After man

{Editor's Note: This review contains ending spoilers.}

Warning: one of the BGM files with this game appears to have a non-Arabic character in its filename, so the game will crash when it tries to play it. Fortunately, just renaming the file to "AlienAqtor - Satelite" (replacing the faulty character with a regular hyphen) lets the game play it properly.

After Man is based on the book by the same name. I've never read it, but I looked it up on Wikipedia and learned that it is a rather fanciful conjecture on what new types of animals might exist on Earth several million years from now, and in its time it was treated as a legitimate treatise on future evolution. The specific idea that seems to have most inspired this game is the speculation on humanity's genetic modifications to itself.

The horror element and the crashed-spaceship setting were introduced as a backdrop to explode these ideas, but the survival horror portion on the spaceship takes up the majority of gameplay, and it's only toward the end that an exploration of the genetic modifications really begins.



After Man (the game) is the about the fate of a colonizing space ship that lands on another planet in an attempt to repopulate after the destruction of Earth. Although it initially presents itself as a horror game in which you control the last human inhabitant of the vessel, in the final act it genre-shifts into more speculative science fiction.

The problem here is that survival horror depends on building a sense of mystery, and in alien-infestation stories it usually focuses around the aliens (putting aside the semantic objection that humans are the "aliens" in this game). Alas, nothing is truly learned about the creatures encountered on the ship. They're just there. The event that counts as your final confrontation with the entities doesn't offer any insight about them, and it's not even clear at the time that it IS your final confrontation (unless you count further experiences in the endgame sections, but these are outside the human protagonist's narrative, and they are with different sets of creatures than the ones on the ship anyway).



In the end, perhaps we're just supposed to accept the "infested spaceship" as an established sci-fi trope and not try to pry too much into the details about exactly how or why it came about. It's just something that happens to ships that crash on alien planets.

As for the design of the spaceship ...



Now, I don't demand that just because it's a spaceship everything has to look like cold metal. In a work of speculative science fiction, we're free to imagine that in the future humans might prefer to furnish a spacecraft with technicolour carpets and strange Mayan textures. But, what it lacks is a sense of function. Certain areas are tagged as the "bridge" or the "observation deck," and for the most part these areas resemble what they're supposed to be (albeit with some odd design choices), but the hallways and interconnecting areas seem very random in appearance.

This especially stands out in a game where a lot of emphasis is placed on pure exploration, as many of the small side rooms are totally unnecessary for completing the game, and are thus meant to be interesting in their own right. Most rooms are built around a single, large feature, but they lack detail in the peripherals. For example: one room in the lab area houses a creature that lives in a pile of dirt in a large glass box. Other than the glass box in the middle of the floor, the room is completely empty except for a few storage crates strewn around. What laboratory would ever be like that?

Clearly the creator assembled a lot of graphical resources and was determined to use them all, but they were not used with very much skill. This results in a pastiche appearance and a lack of unity. It's hard to believe that we're actually on a vessel that travels through space.



I don't feel it's against the spirit of this game to reveal details of the ending. Like I said, the sense of mystery established at the beginning never really pans out, and the ending sections, as I'm about to explain, are far superior to what comes before. Once your protagonist reaches his final destination, you choose one of three DNA modifications that his team had been working on to make humans better suited to survival on the new planet. This leads into the endgame where you take control of the new creature in one of three possible settings depending on your choice.

The three choices are not equal, however. Some of the creatures prove to be successful in the new environment, and some ... do not.



The fate of the creatures is not based on your performance as the player, of course. Each has a fixed ending. So you shouldn't feel bad if you get the spectacularly bad one.

While the earlier sections of the game were also probably meant to be experienced as pure exploration, in these final areas it actually pays off:



The pastiche nature of the graphics is still evident, but clearly a lot more attention was put into building the world outside the ship than the world inside. The designer uses sprites and pictures in this section in innovative ways to evoke a number of different areas and events. It's a pity that very little "gameplay" occurs in these new areas, and the slow walking speed might frustrate players.

The presentation of the final areas suggests that we should be optimistic about the events. (Except perhaps for the one that ends with ... well ...) And why not? Appararently humanity is destined to evolve into a sort of salamander. Although let's not forget that Brannon Braga thought of that one first:



Out of curiosity I did a speedrun of this game, ignoring every area that wasn't mandatory, and I clocked in at 18 minutes. It's a short game, and although it's inconsistent in the kind of experience it wants to deliver, the end pieces go in some directions that are uncommon for RPG Maker games. But without the ending sections, it would really be just like any other horror/puzzle game you've played.

I give this game 2.5 out of 5 because, while the majority of the game (the section taking place on the spaceship) is hit-and-miss in its delivery, the epilogue sections are more interesting. And the game didn't do anything to actually make me hate it.

Final score: 2.5 / 5