After Us Review

ign.com:

The pitch for After Us sounds like a perfect blend of post-apocalyptic restoration, a la Terra Nil, and classic, story-driven 3D platforming in the vein of Psychonauts. In reality, this lumbering beast is often a bit too directionless for its own good, leaning heavily on unwieldy platforming and mind-numbing combat to pad out the time between tearful but brief reunions with the various spirits of the forest you’ll need to restore before you reach the credits. In theory, that kind of light, wordless storytelling is forgivable for a game like this – assuming its platforming is tight enough to carry it. But in this case, it’s aggressively inconsistent.

The premise of After Us is pretty simple: You play as an extra-powerful forest spirit named Gaia, or the Spirit of Life if you wanna get fancy about it. But she doesn’t always handle that well, and sometimes her standard platforming moves can leap between feeling slippery – which was the case whenever I accidentally fired off her air dash too quickly – and feeling like a boulder sinking to the bottom of a river when the glide button seemed like it should have worked, but …didn’t, for whatever reason. That issue has caused me to endure hundreds of needless deaths.

What’s most interesting about playing as Gaia is her ability to use her “heart of the forest” ability to bring Earth back to life, one plant or animal at a time. She can throw it like a boomerang with a quick tap of the left trigger, which gives a satisfying little jolt of force feedback, but all it’s really used for is some lackluster combat and infrequent moments where you’ll need to reach a switch from a distance. The latter can be uniquely frustrating because Gaia automatically aims for distant objects at roughly