REVIEW: ‘Afterlove EP’ Is A Beautiful Story Stuck In A Frustrating Game

Afterlove EP is the last visual novel to be worked on by Mohammad Fahmi, the creator of Coffee Talk and What Comes After, as he unfortunately passed away in 2022. Fahmi’s passing makes the game’s release by his studio Pikselnesia and the publisher Fellow Traveller impressive and touching in its own right. It also makes the title’s themes of moving on and processing grief through art all the more impactful.

Afterlove EP is set in the Indonesian capital, Jakarta, and follows Rama. Players are first introduced to Rama on the night of a gig he plays with his band, the wonderfully titled Sigmund Feud. The following day, however, Rama receives a call that his girlfriend, Cinta, has been rushed to the hospital. She dies in the intensive care unit, and the story jumps forward one year.

When the player jumps back into Rama’s life, they learn that his grief has made him reclusive while he has struggled to process the loss of Cinta properly. Over the year, he barely talked to his bandmates, lost his job, stopped working on music, and started speaking to Cinta in his head. However, he is just beginning to emerge from the solitude of his grief by reaching out to his two bandmates and trying to get the band back together to pick up where they left off one year prior.

This is where Afterlove EP kicks off.

The player follows and guides Rama through the visual novel, rhythm game, and dating sim gameplay. Players can choose activities to take up each day, like going to therapy sessions or hanging out with particular characters to deepen Rama’s relationship with them. How a player decides to have Rama spend his time determines how, or even if, Rama processes his grief and which ending the player will experience.

The narrative is where Afterlove EP shines. The characters are each beautifully realized and feel very human. They’re messy, with grounded beliefs, fun interactions, and biting jabs when there is friction between them. The game isn’t afraid to put its characters and players in uncomfortable, human interactions as the characters overcome their shared trauma and the complications it introduced to their relationships. Thankfully, the game’s writing is skillful enough to pull these scenes off with empathy and a critical sense of realism.

Many of the characters Rama interacts with throughout the story are romance options for the player to pursue. However, each character has an excellent storyline for the player to experience even without seeking them romantically. Unfortunately, it is also in the well-written stories that the player starts to run up against the more frustrating elements of Afterlove EP.

The multiple relationships Rama builds throughout Afterlove EP have pivotal moments of conflict that require the player to take specific actions if they want the relationship’s story to end well. However, these actions are not well communicated to the player, and there is no way to monitor the progress of Rama’s relationships.

The gameplay in Afterlove EP becomes frustrating.

So, it is very easy to invest considerable in-game time and effort into a relationship just for it to go south because you cannot figure out what hidden solution is needed to remedy a fight. It is incredibly frustrating and can detract from the impact of the otherwise powerful ending.

Afterlove EP also has some frequent bugs that mar the experience. Later sections of the game result in many crashes, especially one that boasts various unique locations. The most significant bug, however, is related to Cinta’s voice in Rama’s head. In a brilliant artistic flair, Cinta is the only voiced character in the game, and her actress, Risa Mei, does an incredible job.

However, across multiple play sessions, I repeatedly had a bug where Cinta’s voice lines were bugged and would be skipped past after little more than a second. This made her longer lines impossible to read while also abruptly cutting off the audio file, occasionally leaving me unsure what was all discussed at the end of conversations between Cinta and Rama.

Despite these issues, the power of Afterlove EP‘s story manages to shine through. It is an incredibly touching slice-of-life story that explores the forms and layers of grief with the variety and depth perfect for a video game. Its stellar characters, beautifully rendered world, and great music from L’Alphaalpha make this version of Jakarta a world that I would love to return to.

Afterlove EP is available now on PC, PlayStation 5, Switch, and Xbox Series X/S.