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Afterimage
Afterimage combines non-linear exploration with fast-paced combat and varied character builds. The offer is ≈ $1.85 from 
Kinguin; the player rating of 79% across 7,029 reviews can help inform your decision.
Equipment and abilities support different fighting styles, while multiple possible endings give Renee’s actions weight. Whether the current price suits your budget depends on how much this blend of exploration and action appeals to you. At Steam’s $24.99, this offer saves ≈ $23.14 compared with Steam.
Loading store offersAll-time low ~ $1.50across Steam & third-party stores
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Price History
Past 36 months · Updated dailyHistorical Low~ $1.052026-07Current Low Across Stores~ $2.18Kinguinvs. Historical Low+108%
Prices cover Steam and 39 authorized stores; only legitimate offers are counted. The chart shows weekly market-wide lows and Steam's official price across the past 36 months.
01About Afterimage
Afterimage is a hand-drawn 2D action adventure in which Renee travels through the ruins of Engardin to recover her memories and find her missing mentor. Explore a non-linear world, fight enemies and bosses, and shape your combat style with abilities and equipment. Steam player reviews: 79% positive from 7,029 reviews.
Credits
Developer
Aurogon Shanghai
Publisher
Maximum Entertainment
Lowest recorded in 36 months
$1.052026-07-30 · KinguinBase game · same records as the chart above; USD history, not a regional Steam low.Language support
| Language | Interface | Subtitles | Audio |
|---|---|---|---|
| Simplified Chinese | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Traditional Chinese | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| English | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Show 8 more languages
| Language | Interface | Subtitles | Audio |
|---|---|---|---|
| French | Yes | Yes | — |
| Italian | Yes | Yes | — |
| German | Yes | Yes | — |
| Spanish | Yes | Yes | — |
| Russian | Yes | Yes | — |
| Japanese | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Korean | Yes | Yes | — |
| Portuguese-Brazil | Yes | Yes | — |
Steam PC edition data · 2026-10-26
02Before you buy
Play mode and controls
The Steam PC version is single-player and has full controller support.
Language and audio
The interface is available in English, among other languages. English and Chinese have full audio; German is not listed.
03Frequently asked questions
What is the story about?
After her village is attacked, Renee sets out to recover her memories and find her missing mentor.
How does exploration work?
The interconnected world is non-linear, and new abilities open further routes and shortcuts.
How does character development work?
Equipment, talent points, and weapon skills let you shape different character and combat builds.
Are there multiple endings?
Renee’s actions can lead to multiple endings.
Popular Steam reviews
Native-language selection · 10 reviewsSelected helpful reviews in this language show both recommendations and criticisms. This selection does not represent the overall positive rating; opinions reflect the version reviewed.
RecommendedSteam player
If you played the demo, you probably mostly know how you'll feel about the game. It's very colorful and you find weapons of different types as you explore. You start with just a sword, but also find great swords, scythes, whips, and at least one other type of sword. There's a ton of space and the level design isn't extremely memorable, but it's memorable enough for you to recognize certain spots. The map also lets you place up to 200 reminders with various icons, which is nice. Combat feels pretty good to me, as it's similar to a lot of classic games in the subgenre. You can have two weapons equipped at once and most weapon hits will keep the majority of enemies from attacking. You can dash forward or backward, which I think works quite well, but you don't get I-frames, so don't be expect to constantly dash through enemy attacks. A lot of enemy projectile attacks can be knocked back to enemies and you can equip a tome to use elemental magic spells. Weapons can be improved with a consumable you'll find on occasion, but you absolutely won't want to use these all the time, as you consistently find better weapons. Afterimage is an action-RPG, of course, and the main character, Renee, levels up upon accruing sufficient experience, which grants you talent points that can be spent on a skill tree. You'll also find talent points whilst exploring. These will give your stats a buff, as well as teach you new abilities for specific weapons. I'm fairly satisfied with all of this. The exploration is similar, as I really feel like the game does a fantastic job of incentivizing you to look in every nook and cranny, as there's a lot of great stuff to find. You'll naturally also be able to backtrack and find new stuff with your movement abilities. Now for the stuff I'm not crazy about. When you die, you lose all of the experience you have on you since the last time you level up. This obviously isn't a giant deal and you'll get it all back by touching it at the spot you perished. Afterimage also makes use of a bonfire equivalent, so you'll respawn at these, as well as heal. Resting will bring back any defeated enemies and refill your healing charges too. The game isn't all that difficult, though, and there's no stamina management or anything of that sort, although your MP will recover over time. The bonfire equivalents are quite far from one another, though. The map also doesn't fill in automatically, and it only fills in the places you've been upon using a bonfire equivalent, which I don't mind so much. As for another thing I don't care for, you can only fast travel by using a consumable (at least, so far). This obviously puts a major damper on going back and exploring, but these consumable might be easy to come by later. Early on, I only found a single one of these, so don't expect to find them all the time in your first few hours. Overall, I'm enjoying the game and it offers most of what I like to see in a Metroidvania. It also appears to be fairly lengthy.Show moreShow less
