Afterlove EP review | Rock Paper Shotgun

Among the bravest risks a game can take is making you play an arsehole. Afterlove EP‘s Rama isn’t an arsehole, but he’s getting there. He’s a grieving indie rockstar who has fallen into self-neglect and hermitude – a gloom-sodden, guitar-cradling burden on friends who believe in and care for him, despite it all. As the player of this visual novel with a pinch of rhythm game, you are essentially one of those long-suffering friends. Your job is to help Rama escape his own labyrinth of bereavement, self-pity and tortured creativity. Your ally and enemy in this is Cinta, Rama’s dead girlfriend, who is now a persistent voice in his head. She’s his better self, sometimes, and at others, the voice of anguish and fear dragging him deeper into purgatory.

I like Afterlove EP’s deft writing, and enjoy its splendid and specific recreation of 21st century Jakarta. I also feel for developers Pikselnesia, who have made a game about grief while processing the loss of their own creative director, Coffee Talk creator Mohammad Fahmi. But I do not much like being Rama’s friend, at this particular moment in his life. And by extension, I did not enjoy a lot of Afterlove EP, much as I admire it.

Afterlove EP begins a year after Cinta’s death of an unnamed illness. Following that loss, Rama has cut himself off from his band mates, Tasya and Adit, and from life in general. Now, he has 28 in-game days to put everything back together, rekindle connections and even find new romance while preparing for a comeback show. You get to perform two actions each day, one in the morning and one in the evening. These mostly involve choosing who to spend time with, but you can also free-roam the game’s boisterous, hand-drawn city, dipping into shops and alleyways to experience the artful layering of the overworld score, and chatting to bystanders whose optional dialogue consists of pleasingly Squaresofty two-sentence brainfarts.

There are places that trigger flashbacks to your days with Cinta, and eventually, places where you can busk, which involves ad libbing from a selection of awful rhymes. (Among his other faults, I found Rama to be an abysmal lyricist.) The most involved it gets at the level of the buttons is some cursory prompt-matching during rock band performances, with a soundtrack contributed by real-life Indonesian crooners L’Alphalpha. Beyond that, it’s a traditional visual novel in that you’re trying to guide the plot towards a selection of Good or Bad endings. There are three well-telegraphed romance routes to undertake, while dividing time between trips to a therapist and some tense rehearsals with Tasya and Adit.

The constant throughout is the mysterious disembodied voice of “Cinta”. In a gently inspired flourish, she is the only character with full dialogue voice-acting; everybody else in the game gets bibbly-bobbly speech effects. Cinta sits by implication at your elbow, keeping up a fickle, flirty, fighty commentary that is surely going to be a massive inconvenience for the Let’s Players. Rama is the only character who can hear her. He has a habit of talking to her out loud without realising, sometimes meeting her eyes through the screen, which is naturally rather disconcerting for his friends. The game never fully explains Cinta’s persistence in any unambiguously clinical or fantastical sense, but it’s obvious what all this represents for Rama: his inability to let go.

I suspect Pikselnesia have different influences, but for me, Cinta is a literalisation of the North American cinematic archetype of the “Manic Pixie Dream Girl”, coined by Nathan Rabin in 2007 with reference to Kirsten Dunst’s character in Elizabethtown. Briefly, Manic Pixie Dream Girls are unstoppably upbeat, weird ‘n’ wacky cuties who exist “solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures”, as Rabin puts it. Cinta is that idea thrown into a crockpot with phantom Chef Gusteau from Ratatouille. Thankfully, Afterlove EP is very much concerned to dismantle this soggy masculine hallucination. Part of teaching Rama to let go of Cinta is reminding him of who she really was, before she became his lo-fi Cortana. This involves opening himself up to the fact that other people remember her differently and have been grieving for her too.

One of the writing’s strengths is watching “Cinta” change, for better and worse, as Rama engages with old and new acquiantances. She is by turns the angel and the devil on his shoulder. At her worst, she relentlessly misinterprets feedback as mean-spirited, and prompts him to lash out. She guilt-trips Rama about leaving her behind, while piling on the reassurance that he is a good guy and a great artist who is entitled to all the forbearance his friends have shown him. She discourages him from opening up to his therapist. But there is a certain kindness informing everything, and sometimes, Cinta’s thoughts are constructive or usefully caustic, be it reproaching him for ignoring Adit, his oldest friend, or just encouraging him to go out for a walk before the big show.

The progress from one Cinta to the other isn’t smooth or irreversible. She’s a believable barometer for Rama’s own fluctuating mental health, though certain fluctuations have more to do with the underlying architecture of a visual novel made up of semi-standalone stories that don’t follow a fixed order.

