Allison Weiss

Game Designer & Artist

Afterparty

By Night School Studio

Let this image serve as proof of my completed run, since it is a screengrab of the end credits.

Ooo, baby! I have been waiting for this one. And any expectations I could have had going in–BANG! BOOM! FUCKING SMASHED! I absolutely love this game. And not because it lines up with my recent studies on Dante’s Inferno, not because I was already a massive fan of Night School and Oxenfree, and not even because I am the key demographic for this game. Or maybe it is all those things and more. Either way, this game is fantastic, introspective, and fun. Its excellence is absolutely worth my staying up all night so that I could get this post ready for my self-imposed deadline, compelled to express my impressions and observations. Oh, but considering my time constraints, I hope that you will forgive any negative changes in format or typos. But seriously, give me a full 8-hours and I might never stop talking about this game.

So, Some Context…

In early 2016, Night School released Oxenfree, a game in which you play as a teenager in a sort of coming-of-age horror/thriller plot. Actually, more like spooky, suspenseful, and supernatural than horrifying and thrilling. You decide which dialogue choices to say, or not say at all, and explore a (possibly haunted) island alongside your new step-brother and friends. You drink and smoke on the beach and tussle with some ghost thingies, y’know like every teen.

Afterparty is their newest game, and is set towards a slightly older audience. The game follows the afterlife adventure of two longtime friends that just graduated from college…only to die soon after and get sent to Hell. It’s a premise that’s a bit less traditional than Oxenfree, but it does not suffer for it. The outlandishness of the story opens it up to opportunities to incorporate philosophy, classical poetry, and mythology into its world building moments that still deliver entertaining wit, and the occasional meta joke.

The game’s excellent writing focuses on the insecurities of these close friends, and gives one of the coolest takes on Satan I’ve ever seen. Before you even meet him he is painted as a figure of great responsibility, but then his relaxed yet intimidating demeanor and title of “Prince of Partying” adds another layer, and yet another as you meet more of the denizens of Hell and hear outside perspectives.

Some gameplay from Oxenfree.

AAAAH! The bottle! It’s coming right at me!

The Gameplay

Left and Right with Dialogue Choices

Afterparty keeps the dialogue system from Oxenfree, but with some really intriguing changes. The aesthetic of the UI for dialogue choices is more tailored to the game’s hellish (minus the ‘ish) environment, along with the addition of drunk choices! If Milo or Lola have a drink, an additional dialogue choice will become available for selection and it will be different based off of their beverage selection. This adds an extra layer of pressure to what you choose to drink, as drinking something that causes you to become a massively tipsy flirt or raging yet sauced asshole might not make your desired dialogue appear.

What I appreciate greatly about Afterparty’s and Oxenfree’s respective interfaces really lies in the button allocations assigned to the choices. Both on PC, on which I played Oxenfree, and on PS4, for my copy of Afterparty, the dialogue options were set to conventionally used buttons/mouse-press and as such aren’t likely to be pressed by accident. It’s a little touch that works in favor of the visual design of being parented to the player and makes the formation feel immediately intuitive. At this point, it’s just my all-time preferred UI for dialogue options when you have such interesting backdrops, as both games do.

The green option showed up as a result of the drink.

Drinking!

Drinking is fun! Especially when you are already dead and alcohol can no longer kill you! Even more so when it expands player choice in a game that’s very course is decided by even the most minuscule decision. And on top of all that, the portraits of the drinks are gorgeous (and disturbing, in a great way), while their written descriptions are witty and hilarious.

My only complaint would be that it takes quite a bit longer than I expect to get my drink in hand and get away from the bar. This waiting period does stand up to my real-life experience, though, so it definitely gets a pass for realism.

Beer Pong and Dance Battles

These games along with a Jacob’s Ladder shot glass stacking contest make up the minigames of Afterparty. And these games are the trials you must master to defeat Satan and escape from Hell. Now, unfortunately for me, I suck at all but dance battles, which are pretty much Extreme Simon. 4 colors in a circle light up in a pattern and the player has to repeat that pattern before time runs out. It runs out quickly, so the pressure is real, but the moves aren’t hard. My trick for beer pong going forward is to aim a smidge higher than I expect, and shot stacking is nice a simple. On the first playthrough, their introductions can feel a tad rushed. But seeing as Afterparty is a game with multiple ways to play and routes to take, there will be next playthroughs in which I am used to them and can improve.

