Afterlove EP (LudoNarraCon '24 Preview)
Love, music, death, grief, therapy...
Finally being able to play Afterlove EP is bittersweet. Coffee Talk creator Mohammad Fahmi was working on this slice-of-life narrative, part visual novel and part rhythm game, when he passed in 2022, but development continued at Pikselnesia and found a publisher in Fellow Traveller.
I adored the visuals in Afterlove. The rough, hand-drawn style was immediately endearing, adding personality to the characters and every location I visited. The game is set in Jakarta, and while I’ve never been there, all the little details certainly created a vibe where I felt like this was truly a place where people live. (Even if I was just in a hand-drawn version.)
As for the story in the demo: Rama is in a band, he has a girlfriend, and life is good. Until it isn’t.
Afterlove packs a lot of emotion into the first ten minutes of the demo, much of it in short, quiet drawings. Rama realizing something is very, very wrong. Then he’s at the hospital. At a funeral. At a cemetery. His girlfriend Cinta is gone, and in a way, he’s gone. Each still looks increasingly bleak, showing Rama’s descent into the stages of grief. It’s powerful; we’ve all experienced grief before in some fashion, but it manifests itself in different ways for everyone.
You wake up after, and a year has passed. Rama is still dealing, except now he hears Cinta’s voice in his head. (Grief works in weird ways.) After hiding away for the last 365 days, he decides it’s finally time to join the world again, starting with his bandmates. Drummer Adit is glad to see him around, but Tasya, who was also friends with Cinta, can’t hide her resentment that he hasn’t been around. She’s set to join a new band, but when Rama promises he won’t flake out, she pledges to see the band through at its next gig at the end of the month.
That’s all I’ll spoil for the story in the demo, I can’t wait for others to play this one and talk about their experiences with it through their view of grief. Afterlove is set to release for PC, Nintendo Switch, and PlayStation in the third quarter this year.
(Preview based on early access to the demo by Pikselnesia and Fellow Traveller.)