4.2 hours at review134 people found this helpful
Not recommendedSteam player
First the good, then the bad, you know the drill. The game looks beautiful, from background to character, weapons, magic, enemies, NPCs, everything is quite nice to look at which helps to lessen the frustration of all the bullpoop that is thrown your way but more of that later. It has all the hallmarks a proper metroidvania should have. Vast areas, exploration of said vast areas, abilites that increase your mobility that open up different parts or entirely new areas, leveling system including a Talenttree with skills that have levels too!, a good variety of weapons and magic and gear that sometimes comes with effects like bleed and poison debuffs or dmg changes like "this weapon deals fire dmg", main and sidequests, interesting story and so on and so forth. If you think of something a metroidvania should have, you probably will find it in Afterimage in one shape or another. And that is also the crux about this game, it has everything, but it alway feels half-assed. Talenttree with skills that have sublevels ? Yes, but the increments are so small that you wouldn't notice them unless you put multiple points in the same talent at once. The Talenttree also includes attacks for your various weapons which sounds nice but mostly are attacks that should be a given. Things like being able to hit upwarts or downwards for example. The idea is nice, but the execution mostly leaves you asking yourself whether it was really necessary to do it this way. One would think it's a normal thing to be able to strike upwards while standing or downwards while midair, no ? This leads to the next problem, the combat. Aside from having difficulties to hit aerial enemies because of the aforementioned restrictions in striking directions, the enemy placement itself is in a lot of cases rather irritating. There are a lot of platforming sections in this game, as should be in a metroidvania, but more often than not you're greeted by a flying enemy right in the path of the last small platform to either hit your without being able to dodge or simply bump into you so that you fall all the way down just to do the whole segment again. I understand that games need a certain level of difficulty to be interesting but man, nobody wants that level of buttholery for every damn platforming section. Another problem with the fighting is the telegraphing and dodging. You can dash back and forth but every enemy has contactdmg followed by a healthy knockback. Combined with the lack of telegraphing attacks from basically every enemy and you'll find yourself in a weird overly precautious fighting style of barely getting a hit in and then dashing away twice to see what happens next. This als extends to the bossfights. Big monsters with even bigger hitboxes, no telegraphed attacks with no visible ways to dodge in very small rooms. You'll always just tank whatever attack comes next, heal through it and try to dmg race the foe to death. It's very unsatisfying. Pair that with the fact that after most of those fights you don't get any loot of any significance and you'll very quickly lose any interest fighting or beating any boss unless it's absolutely necessary. The variety of weaons is nice, several close and mid range combat weapons are available early on in the game. Some are slower, some are faster with the usual pros and cons and through the talenttree you'll also get ideas for possible pairings of weapons (you're allowed to equip 2 weapons and 1 spell) for further increase your dmg output. However, it does feel as if weaponupgrades are quite sparse so you'll end up feeling constantly weaker than everybody else so that it's always n uphill battle, some might like that but i would find an even playing field more enjoyable. The third point I want to mention in more detail is the size of the map. It is truly humongous, which on first glance is great. You can run around for hours simply exploring the areas and you'll have plenty to find and look it. However, you'll also get lost, often. You do have a map but other than Area names and a couple markers you can set yourself that thing only shows you rooms and that's about it. Telporters and resting points are shown as well but nothing else. No npcs, no cities, no doors, no elevators (although those are mostly selfexplained but massive "tubes on the map but still) no nothing. With maps as massive as in this game a couple markers (even if it was only names for subterritories in a given area) would greatly help. There's a bunch of other things noteworthy, some of them are: -you pick up money but have nothing truly interesting to spend it on -the mainquest you get in the beginning is so far out in the map that it's kind of hilarious that the devs bothered in the first place to even show you where to go :D -the movement abilities you can get are scattered so far from each other that you can easily look for multiple hours and not find anything which is quite demotivating -resting points are sometimes weirdly positioned so that corpse runs are quite tedious -there's sidequests but doing them feels more like happenstance than an actual part of the game The basic construct for a great game is there, it just needs more full-assing of all the half-assed stuff the devs alrdy put in. I hope for a lot of changes in the future because I'd like to finish the game sooner or later.Show moreShow less