This image is the one and only time I won at beer pong, and it felt so damn good.

The Issues

Moving Around

Here I can run deeper to the Information Center and back toward the shore.

Here, I am stuck running in circles, but not really moving towards the back wall or camera. No matter how I try, I will never get to sit on that couch againg

I was having trouble with movement in Afterparty, at first. I kept getting stuck in place when I was trying to move deeper in or out from the screen. I wanted to explore the room around me without any invisible walls and mess around behind some random extra during a tense cutscene like a goofball. Not for nothing, I was able to do just that a couple of times, but I was wondering why I kept falling for trying to walk towards a door at the back wall of a bar, or get closer to the camera because I was stuck behind some random extra in an important cutscene.

After doing a brief compare and contrast with basic traversal of areas in Oxenfree and Afterparty, it became clearer. Oxenfree tended to have a profile perspective on it’s areas, so moving deeper appeared to be moving up with some clever layer work to help simulate depth, in a 2D to 3D manner. Afterparty, on the other hand, has taken a 3D to confined to 2D approach. You can only move left and right along the path prepared for you, and though at times you can move deeper in or further forward, this is only in cutscenes or what I assume to be scripted interactions. Afterparty and Oxenfree have around the same angle of perspective for the camera, so I believe my initial confusion came from a habitual expectation for my freedom of movement.

Lagging Framerate

This is definitely the most evident issue in Afterparty as it is now, about a day after it’s release to PS4. It suffers from frequent framerate drops, sometimes freezing altogether for a few seconds. But so far it hasn’t fully crashed, so I figure the game is just taking some extra time to think, load, render, or whatever it needs to do. Perhaps it’s fan bias, but I was already too invested in the story and the characters to get too upset over some performance issues.

I don’t expect most games to be perfect on release day, so lagging and a couple of teleporting glitches are not bad at all for being the biggest problems. I was able to play from start to finish without any glitches causing lasting consequence to gameplay, and with an experience like Afterparty that is perfectly fine with me.

A quick clip of the game’s first loading screen having framerate issues.

Glitches

This portion of the article is going to be a bit different from the rest, as I encountered glitches on my first run through the game and haven’t soundly reproduced them. As such, I’m just going to list out what may or may not have been ‘glitches’ as I they happened. In all honesty, it could have just been the game engine being weird. Unity, man…

Map screen hard to initially tell what location is selected. Thin neon blue outline and record scratch sound hard to notice when looking at a 40 inch screen from 10 ft away. More evident with headphones.
NPC teleporting glitch here and there. Beth got stuck by the elevator, floating on air. She resolved her location after I moved through a door/portal.
“Because you can burn the swap meet…to the ground. I want new experiences…” “I got stuck with Lynda…” Dialogue ran twice, once before Asmodius encounter, right after finishing Apollyon’s encounter(at 1st and Izzard), and once after Asmodius’ (at Thrall City)
Dialogue subtitles had a typo then glitched out when talking with wormhorn at 1st and izzard before picking up milo. Subtitles spoke as if to Milo going to get Lola, but i was playing as Lola trying to get Milo
Opened up map and thrall city had blue outline on, and so did Bobolyne Park. I wasn’t at either, but I fixed it by actually highlighting them and then highlighting something else. That successfully turned off the malfunction icons
Sam’s whole cab glowed righteous neon colors for an instant, like it was catching some reflecting lights. Pretty glitch. On a separate occasion it flashed neon green on and off like a strobe light.
Just before playing beer pong with Satan, picked Ling Chi to drink. Voice line for ordering Global Extinction played instead. Bartender still gave me my Ling Chi, though.

Last Words

Get it? ‘Cause Hell and Halloween and stuff?

Check Out Afterparty!

In spite of some pretty blatant framerate drops, Afterparty is a fantastic, deep game with a lot of routes to take and friends to make on your road trip through Hell.

So Go! Drink a bunch of weird stuff without feeling the physical consequences! Listen to the sweet sultry voices of the amazing cast, and get drawn in to the unique and fun den of sin Night School has so lovingly crafted!

Afterparty is out now on Steam, Epic Game Store, PS4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, PC, Mac, Linux, pretty much everything but phones I think…

Have fun and drink responsibly, but only in real life! When it comes to video game characters, go nuts 😉