Afterlove EP carries distinct content warnings for loss, grief, and mental illness as central themes of its narrative.

I can't decide if Afterlove EP is an odd game to release today of all days.

It's as adrift thematically as its protagonist – a game that feels like it might be a romance title, but set distinctly in the utter void left behind in a relationship's abrupt end. It's an ode to relationships past, revived, and utterly new, to community, and to the struggle to make art come out the way you want – certainly close to the development team's heart given the title's announcement trailer being over three years old by time of release and the tragic loss of the game's own developer Mohammed Fahmi.

It's a mix of rhythm, adventure, and visual novel genres, one that's not perfectly clear whether it's properly supernatural or just a very vibrant representation of mental unwellness. It's at once perfectly clear in its vision, but also occasionally, purposefully muddled by multiple voices.

It's so very many things all in one little package, and that helps it to feel all the more personal than even its grief-driven premise would already suggest.

Art for the Artist

The first thing that stands out about the Afterlove EP is its clearly graphic-novel-derived presentation. Key scenes are laid out in panels with a deliberate sense of arrangement and spacing that clearly evoke a more static form of storytelling. All its character designs are flexible to the point of near-cartoonishness. And key dialogue zooms in on sets of talking heads that feel like even more emotive than the visual novels or Tales of series games that they draw comparison to.

And that sense of artistic pride is everywhere in the game. I knew I was going to vibe with its sensibilities from the first half-hour, when this inconsequential bystander in a completely gameplay-irrelevant shop had an insight about design that made me want to stop and chat with them far beyond what the scope of the game could allow:

That's the stuff.

And the game is chock-full of its own sense of layout and presentation. Every single backdrop in the game looks like someone either spent hours drafting and refining what a messily lived-in space would look like, or else cribbing from how visually busy the real-life version of its Jakarta setting looks. Single-story independent practices are jammed behind fences next to multi-story buildings with pits of ongoing construction out front, everything haphazard but providing an wonderful sense of place.

Even Afterlove EP‘s incidental NPCs keep showing up again and again – the graphic designer, the kid with his RC cars, your trendy groupie and her preppy friend, your pleasant next-door neighbor. None make a day-to-day impact on you, but it's hard not to notice passing by the “regulars” with their distinct designs, all adding to the neighborhood's regular cast without complicating the core of the story.

Because for how tangled and messy the game's themes already are, the game doesn't want to make it any harder on you.

Easy Mode

I think it's important to note that, while Afterlove EP features both rhythm-game sections and extended discussions about grief, I found it to be immensely approachable in both of these respects.

In the case of the former, Afterlove gives you the option to turn the already-quite-achievable difficulty of these sections down past “Normal” and “Easy” straight to “Auto”. Yes, you read that right, the game will graciously play itself for you if you're sufficiently musically-averse – and even on higher difficulties, I'm not sure whether the game will block your progress if you don't perform well enough.

And honestly, I considered turning the game to “Auto” myself – not just to soak in the game's aesthetics rather than stress myself out with the timed inputs, though that's also a good reason. But because at least one pivotal moment in the game's story naturally happens during a musical moment, and I wanted to not have to split my attention. Luckily, the the game works this sense of diffused focus into the moment itself, so the choice of “Auto” becomes less about inability and more about how you want to experience its narrative, which is such a wonderful way of de-emphasizing the traditional baggage associated with difficulty settings.

As for how it makes grief approachable, well.

That's the crux of the whole game.

The Gang Goes to Therapy

And here's where I become deeply unqualified to talk about where the game's themes. While I've lost a few family members over the years, I've been lucky enough not to go through anything close to the experience that so utterly devastates the cast of Afterlove EP, nor have I had to suffer with the distinct level of mental unwellness that plagues him.

But I can say that, by all appearances, Afterlove EP is taking a gentle but honest hand to the entire affair. Rama's friends understand his lingering pain, but they're still entitled to be frustrated with him and get into heated arguments about how it affects his remaining relationships. The game offers a path of seeking professional therapy, which is treated with the utmost earnesty and seeks to offer a genuine mooring to both Rama and the player, even the story's structure mandates a true-to-life sense that any “progress” cannot be straightforward.