17.4 hours at review121 people found this helpful
RecommendedSteam player
Loved it, 100%ed it, but can only recommend it with a number of caveats. - incomprehensible story, writing feels machine-translated despite the voice acting; - item pickups vanish into your inventory without an explanation, good luck finding what you just picked up; - very directionless, even for the standards of the genre; - the NPC quests actively suck, they're similar to Dark Souls in that NPCs just teleport all over the place and you're supposed to accidentally run into them... I just looked them up, no patience for this; - overall jank, both in programming and in art direction (some sprites clash a lot). That said: The movement and moment-to-moment gameplay is so much fun. If you're experienced with Metroidvanias, are somewhat tolerant towards jank, and are looking for another big one to sink your teeth into, this one's not a bad choice!Show moreShow less
29.9 hours at review93 people found this helpful
Not recommendedSteam player
This game has a lot going for it, but it ultimately drops the ball. This game tries to have challenging, but fair boss fights like Dark Souls, but bad hitboxes, enemies with auto-homing that hit you after you dodge, and some literally undodgeable attacks kill any satisfaction that could be had from winning. It wasn't you that won. It was just luck. The game is so bad at hitboxes, that the game can't even keep its own rules straight. Sometimes enemies deal contact damage, while other times, you HAVE to stand on top of the enemy to avoid its attacks, with no indication whatsoever that contact damage has inexplicably disappeared. Even worse, there's no difficulty curve. The regular enemies are brain-dead the whole way through, and the bosses are curbstomp fights up until a certain point, when all of a sudden they turn into brick walls with no chance to prepare. The other systems are half-baked too. It has a convoluted talent tree, but it's false complexity. Level restrictions stop you from actually specializing in one stat or another, so fans of in-depth character customization won't like it. Those who just want to get into the game won't like it either because you have to hunt and peck for which nodes you can put points into. (You can't tell at a glance). This pleases no one, and I honestly can't think of a worse way to design a talent tree. The talent tree's special attacks you unlock are almost all garbage. Worse to have than not. With greatswords, for example, there's a diving sword thrust where the moment your sword makes contact with the enemy, YOU take damage, and not them. Did the designers never actually use that move?? The rest just lock you in place for a long time and do less damage than animation-cancelling your regular attacks by spamming the jump button. Weapons are similarly half-baked. Each new weapon is always superior to the last, and the cool side-stats or special abilities are never enough to keep an old weapon, which is a massive disappointment. Weapon upgrade potions never get used because the damage boost they give is insignificant, and they're non-renewable. Magic costs such an absurd amount of mp that you can only use it twice at best, so I just forgot about it entirely. On the plus side, the secrets are fun to find, and the movement controls well. Unfortunately, the key hallmark of metroidvanias - secret shortcuts that connect previously far away zones, is lacking because of how spread out everything is.Show moreShow less
16.9 hours at review87 people found this helpful
RecommendedSteam player
I just completed this game in ~45 hours, less than two weeks after I bought it. Of course, part of that is having more time around the holidays, part of it is the convenience of playing stuff on the Steam Deck, but it also shows that the game really was motivating me to keep going. This is not something that too many single-player games manage to do these days, at least not consistently for this amount of time. Afterimage is basically just a massive, mostly very well-executed Metroidvania. A standout quality of the game are the graphics and the variety on display. There are lots of areas in the game and they all have fundamentally distinct and beautiful graphics, and there's also a huge variety of enemies. Both the basic and advanced movement and combat mechanics are also great, and everything flows and controls well. The variety extends to these gameplay aspects as well, with lots of different weapons and spells with unique movesets and even an array of special moves. There are also tons of build options, between the talent tree, "afterimage" system, and various equipment with special effects that benefit different playstyles. Level and world design are also overall very good, with lots of different progression routes and a staggering