Afterlove EP Review (PC) – In Love With The Sound Of Your Own Voice

The opening scenes of Afterlove EP, a new visual novel rhythm game from Pikselnesia, will hit you pretty hard in the feels. The lead character, Rama, suffers a bereavement as his doting girlfriend Cinta passes away, only to reappear as a voice in his head that will not let him process grief properly at all.

If you know that the lead writer passed away during the development of this game, it hits even harder. Writing convincingly about death in any medium is hard and taxing and cathartic and full of pain, and writing about it in a video game when your mentor and colleague has recently passed away (the second writer stepped up to finish it), gives every scene of Afterlove EP a poignance and emotion you can really feel.

Poignance aside, After Love EP is a deep visual novel about grief and about people and relationships and honesty and working through things and it’s very modern psychological sounding, and there are rhythm bits coz Rama’s in a band. But is there fun to be had in amongst all the catharsis?

Give Voice To The Voiceless

So Rama is a sad boy singer-songwriter, with a mop of hair that falls over his eyes a lot. He’s angsty, emotional, dense and far far more layered and introspective than your average videogame character. It’s no spoiler to say his girlfriend Cinta passes away in the opening scenes. Afterlove EP is set one year later.

Rama is not dealing with grief well. He abandoned his band and bandmates for a year, he stopped going out, he ate simply, and worst of all he started experiencing Cinta as a voice in his head. She’s with him every hour he’s awake, talking, laughing, sharing, and echo-chambering, as if she never died, as if the relationship never ended.

Afterlove EP explores the month that begins when Rama emerges from this year of hibernation and makes contact with the outside world; his estranged and pissed-off bandmates, who are very close to quitting the band but have one final gig booked, new relationships, and strangers who help him process, going to therapy and trying to deal with grief and rejection and betrayal, making it through the day, and all the while talking to Cinta as if she’s right there.

I could appreciate the deep introspective writing and the topics discussed, however Afterlove EP’s dialogue and plot has such a high level of over-analysing and self-monologuing – I mean it’s like the entire conceit of the plot, right – but I’m a simple guy, and nearly 40, and to be honest I may not have been the target audience. Internally monologuing and grieving teenagers are exhausting.  

Throw Your Voice

I got frustrated with Rama, I got frustrated with the pseudo choices, that really only let me go a few set ways before wrenching back to the correct plotline. I wanted to set things right and apologise to these people immediately (and shake off Cinta, and have a nice time with my band), but that wouldn’t have explored half what the developers wanted Rama to go through.

I hated the way Rama would answer Cinta out loud. He knows she is in his head, and similar stories often have characters address their internal voice, you know, internally. It caused a fair amount of the misunderstandings in the plot as people think he’s vacant or he says something offensive. I also found Cinta really toxic and selfish.

At least early on, I wanted Rama to completely ignore her and answer his bandmate’s concerns, they felt more genuine and understandable than the frankly selfish young girl in his head. It feels like the voice doesn’t want him to get better or move on. Like they have a selfish stake in Rama not healing.

If you go in aware that you can’t affect the plot much more than going to see particular characters more than others, you’ll probably be less frustrated by the lack of control. Go along for Rama’s emotional ride and you’ll probably find it relatively cathartic. I think I wanted agency over the way he was acting far too much to then enjoy reading through the issues he had when he inevitably made a bad choice.

A Word In Your Ear

This is a visual novel so it’s pretty light on gameplay. There are about five streets of Jakarta that you can walk down, and visit shops and hangout stops along the way. Despite the small number I used the fast travel map on Rama’s phone constantly because exploring these areas got old in minutes. Don’t waste time walking either – the shoulder bumper makes him sprint.

The narrative is really trying to tell its own story, and what I mean by that is that this isn’t an open-ended thing where your choices matter. You are given opportunities to choose a few responses, but they are just variations on saying exactly the same thing (often making a situation worse). Please don’t give me the illusion of narrative choice when it doesn’t actually exist.

