In the metroidvania genre, creating a game worthy of sitting alongside recent releases like Hollow Knight and Metroid: Dread in terms of ingenuity, quality, and fan devotion is difficult. Dozens, perhaps hundreds of metroidvanias from the last decade deservedly demand the attention of players, all of them with something novel to do, be, or say. We’ve got our hard-as-nails Blasphemous, steeped in a gruesome Catholic horror, and full-out Castlevania (in spirit and legacy) in Bloodstained. Two SteamWorld Digs reimagine level traversal so seamlessly that someone might mistake it, at first glance, as a Minecraft situation.
On the surface, Afterimage seems like it can hang. Its beautifully painted world brings to mind the Ori games, its weapon system smacks of originator Castlevania, particularly Symphony of the Night.
But there are elements all those previous games possess that Afterimage does not, something ephemeral that took me some time to identify. Something which compels a player to be sucked into each of those bizarre, unique worlds and struggle against their difficulties.
By the time I put my Switch due to a sort of exhausted frustration, I still couldn’t pinpoint it until trying to express my feelings to our games editor. Largely, it came down to a feeling of weightlessness, of feeling insubstantial, of progress feeling stilted or meaningless.
In a word, it was a lack of satisfaction.
With a map as massive as the one Afterimage presents, it is an unbearable tragedy that it is not fun to move around in the game, particularly since the exciting dashes, slams, and double jumps which one might expect are so prodigiously scattered across that map. As soon as they are unlocked the player is then presented with punishing platforming segments which they had no preparation for.
Like the map, the game presents a large skill tree, but this too feels more burdensome than exciting as soon as the player understands how minimal an effect each skill point represents. Any interesting attacks are, like the more exciting movement options, locked behind a barricade of +5% upgrades.
None of this is surprising given that the game, itself, seems locked behind a pair of load screens (at least for the review copy I was given) so comically long that I thought the game hadn’t fully unlocked.
None of this adds up to a compelling difficulty, an interesting uphill battle. Harder, more incremental games (like the above-mentioned Blasphemous) are filled with dynamic baddies, atmosphere, and design elements. Afterimage presents us with cookie-cutter anime characters, uninteresting bad guys, and a Navi-like sidekick more obnoxious than cute.
This is the first minute and a half of my gameplay, every single time.
So much about Afterimage has the damnable curse of promise; in my time with the game, I kept thinking, “If only this were. . . “ It’s a series of missed opportunities, things just bare millimeters from landing in such a way that might launch Afterimage into the heights of its genre peers. There is little that is novel or ingenious so much as templated, tiring. In the end, it becomes an illustration of all those dissatisfying parts, a cautionary tale to every eager metroidvania creator as to what falling just short looks like.
The best the game achieved was to make me want to play a more satisfying game, one where my sword slashes felt like they had weight and where my movements felt engineered to make me enjoy struggling at tricky platforming.
It succeeded in driving me to finally dive into Owlboy.
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