New game: "Shadows of the Afterland"!

New game!

Here's one I've been looking forward to for a while now! Shadows of the Afterland by Aruma Studios is a perfect fit for everyone who loves classic style pixel art point 'n click adventure games. After their previous title, Intruder in Antiquonia, I was hoping for something with a bit more meat on its bones. Well... It's still kinda missing that, since it's a game about ghosts... But anyway, you know what I mean!

Oh, the bureaucracy...

The premise is a bit difficult to explain... You play as Carolina, a detective from the year 1988, who is somehow transported into the astral body of a maid named Pilar, who for some unknown reason was pulled out of her body in 1960 and watched her rogue vessel get struck by lightning and fall into the polar bear pit at the Madrid zoo. Carolina, in the shape of Pilar's ghost, is now stuck in the afterlife, and it's your job to figure out what exactly happened to her. It's a very strange mystery and I'm really curious how they will explain it all.

That's definitely a book I would read!

The game is fully voiced, with the lovely Ivy Dupler as the main lead Carolina, but the entire cast performs with high quality. The pixel art graphics are slightly cartoonish but not over the top silly. It employs a one-click interface, with an inventory at the bottom of the screen. There are inventory puzzles and you'll have to talk to other characters to figure things out. You can save manually, but there's also an autosave on exit, which is very handy (but I'm old school so I still save manually, anyway...)

This guy is Afterlife-Stan...

So after having played for an hour, I can say I'm enjoying myself. So far it's not too difficult, I'm also not overloaded with inventory items. There are loads of locations and characters already, but there's also an overview map that's hardly been filled so I expect there's a lot more to come. The objectives are very clear, and it's also helpful that Carolina will say so if you don't really have to talk to a certain character anymore (and it's also helpful that she will automatically say the last available dialogue option or quit a conversation).

This guy should be able to help me; if I can convince him!

My primary goal at the moment is convincing a former "spectral agent" to help me get back to the world of the living so I can start investigating my own death. There are a couple of steps I still need to take for that, so let's dive right back into this realm of the dead!

You can find Shadows of the Afterland on Steam and on itch.io.