In particular, as you make headway through the core storyline, “Cinta” starts to become a source of more genuine insight on the living Cinta and her mixed feelings about Rama, who was anything but the perfect boyfriend. You catch whiffs during those ostensibly rosy, couple-bonding flashbacks of his controlling tendencies and inability to listen, masquerading as deep feeling. “You couldn’t see me outside of your own expectations,” she says, at one point. Plus ca change, etc. This echoes the tough love Rama receives from Tasya and Adit. During a rehearsal of new material, Tasya expresses ambivalence about Rama’s lyrics. The way he writes about Cinta is reductive, she says, condescending. Cinta was so much more than this. The Cinta in your ear is atypically withdrawn during this exchange.

In addition to making room for memories of the “real” Cinta, Rama’s journey towards the big comeback performance slowly makes room for the trials and travails of newcomers. One of your possible love interests is a queer man who had to survive on the streets after being kicked out by his homophobic parents – a trauma that tentatively makes itself felt between the lines of his teasing. Another love interest is trying to navigate the sexism and ageism of the modelling industry, while dealing with a long overdue break-up.

I found these people good company, not least because their energy and appetite for life make a nice contrast to doom-ridden Rama. Afterlove EP’s script in general is adroit, fleshing out each character without lapsing into the exposition that could easily encumber a game set One Year On from its prologue. It flows together well with artist Soyatu’s roster of character portraits, which communicate volumes in miniature: Adit’s peacemaker tendency to talk at you over his big round shoulder, Tasya’s businesslike eye-rolling, Rama’s way of looking down despondently while picking at one of his headphones.

Admittedly, I came and went with the game’s art direction. Early on in the story, you meet somebody in a pharmacy who is lost in raptures over a box of painkillers. “There’s something so beautiful about the simplicity of painkiller packaging,” they tell you. “Somebody chose this color. This layout. This font. This is somebody’s art.” Is that the game commenting on itself as a commodification of grief, I wondered, tugging on my stinky culture pundit goatee? I wouldn’t call Afterlove EP’s 2D hand-drawn art “simple”, but it does cultivate an unrehearsed spontaneity, with lines and colours that overflow with careful, mildly anaesthetic scruffiness. It feels warm and self-deprecating in a way that suggests there will be no real ugliness in store, that even the worst arguments will have the corners rounded off, like the fonts. Thankfully, that’s not how it plays out. Afterlove EP may be “wholesome” on some level but it’s wide-open to the emotions of spitefulness, regret and defeat.

Gosh, that’s a fair amount of praise, given how I opened this review! Again, the big issue I have with all this is simply that I do not like Rama. Spending time with him makes me feel the need to shower. At his worst he is a caricature of a sadboi slouching around his own personal hall of carnival mirrors. At his best, he is a creature with the capacity to care but no pressing aim in life beyond writing another rock tune – and while I think the compositions are polished, the game’s brand of indie soft rock leaves me cold.

All this is, whisper it, a very subjective thing to hang a review on, and possibly a show of my own unkindness toward a suffering younger man. Grief makes morose, entitled dickheads of us all, and I’ve read other reviews that find consolation in Rama’s difficulty coming unstuck. But I guess where I can make a more convincing case against the game is that the format of the visual novel sort of encourages Rama at his shittiest.

It’s being pedantic, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the fact that world literally revolves around him, advancing from sunrise to sundown only once he, Rama, has decided how to proceed. Rama is the functional centre of the universe, even when the aim is to defuse his melancholy narcissism. The dating sim element also means that characters feel too available for a story that is, on some level, about learning to respect other peoples’ time. The three romantic possibilities you’re presented with pop up from day to day, marked on your map as though Rama had bugged their phones: the same cafe table, the same bookshop, the same record store. Any lessons in empathy involved are thwarted by this sheer availability, which characterises them as unpaid therapists. In short, the choice of formal precedents both supports and undermines the tale.

This is much more of a problem when it comes to those Good and Bad endings. These compress the mushy unpredictability of grieving into a rigid puzzle. To achieve a Good ending, you’ll need to min-max the stories, devoting all your days to certain characters and disregarding others. By contrast, my approach to healing Rama was to distribute attention considerately between the cast. (I also did this, of course, because I was reviewing the game and wanted to see what each character had to offer.) This landed me with a Bad Ending that fast-forwarded to a scenario in which Rama had snapped back into resentful isolation. I get that visual novels are known, even celebrated, for such whiplash. But given the intelligence of Afterlove EP’s writing, I found it bizarre and winding to be slapped with a closing grade.

It’s a provocation to replay, of course – if you commit to all three romance routes, I think you could get 15-20 hours out of this – but I am in no mood to spend any longer in Rama’s head. Finishing the game and writing this review has been an agonising, spaghettifying descent from grudging empathy into loathing. I’ve been stringing the game along in 20 minute bursts for weeks, because that’s as much as I can take in one sitting; the last hour of my 7-8 hour runthrough felt like prying out my own teeth.

Some of that is Rama’s fault, and some of that is the game’s, and some of it, again, is my fault for being older than Rama and perhaps, having more in common with him than I care to admit. I suspect that if you are not me, you might relish this more, but please be prepared for a lot of emotional labour.