amount of hidden paths and secrets. The game claims to be non-linear, and I've rarely seen this being as accurate in a Metroidvania as it is for this game. From my perspective at least, there are really only two aspects which keep this from being an absolute classic greatest-of-all-time entry in the genre: translation and balance. Regarding the former, the main story dialogue translation is acceptable and sometimes even quite nice (note: I didn't play with English VA so I can't judge that). Sadly, all other text which is never spoken (i.e. item descriptions, quest log entries, and a lot more) is absolutely terrible in terms of translation quality, on the level that it is sometimes even hard to decipher the meaning. Balance is more difficult to judge, and I personally am not too hard on the game regarding that. It is a Metroidvania that leans more heavily into the "RPG" aspect, in the tradition of Igavanias, and these games have a hard time being balanced simply by design. For me, as someone that like to explore everything and find all secrets as early as possible, given the ability to use various items in battle there were really only 2 or 3 fights in the game that presented any difficulty. This is mostly just a bit of a shame because the game has a huge amount of bosses with great design and interesting movesets, and I was able to facetank 75%+ of them on the first try. Overall, if the idea of exploring a beautiful Metroidvania where you place literally 100+ map markers for things to return to later with new skills and then slowly work through them appeals to you, and if you can deal with some bad translation and balancing issues, then I can recommend Afterimage wholeheartedly. If any of the developers/publishers read this: spend some money on getting a higher-quality English translation. Your game deserves it.Show moreShow less
45.4 hours at review79 people found this helpful
Not recommendedSteam player
Afterimage is certainly no Hollow Knight. It's no Bloodstained, either. I'm sorry to say it's not even on the level of Ender Lilies, a game that itself was deeply flawed. While I ended up liking Ender Lilies enough to 100% it, I can't bring myself to want to keep going in Afterimage despite being nowhere near the end. So, compliments out of the way: The game's really pretty. The art style is consistently great and every area is beautiful and visually distinct, even if the biome placement makes the world as a whole feel like generic fantasy setting #1701520 with arbitrary metroidvania obstacle courses every so often. The music's serviceable - none of it's memorable, but none of it's really bad either, with the sole exception of the miniboss music being the wrong kind of silly. You'll notice I couldn't really mention anything good about this game without bringing up a flaw. That's going to be a theme here. Afterimage's cardinal sin is its combat. Let's get the good out of the way - there's no stamina bar to deal with. Yep, that's it. As for the bad: You take contact damage from 99% (but not 100%) of enemies, your dash animation is long with sizable endlag, and iframe access is build dependent for most of the game, but the bosses still dash around at hyperspeed and launch attacks with enormous hitboxes like they're going out of style. Several people are already typing "skill issue" but I don't mind hard bosses as long as they're good. Nightmare King Grimm is one of my all-time favorite fights, and he assaults you quickly and relentlessly, but everything he does has a distinct and obvious telegraph and can be reliably avoided. Afterimage's fights are not remotely on that level. Bosses can chunk you in 2-3 hits, but they also frequently have 1/4 second windups or less, have nearly the same windup for 2-3 completely different attacks, and can commit to an attack what feels like 1 frame after their sprite flips. There are plenty of flying enemies to harass you and plenty of enemies camping ledges, but you can't cast spells in midair because you can't cast while moving, and the only two weapons that are decent at hitting enemies above you when you're in midair each have significant drawbacks. Weapons have unlockable special attacks but most of them have enough start- and/or endlag that they do about the same amount of damage as regular attacks while decreasing your mobility, if they don't just slide you forward and make you take contact damage. Out of the 16 weapon skills I unlocked, only 5 or 6 were actually useful. The rest were overly situational, entirely pointless, or actively detrimental (special mention to the greatsword plunge that makes you take damage instead of the enemy). Compare to Ender Lilies: that game had plenty of its own problems with combat to be sure, but the enemies were generally slower and easier to read despite (or perhaps because of) also dealing contact damage, your weapons and subweapons were more reliable, and you started the game with iframes on your dash. Hollow Knight had fast enemies dealing contact damage but their fast attacks all had obvious tells while your own attacks had knockback and no windup. The combat isn't the only part Afterimage doesn't get right, though. The controls are unpolished. The best example is that the pogo bounce (down + A) doesn't work if the game thinks you're pressing diagonally. This would be bearable on a d-pad, but on a stick it becomes frustrating really fast, especially in the jumping puzzles. The world is just too big for its own good. At the time