frame after their sprite flips.
There are plenty of flying enemies to harass you and plenty of enemies camping ledges, but you can't cast spells in midair because you can't cast while moving, and the only two weapons that are decent at hitting enemies above you when you're in midair each have significant drawbacks.
Weapons have unlockable special attacks but most of them have enough start- and/or endlag that they do about the same amount of damage as regular attacks while decreasing your mobility, if they don't just slide you forward and make you take contact damage. Out of the 16 weapon skills I unlocked, only 5 or 6 were actually useful. The rest were overly situational, entirely pointless, or actively detrimental (special mention to the greatsword plunge that makes you take damage instead of the enemy).

Compare to Ender Lilies: that game had plenty of its own problems with combat to be sure, but the enemies were generally slower and easier to read despite (or perhaps because of) also dealing contact damage, your weapons and subweapons were more reliable, and you started the game with iframes on your dash. Hollow Knight had fast enemies dealing contact damage but their fast attacks all had obvious tells while your own attacks had knockback and no windup.
The combat isn't the only part Afterimage doesn't get right, though.

The controls are unpolished. The best example is that the pogo bounce (down + A) doesn't work if the game thinks you're pressing diagonally. This would be bearable on a d-pad, but on a stick it becomes frustrating really fast, especially in the jumping puzzles.
The world is just too big for its own good. At the time of writing this review, I have played Afterimage for longer than it took me to 100% Ender Lilies, and I still haven't unlocked the iframes on dash. I have encountered bosses that are designed to deal unavoidable damage if you can't dodge through them or their attacks, though. (Yes, this is Loss.)
You are going to get lost in this game, but rarely for the good metroidvania reasons that you can't remember where to find all the paths your new upgrade will let you take or you've missed an unexplored door on the edge of the map somewhere. Instead it will be because you need to talk to an unmarked NPC in the middle of nowhere, who will then teleport you to a new area and/or send you on a chain of fetch quests to acquire the item (not powerup) you need to continue.
At one point I was locked from progressing because the game played a cutscene showing me a direction I shouldn't go in because a powerful enemy just went that way, except that was actually the only way to progress and I only found out hours later after I'd forgotten that cutscene entirely. The next time it happened I ignored the cutscene, died instantly, and the game made fun of me for ignoring the cutscene.
Boss save point placement is subpar. Sometimes the nearest save point is reasonably placed, but usually you have to walk for at least half a minute, and sometimes you need to go through a half dozen enemies and ride two elevators that you had to call from a different floor than you. Bloodstained and Ender Lilies always had a save point next door, and Hollow Knight eventually let you set warp points to bypass its worse corpse runs. No such luck in Afterimage.
Talent trees can be great systems, this game's version is not. Each individual node only gives you a 1-2% boost to a single stat (most of which only show up once or twice in the whole tree), and several nodes have level-locked upgrades but there's no visual indicator to say whether you can or can't buy or upgrade a node unless you hover over it. Your weapon skills are all talent locked to discourage you from experimenting, which is extra baffling when this game also has secret skill scrolls that double-lock some of them behind exploration.
There is a lot of gear, but it suffers from mostly the same problems as the talent tree. All of it is a small incremental base stat upgrade from something else with maybe a 2% bonus to critical hit chance or a +5 to defense as additional effects. If the game's really feeling fancy it'll throw you a 10% bonus with a 30% demerit. There's a weapon upgrade system, but it just gives even smaller incremental upgrades, won't stop you from abandoning early weapons for later ones, and doesn't work on armor or accessories.
Exploration just doesn't feel rewarding. On very rare occasions you'll find something meaningful, like a glyph (read: estus charge), an accessory slot, an afterimage (read: charm), an afterimage slot, or 1/3 of a health/mana bar upgrade. The rest of it is weapon/talent upgrade points, gear, consumables, and money. And there's no real rhyme or reason as to what will be where. The most fiendishly hidden area of a region containing a moderately difficult jumping puzzle might only have a fast travel potion.
The translation is very rough - the opening cutscene gives you a good idea of what to expect for the rest of the game. All the dialogue is also voice acted in English, you'd think they could have spent their budget on a proper translation instead. Most of the time it's just vaguely confusing, but sometimes it's actively misleading to progression. Even when it's readable, the story is pretty generic and only memorable for the times where it just gives up and has bad stuff allegedly happen to you during cutscenes that gets immediately resolved before you regain control.

Again, compare to Ender Lilies: the controls were generally solid, the world was way less padded and felt like it could plausibly exist, the one time I got stuck with no idea how to progress ended up being my fault for setting the gamma too low, there weren't any wasted systems, and the translation and writing were both solid.
It's disappointing because under all the jank I can see a lot of potential in Afterimage. But potential is all it is.