You can choose how you spend your days to some extent, a bit like Persona. You can busk, or visit one of your friends/acquaintances. There are Cinta memories to find. You have an afternoon and an evening most days (unless otherwise plotted) and there are thirty aimless days to fill. Again as a busy modern man, the aimless days of an unemployed grieving singer-songwriter were often irritating. I wanted to solve solve solve, and I wanted to use his time so much more productively.

There are also three romance options and relationships to pursue. I played the game through once and it’s kind of hard to puzzle out every route on a first playthrough. I’m also not writing a guide here but a review. Through whatever series of events I watched, and who-knows-what-points-system, I managed to get a bad ending. I thought for the most part you could choose your ‘romance’ path, not that it’s overt or anything. But the longer you play the more these paths seem to have set parameters, and at least one ended in a way I didn’t want.

There are a lot of days and instances where particular characters aren’t available, so I think probably by spreading my time a little too widely between all the characters, I didn’t do quite enough to secure one as a successful romance. I’m not sure. Maybe take your first playthrough as an experiment and then use a second one to target a romance or scenario you wanted to achieve.

It Ain’t Over Until The Little Emo-Boy Sings

As this is also a rhythm game, let’s tackle the music as gameplay. I thought a visual novel rhythm game would live or die on the strength of the music but generally it was so heavy (emotionally) in the other areas I’ve covered, that the rhythm sections took a major backseat. As such it wasn’t the strength or weakness of the music that really made much difference to me.

That said, the soundtrack is real nice. Afterlove EP has loads of great ambient tracks with a good vibe to them for just conversations and exploring, and the actual songs you get to play are often pretty nice. I read that a real Jakartan band called L’Alphalpha contributed the bulk of the music and it’s all appropriately emo and fits the game well, even if I couldn’t understand the words much.

When I say the rhythm part of the game feels secondary, it’s exemplified by how ungamified it is. It’s a little strange to have a rhythm game with ‘Perfect’ and ‘Good’ popping up constantly during the practice segments, but then never to have any grading of your success or failure, or a score, or anything much at all. I was able to pass any song, no matter how badly I played – sometimes characters will comment that you were great, or off your game. They must be judging something to get that dialogue pop up. At one point close to the end, I achieved a perfect score on a practice track, popped a Steam achievement even, but that was the only scoring that ever appeared.

I Hear What You Say

I want to talk about the aesthetic of the whole thing. You can see the artwork yourself in these screenshots. The style of Afterlove EP feels very love it or hate it. There’s a sketch-like quality to the avatars and characters, and you’ll either find that charming and emo and lovable, or you’ll find it does nothing for you. It’s a 2D world where you stiffly walk or run and chat to friends and it doesn’t need to look like much more than this, but I personally could have done with more defined characters.

I also had a pretty regular bug where Cinta’s voiceover would end early, before her line was fully finished and that would then also mean the text would disappear before I’d had chance to read it. It seemed to be sorted by pressing the text log and sort of resetting things, and of course there I could read what I missed. I think it was always caused by fumbling with the auto-dialogue which had a slightly odd UI.  

Voice of Reason

Afterlove EP may be appearing on Valentine’s Day, but be warned, this is sad boy territory. I found it quite depressing in places. I wouldn’t have wanted to play having just had an argument, a break-up, a bereavement, or even after a sad movie. But there is also hope and resolution and often bright moments to level out the low ones.

It’s going to be able to bring some catharsis, and probably more so if you need to work through any of these kinds of topics yourself. So maybe that really depends on the kind of person you are and what you are personally going through. There is deft and heartfelt writing in there, dealing with some intensely emotional subjects. There is also a cast of very young emotionally exhausting characters and a lack of control over the narrative that frustrated me as an older player.

I wanted more control over the narrative’s direction. I wanted more rhythm sections with real passing and failing. Conversely, I wanted to speed it up because I wanted to productively manage Rama’s time – I wanted to get done in a week what took him a month.

Afterlove EP is available February 14th 2025 on Steam (review platform), PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch and Xbox Series S|X

Developer: Pikselnesia
Publisher: Fellow Traveller

Disclaimer: In order to complete this review, we were provided with a promotional copy of the game. For our full review policy, please go here.

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