of writing this review, I have played Afterimage for longer than it took me to 100% Ender Lilies, and I still haven't unlocked the iframes on dash. I have encountered bosses that are designed to deal unavoidable damage if you can't dodge through them or their attacks, though. (Yes, this is Loss.) You are going to get lost in this game, but rarely for the good metroidvania reasons that you can't remember where to find all the paths your new upgrade will let you take or you've missed an unexplored door on the edge of the map somewhere. Instead it will be because you need to talk to an unmarked NPC in the middle of nowhere, who will then teleport you to a new area and/or send you on a chain of fetch quests to acquire the item (not powerup) you need to continue. At one point I was locked from progressing because the game played a cutscene showing me a direction I shouldn't go in because a powerful enemy just went that way, except that was actually the only way to progress and I only found out hours later after I'd forgotten that cutscene entirely. The next time it happened I ignored the cutscene, died instantly, and the game made fun of me for ignoring the cutscene. Boss save point placement is subpar. Sometimes the nearest save point is reasonably placed, but usually you have to walk for at least half a minute, and sometimes you need to go through a half dozen enemies and ride two elevators that you had to call from a different floor than you. Bloodstained and Ender Lilies always had a save point next door, and Hollow Knight eventually let you set warp points to bypass its worse corpse runs. No such luck in Afterimage. Talent trees can be great systems, this game's version is not. Each individual node only gives you a 1-2% boost to a single stat (most of which only show up once or twice in the whole tree), and several nodes have level-locked upgrades but there's no visual indicator to say whether you can or can't buy or upgrade a node unless you hover over it. Your weapon skills are all talent locked to discourage you from experimenting, which is extra baffling when this game also has secret skill scrolls that double-lock some of them behind exploration. There is a lot of gear, but it suffers from mostly the same problems as the talent tree. All of it is a small incremental base stat upgrade from something else with maybe a 2% bonus to critical hit chance or a +5 to defense as additional effects. If the game's really feeling fancy it'll throw you a 10% bonus with a 30% demerit. There's a weapon upgrade system, but it just gives even smaller incremental upgrades, won't stop you from abandoning early weapons for later ones, and doesn't work on armor or accessories. Exploration just doesn't feel rewarding. On very rare occasions you'll find something meaningful, like a glyph (read: estus charge), an accessory slot, an afterimage (read: charm), an afterimage slot, or 1/3 of a health/mana bar upgrade. The rest of it is weapon/talent upgrade points, gear, consumables, and money. And there's no real rhyme or reason as to what will be where. The most fiendishly hidden area of a region containing a moderately difficult jumping puzzle might only have a fast travel potion. The translation is very rough - the opening cutscene gives you a good idea of what to expect for the rest of the game. All the dialogue is also voice acted in English, you'd think they could have spent their budget on a proper translation instead. Most of the time it's just vaguely confusing, but sometimes it's actively misleading to progression. Even when it's readable, the story is pretty generic and only memorable for the times where it just gives up and has bad stuff allegedly happen to you during cutscenes that gets immediately resolved before you regain control. Again, compare to Ender Lilies: the controls were generally solid, the world was way less padded and felt like it could plausibly exist, the one time I got stuck with no idea how to progress ended up being my fault for setting the gamma too low, there weren't any wasted systems, and the translation and writing were both solid. It's disappointing because under all the jank I can see a lot of potential in Afterimage. But potential is all it is.Show moreShow less
25.9 hours at review78 people found this helpful
RecommendedSteam player
Just popping my review in to balance out some of the silly ones. The game's pretty, the combat feels responsive and fluid, the weapon types are neat. I'd recommend anyone who liked Ori, Dust an Elysian Tail, or Hollow Knight to try it. Positives: - Combat is fluid, responsive and fun, you can even deflect projectiles back at enemies. - Decent weapon variety and you can wield two at once like in Ori. - The map is huge, lots of places to explore. - The artstyle is gorgeous, the enemy and boss designs are neat, all around good looking game. - The music is good, it's not going to stick in your head like Ori's did but it's doing its job and it's doing it well. - The story is there, it's pretty standard for a Metroidvania plot, it works and I'm not here for plot anyway. I do have some gripes though but I don't think they take away from the experience enough to not recommend though they might detract someone from buying it: -Resource-based fast travel is pretty cumbersome, especially with how distant each "bonfire" is, these resources are limited and can't be bought, meaning you have a finite number of fast travels. UPDATE: You can buy the potions to fast-travel anywhere