|
Have you played this game?You can rate this game, record that you've played it, or put it on your wish list after you log in. |
Playlists and Wishlists |
RSS Feeds New member reviews
Updates to external links
All updates to this page
|
|
About the StoryResolve problems. Open Gates. Free Skycity. Go home. Game Details |
Awards
35th place - 27th Annual Interactive Fiction Competition (2021)
Tags
Member Reviews
| Average Rating:  Number of Reviews: 4 Write a review |
Most Helpful Member Reviews
A minimalist map exploration and fetch quest game, October 24, 2021This game is a six-by-six grid of locations, each described in two words or less. Each location has something that needs resolving: a missing item, or a problem in a different square. You are the resolver, who will resolve the problems (including the word limit).
It's choice-based, but with mild quadratic complexity. You can choose between LOOKing and INTERACTing with each object in a room, and you gather an inventory of items.
I loved this game, with the only drawback for me being the 'lawnmowering' that felt natural for the mid-game, trying out different items in different rooms. This problem is both alleviated and exacerbated by the helpful text which tells you if you're in the right room. It makes lawnmowering both faster (less painful) but also more appealing.
Overall, I find this a very successful puzzle piece. It reminds me of Weird City Interloper, a bit.
I can also highly recommend Domestic Elementalism, another game by this author from the 2017 IFComp.
After-Words is the sort of sharply designed and presented game that takes a while to get used to. It's almost too slick to adjust to at once. I was clueless how to do that first thing, but then, everything clicked. There's a tidy map with lock icons by passages you need to open. There are two buttons on the main page: look and interact. You build an inventory and use it on people or items you find--dry goods stuff, perhaps, but not dry writing. And the writing is largely in two-word phrases. And it all works.
Because the wordlessness is part of the quest: you, the Resolver, need to bring words back to Skycity, where there's plenty of activity but little spoken. What words there are create a vivid world. There are all sorts of flies, as well as other surreal things like gunflowers (they are rusty and need oil to defend the city properly, and once they do, security stops blocking you from going elsewhere) or robogulls or hammerspiders, or glowdoves who give you eggs you need to hatch. This all sounds like it could be a mess I had to use a bit of trial and error, but the cool thing was: there weren't a ton of errors to make! And After-Words tersely lets you know when you can't use something. "USE ELSEWHERE." Though some items, like a hammer, give amusing variants (VIOLENCE UNNECESSARY) or location-based text (I was almost sad to give the prismheart up!)
The map itself is nifty, with arrows protruding from your current location. You can click on them to get around or hover over a location to see its name, though most of the time, the location's icon should remind you what it is. This is a big help once you've explored the whole city and have a lot to remember, and all the locks that indicate a temporarily blocked passage have fallen away. Since there is some fetching to do, I was mildly disappointed I couldn't click on the location and move there, or maybe use arrows to get around and L/I for LOOK and INTERACT, because there were so many other conveniences. But it was pretty slick, all told. And I appreciated the "hint" command at the top that told you where to go next. I used it a few times the first time through, but revisiting it for this review, I remembered bits and pieces of the logic and was able to piece things together. My main problem was forgetting to INTERACT fully after solving a quest or helping someone. They'd often offer you an item, but it wouldn't go right in your inventory.
You don't need many words to figure what to do in the big picture. There are three gates near corners of the city that need Big Items (Moon, Blood and Summer,) and they're in the corner, behind a few locked doors, of course.
The only problem I had was that once After-Words got clicking, it was pretty much over. I was almost sad to see my exploits had cost the city its brief charm! But maybe there'll be a sequel. I think I really appreciated the lack of forced logic or received wisdom in the puzzles, though, because on my second play-through, I only had a vague idea of what was where. This felt about right. I enjoyed winning a trophy at the football stadium, counting fractalseeds to acquire another prize, recharging a judge with the right battery, and helping dancers down from being too happy (the relaxed discoball on doing so made me laugh, too.) It's a good-enough sized game at six-by-six, but not so much that too many possible alternative uses for an item pop up and frustrate you.
An aside about myself: the 2015 game The Problems Compound suffered, according to one tester, from AGI-itis, where you "just take one item and use it on someone else, and so forth." While I'm proud of what I wrote, I was glad to see a different strain of AGI-ish game pop up and be done so effectively. It sort of justifies my decisions to make such a "USE X ON Y" game. But I see the clear and obvious appeal of a game like After-Words. It was the sort of thing I was aiming for, and if you aren't doing anything tricky with the parser, I think it works better in a graphical interface than a textual one.
Lots of inventory puzzles, October 12, 2021This is the kind of game where there are just a zillion inventory puzzles, so many that the primary puzzle of the game is just remembering which puzzles you've already seen. ("Didn't somebody need an object like that? Where was it??")
None of the puzzles are particularly surprising, and the very sparse writing doesn't really help establish a sense of place, IMO. (This seems like a poetic place, rather than a place that makes any internal sense.)
You can play the game on autopilot if you click the hint button too much; try to keep notes, instead.
See All 4 Member Reviews
After-Words on IFDB
Polls
The following polls include votes for After-Words:Looks like I have to do EVERYTHING myself by Kinetic Mouse Car
This poll is for games where the player's sole purpose is to fix things. It's their job, or a near equivalent to a job. Does not necessarily have to be traditional employment but fixing things has to be part of the PC's purpose, not...
The New Abstract by strivenword
Time goes on, vibes change, people change, historical thresholds are crossed. I always loved the unique kind of abstract/surreal genre in IF. I don't want to give a grocery list of the games that I liked it in, because I don't want it to...
Links
This is version 3 of this page, edited by Zape on 21 November 2021 at 4:11am. - View Update History - Edit This Page - Add a News Item - Delete This Page