After The Wane Reviews
Featuring an extensive branching storyline delivered by concise yet evocative writing, After The Wane excels at making every decision feel significant, with an unexpected twist that will leave players rethinking everything. It looks beautiful, sounds fantastic and showcases the developers Nova-box at their very best.
After the Wane shows the darker side of professional dance, it takes apart a few industry stereotypes along the way. The strongest idea is that your ambitions may not be what you once believed, or may turn into something unexpected, and that real happiness might be a quiet neighborhood café on a Parisian street. The studio packs a rich, branching story into a few hours, and it leaves you wanting to try the other paths and relationships to see how differently they play out.
Nova-box brings dance into an interactive graphic novel: in After the Wane, Lena, a young dancer, seeks her place between the difficulties of maternal abandonment, life aspirations and the desire for simplicity, while keeping at bay a voice in her head that questions everything she has always believed. The third chapter of the series that began with Along the Edge explores, through second-person narration and a 120,000-word branching script, the transition from adolescence to adult life. The art, with over 2000 hand-drawn illustrations and rotoscoped animations of admirable quality, and a soundtrack of nearly 3.5 hours that adapts in real time to your choices, almost becoming a character in its own right, both work beautifully. The freedom in managing Lena's priorities, with four tendencies and possible romances, is interesting too. The pacing, however, struggles from the second half of the game onward: the mingling of themes generates an acceleration that culminates in an almost hasty resolution, in which dance as a ritual never fully integrates into the Bordeaux studio's universe. It remains an enjoyable story nonetheless, capable of stirring great emotion especially in those who see themselves in a girl devoted to her dreams and frightened by the unknown of adult life. The strongest reflection the game raises is that our aspirations may not be what we believed, or may change into something we never imagined: and perhaps the most authentic happiness is a café on a Rue in Paris.