now! -Healing is relegated to relatively rare potions, or the innate heal your character gets from the getgo, but she only gets additional ones later on, quite a bit later on too, meaning you have whatever potions you find +1 heal and only the innate heal restores on death. You have a magic bar, but you don't get a healing spell at least as far as I've gotten. UPDATE: Mentioned above but consumables can be bought now for relatively cheap. -Some enemy animations are pretty ambiguous making you guess where or how to dodge. Not a big deal once you have mobility abilities and the greatsword parry but early it can be troublesome. -The game doesn't seem to recognise certain inputs (down+attack, jump+attack) at times it's supposed to like for extending jumps. I'm sure it's an issue that can be patched out so it's not that big a deal. UPDATE!: That was a slight translation error as I thought. -The voice acting and dialogue/translation are pretty rough in some spots, if you're like me though that doesn't matter you're in it for the gameplay. -The menu transitions and transitions to the title screen are pretty long. It takes 5 seconds or so to get back to the Load File screen, not a problem normally but if you're speedrunning it can be. On launch it takes about half a minute to get to the title screen as well. If you played any of the inspirations this game has then you kinda know what to expect, it's relatively by the numbers on that end but it's pretty good for what it is, aside from those complaints. Lol. Edit: I play games like this on my Deck which is offline most of the time to save battery so my playtime is weird. Edit 2: The latest patch fixed or cleared up my major gripes with the game, I can wholeheartedly recommend it.Show moreShow less
0.9 hours at review59 people found this helpful
Not recommendedSteam player
Heres the thing. I love a metroidvania, and the art style is great. A+ even. The lush backrounds and 2.5d movement is on par with some of the best in this genre. However, in games of this style, two things make the game great. Combat and exploration. As many other reviews mention, a lack of mini-map seriously hinders this. Especially since quick travel to areas you've already explored requires items that as to the writing of this review I have not found to be renewable. Overall the platforming is relatively smooth, and abilities you unlock make it much more fluid as you go along. The problem becomes that the game gives little to no direction or guiding to explain what path is going to dead end in a one way gate (which I'm going to explain in a second) or is a viable progression path. Combat here really suffers. The enemy types are varied enough, but your options for combat aren't. Attacks all seem flavored towards melee, with a supporting magic that I found really underwhelming. The only true raged option is a whip which immediately becomes short range in the air, and on the ground is one of the slowest start up weapons you have. You do get staves and magic books, but the magic system is very very resource dependant, and 2-3 casts of your spells and you are tapped and either have to chug a potion to get back pretty abysmal damage or wait for it to regen over time which takes too long in a boss fight to be viable. Here is where the real meat of the problem with this game lies. The map is insanely big, like far bigger than other map sizes in its genre. The developers decided to use a combo of skill gates, which require items you find throughout the game to pass, and one way gates, which require you to find the other side of it to unlock it, most of the time as a short cut back to an area you've already visited. THERE ARE SO MANY ONE WAY GATES. Far far too many, and with a lack of mini-map, you end up bouncing between the overmap, and back to the game to path find a way to the gate. Most of the time, the one way gate is a short cut unlocked by a skill gate check but because there is no mini map, the game wants you to go to the over map, mark a location with its sticker system, and then come back with the required skill. ALL OF THAT COULD HAVE BEEN SOLVED WITH AN AUTO-MARK SYSTEM. It would have taken very little time and a small amount of effort to auto mark an impassible gate with a little icon so you know where it is and what skill is needed to progress through it. One way gates get an arrow indicating the direction of the needed bypass. Skill gates get an icon matching that skill. Very simple QOL solution. On top of that, the map system at times is very cluttered and your personal location icon is huge. It actively blocks part of the screen ahead when you are at say a door or pathway so that you can;t see if what is in front of you leads to a path or a wall. They made the map zoom able meaning you can zoom in and out, and then didn;t adjust the player icon to minimize as well. Lastly, I will say some of the puzzle/timing platforming is really cheap. The whole water pulse platforming section where if your foot even brushes the water you warp back to some arbitrary point at the beginning of the puzzle is really lame. I haven't beaten the game, and as it stands right now I more than likely won't. There wasn't enough hook in the combat to get me excited for bosses and combat challenges, the map is so overwhelming that the exploration is tedious and time consuming. The story...well...the story isn't aimed at a western audience, and the dialog is written in such a way as to be very flat and lifeless. I'm sure its more compelling in its original language, and thats on the localization team who converted the written text to spoken word for the voice actors. Overall, I would say this is a labor of love game for die hard MV fans, but most people will be off put by a whole slew of issues that keep it firmly in the "had potential" category.Show moreShow less
