Piccolo Studio’s After Us: An Art Game with a Message
After nearly three years of hard work, Piccolo Studio of Barcelona has nearly finished their second game, After Us. The game is set to launch on May 23 via Private Division on PS5, PC, and Xbox Series X | S. The game’s purpose is to raise awareness about climate change, an issue becoming increasingly more crucial and apparent to society each day.
The game’s storyline begins as Gaia, Mother Earth, and her daughter, and various animals reside in an ark, a sanctuary. Suddenly, animals begin to disappear, and Gaia reveals that life on Earth has been extinguished, but there may be a chance to bring it back. Gaia sends her daughter to find the last specimens to die, which contain Gaia’s energy inside them. If her daughter recovers it, Gaia will be able to bring the planet back to life.
After Us is challenging to explain classically. It is a “platform adventure,” an art game designed to convey a message and make the player reflect. The game’s atmosphere is incredibly oppressive and invites players to explore linear levels that offer one way forward.
The game features a heart of Gaia, a playable sphere of light that players can toss to defeat specific threats and find blue spirits of other animals (outside of the dachshund). The blue spirits populate the apocalyptic world with animals such as fish, horses, and birds that are rarely present.
After Us seeks to provoke a poetic hymn to life, a planet that’s slowly being destroyed by humans, and the sad end that awaits us if we continue to ignore climate change. This game is presented as a sensitive and artistic interpretation of an apocalyptic future that is not far off if humanity continues on its current path.
For our first impressions on After Us, we played the game on PC with an RTX 4080 on 4K and 60 stable fps. The game moves seamlessly and offers impressive graphics, light effects, and sound Vangelis-inspired music. A few technical hiccups occurred throughout the game, but it’s an unfinished product.
We can’t wait to dive more in-depth into this game and offer our full analysis. However, if the rest of the adventure maintains the quality of the first level of the game, we might have one of the great indies of 2023.
