Afterlife
Top Critic Average
Critics Recommend
Afterlife Trailers
Afterlife | 360 VR Interactive Film | Trailer 2019
Afterlife | Creating something new in VR | Dev Diary
Afterlife | Making of an interactive VR film | Dev Diary
Critic Reviews for Afterlife
There is nothing brand new to look forward to in the title, but Afterlife VR effectively takes a blender to a number of horror tropes and settings, delivering a sufficiently worthwhile experience.
Creepy enough in a low-budget, cookie-cutter sort of way, Afterlife VR gets a lot of milage out of darkness and sound design. VR horror fans won't find much new here, but the gameplay isn't offensively bad, and I enjoyed my two hour playthrough well enough. Decent puzzles, some functional - though limited - shooting. Worth a look, especially for it's very reasonable selling price.
An impressive framework for a seamlessly interactive experience, devalued by the uneven melodrama played out on-screen.
Perhaps I am missing the point here, but nothing was fun, nothing was engaging and everything was painfully boring to watch. This game single-handedly drives home the fact that 360-degree video experiences are not the future of video games, especially when it feels like a hugely amateur production with horrible attention to detail with their own intellectual property.
It is not necessarily a bad game, although many aspects of it are not good enough. But it also has a few good sides. Its problem is that there are many better VR horror games on the market, which, even if they draw from the same genre clich's, have tried to spice things up in some way. However, here you won't find anything interesting or different.
Review in Slovak | Read full review
Afterlife falls into those cracks between game and cinematic creations and is worse for it. Without a UI or any indication on how to experience its branching narrative without blindly stumbling through it, it fails as a VR game. Without the set cinematic frame, of the direction that all standard movies have, you can miss some of the better moments in the because it’s going on behind or to the periphery of your vision. The performances and the more powerful moments of this experience make it easy to see it has been nominated for a number of high profile awards – but for me, this virtual voyeuristic experience lacks the clarity provided by the staples of either medium to really capitalise on its more powerful moments.
The concept of Afterlife is very interesting, combining FMV with hands-free choices whilst within VR. I’d say the producers did a great job of seamlessly transitioning you down the various pathways as I didn’t even realise there were branches until the timeline popped up. However, the lack of trophies for the ‘gamers’ and low-quality compressed video file reduced my overall enjoyment of this experimental experience, despite actually enjoying the story and being immersed at all times (once I turned off the subtitles so the 3D-mode was enabled).
Afterlife VR falls nicely into the B-tier Horror niche and does a decent job for doing only that, but is too afraid of being anything more. Unknown protagonist goes to unknown location with an unknown connection to an uninteresting story with an unsurprising twist ending. In the end, I have seen Afterlife VR 100 times, basically when my 6 year old watches a random spooky game playthrough on YouTube.
