Afterparty

Have you ever had one of those nights where maybe you drank a little too much? Don’t remember anything the next day, you feel like crap, oh and you’re in hell. No? Never happened to you? Well, you’re doing better than the protagonists of Afterparty.

Afterparty is an adventure game brought to us by Night School Studio, the makers of Oxenfree - the dialogue choice ridden game where a Scooby gang of kids simultaneously become part of the machinations of a mysterious island and alienate each other for no discernible reason besides shits and giggles. Back when I played it I remember enjoying Oxenfree which bodes well for Night School Studio because close to bugger all has changed. 

The gameplay remains the same though the cast has been cut down and the dialogue tweaked a bit to shoehorn in an extra option at times when you’re drunk - an odd mechanic that slows the pace a bit every time you sit at a bar, order a drink and then wait for the drinking animation to finish. Pacing isn’t really Night School Studios thing though I guess. 

You control Milo and Lola, two friends who wake up in hell and have no idea how they got there. The aim is to get to Satan and challenge him to a drinking contest so they can escape but that quickly gets shoved to one side in favour of tedious quests where you talk to someone then backtrack to another person just to tell them what the first said. While mechanically sound it by no means should be the core loop.

One thing that has improved is the character design. All of the characters in Night School Studio games tend to be very vague looking with only hints of facial features and that’s fair enough, smaller studios have to make do and there’s nothing wrong with the style. In Oxenfree all the personalities were very stock but in Afterparty it actually feels like the characters have conflicting thoughts and feelings, ya know, just like a normal person. This was the saving grace for me, if you can’t provide sky boxes, music and graphics tech that the big budget guys can then you need to lean on the things that all the big boys push farther down the priority list, the writing. 

Afterparty’s story is passable but the key thing is the writing and fleshing out of the characters. Milo and Lola themselves are friends but throughout their conversations you, and by extension them, start to learn that they aren’t as compatible as they first thought. The tour guide you have is mysterious and very flighty, you may have even started to think that she wasn’t fully on your side. It turns out that she only has the best intentions for you and any doubts you may have had are off base but the way she’s played and the conversations you have with her by no means cement that early on. The demon assigned to torture you is delightfully inept and yet loves her job, however that ineptness fantastically subverts your opinion enough to maybe just have missed her real goal. Satan is just a lad that wants to have fun, at first it seems stupid and juvenile but after some backstory his motives become slightly more clear.

Even the background characters are worth listening to every now and again, even if it is just to hear them talk about bowl movements. 

After all the bullshit running about to give demon A something from demon B, the story starts to get to an actual ending and without giving anything away, I very much doubt you can predict it. The reason I’m being vague about the character’s motives is because it all intertwines and adds to one another, so I don’t really want to give too much away to people that may play Afterparty. It’s definitely not a stock story but it does have a stock message, not one I was unhappy about because I think video games are a great vessel for actual moral life lessons. It came across a little preachy but I think it gets a pass because of how you got there. 

As with Oxenfree, Afterparty is a short game that you could finish in a morning. It’s the type of game that you sit back and relax with, nothing too intense but the story and characters could keep you going until the end. 
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