But perhaps my favorite little instance of this comes from the keeper of the coffee shop that serves as a social hub. At a certain point, the game brings home the reality that Rama's depressive state has kept him from holding employment, and so you ask the only employer in the game's cast for advice. He throws Rama a bone, and so you get to work a shift as a barista – but not right away; on his terms, if you can make it. And when you show up, the game doesn't happily progress you along to a bar gig – you perform shakily, and so your friend has to protect his business and turn you down.

It's a wonderful little vignette perhaps because it goes nowhere for Rama materially. The world needs to continue to spin, and if he wants to rejoin it, he needs to be able to walk at its pace. He's just not ready yet, and both Rama and the cafe owner understand that. But he was willing to provide you a chance and the support you needed to try, which is a microcosm of the supportive – but not coddling – situations that the game throws at you again and again.

And you're encouraged to engage with as much of this as the game's calendar system allows – or none of it at all. You could spend your days busking on street corners despite the game not rewarding you with any semblence of a currency for doing so. Just day in, day out of dodging your friends to stand there with your guitar and piece together poetry.

Narratively filling, perhaps not. But aggressively true to Rama's sense of self and place.

And if you do want to go through with some aggressive schedule maintenance, you can forge through to the “best” ending of a given relationship route, making one facet of Afterlove EP surprisingly close to a traditional dating sim. Granted, the timing window on that front is narrow enough that I just missed it on my first playthough. But even then, the so-called “breakup” ending I saw bore a refreshing sense of mutual respect and understanding. Disappointing as it may have been to play the whole game over for a single character route, it felt appropriately low-key to the mood of the setting, so I walked away surprisingly satisfied despite it all..

Rough and Raw

Here's where I have to admit that the game is far from perfect – because in the build I played before the game's day-one patch, it does have its nagging issues. Luckily none of them were so obtrusive as to block my progression, but they did interrupt the core experience in their own ways.

One still present on the Switch version is an apparently invisible setting toggled by the ZR button that causes voiced dialogue to skip ahead, independently of the same setting for text dialogue. I missed a few exchanges – short monologues in particular – due to not being able to see any indicators on-screen as to why this was happening. Luckily, this is already patched out on the Steam version, indicating that the development team is devoted to ironing out purely-technical issues.

But more insidious is how the script is laid out in many key scenes, with two conversations happening in parallel – one out loud, and another entirely inside of protagonist Rama's thoughts. While this does lead to a few double-meanings, it's just as often jarring when the dialogue snaps back to reality and I can't quite recall the last line spoken out loud.

Disorienting the reader and throwing off the “real” conversation is, admittedly, likely the point in this case. But that intentional disconnection meant I still found myself flipping rapidly back to the game's conversation log to make sense of the parallel conversations happening inside and outside of Rama's head, which was a real killer for the momentum of some emotionally-tense scenes.

From the Heart

At the risk of being overly forgiving, all of this contributes to the sense of Afterlove EP being Pikselnesia's “debut album” of a game, and one that took them even longer to nail down than it takes Rama and his band to nail down their own comeback album in the wake of the story's inciting incident.

That strong sense of a identity is the thing that I love to see in independent games – and something that I've seen a lot from studios located in countries that aren't represented in the AAA market.

It creates a flavor all its own: amongst universal themes and a lovable cast, Afterlove EP is delivering first and foremost on a sense of feeling that shines through at every moment, making its unique mix of shifting turmoil, melancholy and contentment felt to the player in dozens of ways that all feel consistent and clear while remaining a reserved air and a hanging space that invites the player to bring in their own experience or just as easily sidle in to absorb something new that feels utterly real despite the facade of fiction.

The result is an utterly unique collaboration between the creator and the player, an interaction that invites a personal thought and reflection.

And really, isn't that what art is supposed to do?