9.5 hours at review71 people found this helpful
RecommendedSteam player
The gameplay is great. The world is large. The narrative is completely idiotic. Apparently things happened before. Now you kill things en masse. Sometimes there are conversations that feel like the work of ChatGpt- early beta. There are words. They make sense in isolation but as sentences ... they are just gibberish. I killed enough things to get a credit roll, but I have no idea what really happened. Still, the gameplay was fun and I don't require a sensible story for thatShow moreShow less
34.2 hours at review53 people found this helpful
Not recommendedSteam player
Afterimage is a beautiful game with many ideas and systems, but the main issue is that none of the ideas were thought through. The game looks very beautiful and it's main appeal are the hand drawn graphics. Backgrounds are nice and lively and it is very pleasant to look at. The style can look overdesigned at times. Music is really soothing, atmospheric and strengthens the ambient of their respective zones and moments. And that is where the praise ends. Gameplay seems fun at first, and does have some interesting traversing challenges. Afterimage implemented RPG like leveling up system with a somewhat okay skill tree in size, but with +1 damage type passive upgrades. The skill tree is very messy in its design, multiple points can be put in the same node and you can't tell at a glance which upgrade is available. Besides passive bonuses they also grant weapon moves which are disappointing in damage and actual usage. The biggest sin is "diversified character builds" the game is claiming, as you are basically railroaded into having points in every node if you level up enough. The only difference in build is which weapons you use. You don't have invincibility frames on dodge which is very weird choice as you can't react to attacks that are frequently instantaneous. Environment doesn't help either, as you will be restricted in movement. Enemy attacks are often random and with bosses' attacks being mostly impossible to read. Bosses, while mixed bag in mechanics, are almost always simple DPS races. Some of the important gameplay upgrades come waaay too late. Map is too big to go for what the game designers decided here. As in every metroidvania, there are obstacles and hidden paths that become available after some new items/abilities are acquired. Every region in the game has almost all types of this hidden areas. You will have to backtrack to every area to check if you can traverse any of those paths with currently available skills every single time you unlock something. Another sin is the locked doors which appear 5 hours before you acquire the key. With all the hidden paths good luck at remembering everything (and guessing if the right door for the key). That wouldn't be problem if the exploration isn't meaningless. Rewards for your exploration are often meaningless - some credits, skill point, small upgrades, weapons barely stronger than what you have that will be outclassed in hour or two. If you have any completionistic tendencies this will very quickly turn into chore. The game does give you tools for the map and it actually expects you to use them. Another problem is the lack of minimap. You basically have to look at the map all the time to traverse the area while backtracking. The fast travel is gated behind consumables which can be bought with credits. The fast travel points aren't always places where'd you want them. Story is in typical Soulslike fashion obscure and almost impossible to follow. It is very contrived, bombarding the player with unnecessary terminology and references to events that player has no way to memorize. The translation doesn't help either. It's also told through key items which the game bombards you with. You end up with so many gems orb and whatnot and until the plot demands, you really have no idea what is their purpose despite the description. The game suffers the disconnect in the tone. All characters and plot points convey the mood of tragedy and sadness but the game is overly vibrant with colour as it tries too hard to seem like an adventure. The tone of the areas mostly overwhelms the story. As scarce as the plot is, it'll be very hard for story to drive you going forward. The menus aren't organized good either as you have to scroll through couple of them to get to the one you need. And most of the time you will need some adjusting through sub menus to get to what you're looking for. There is a weapon upgrade system but is hidden away as the game suffers from many other contrivances and obscurities. In conclusion the game is well made but too ambitious. Most of the features, while complete, were not planned well and their implementations lack practicality. The gameplay isn't good and story isn't strong enough to drive you to the end. It tries to give you playtime for your money but in the end it doesn't respect your time.Show moreShow less
19.3 hours at review56 people found this helpful
Source: original Steam user reviews. Helpful votes are an archived snapshot, not live data. Last collected: 08/15/2026.