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Aftermath Review

Rating:

Aftermath is a special kind of brilliant that not everyone will appreciate, or maybe even understand, but it's one of my favourite Indie Games ever, and here's why.

Full Review

Aftermath is a Super Mario fan game, a product of the Mario Fan Games Galaxy community and developer Yrr. Fan game communities are rarely as productive as MFGG, and fan games themselves are rarely as wonderful and artistically accomplished as Aftermath.

Aftermath takes place, like many great Mario games, in the Mushroom Kingdom. Or rather, a smouldering crater in the Mushroom Kingdom where Peach's castle from Super Mario 64 used to be. Mario and Toad are the only survivors of a horrific aerial bombing.

The thing that sets this game our from other fan games is that it's oddly hopeless. It's brown colour pallet, apocalyptic scenery, and slow, downbeat music create a pessimistic and haunting tone. This is compounded by it's harsh difficulty; Mario dies from fire and spikes, which are seemingly everywhere. It becomes easier as it goes along, but it remains challenging throughout. The game is so difficult and low-res that the phrase 'Pixel Perfect Platforming' has never been more applicable.

The games structure is equally strange; it doesn't go from left to right, but rather asks you to explore a reasonably large game world made up of separate rooms, similar to the 2D Metroid or Castlevania titles. It even rewards you with extra abilities as you explore, allowing you to reach more areas, something that's never happened in a traditional Mario game.

The brilliance of Aftermath is in the way it takes the iconic imagery of Mario Bros. (the blocks, the switches, the coins, the Toads and even Mario himself), and provides a bleak, atypical game world for them to inhabit. It makes you see these iconic aspects not as cheery and easily understandable as originally intended, but rather simple, naive, and misguided. Mario himself is oddly out of place inside the game's irregular structure and punishing difficulty. It's the way it combines presentation and gameplay to expound it's themes that truly distinguishes it.

The only thing stopping me from giving this a 5/5 is the saving, which quickly accumulates data every single time you walk past a save station. This causes the frame-rate to drop considerably, and the game became downright unplayable as my save data got larger and larger.

But that's a technical qualm, one that I hope will be resolved eventually. Aftermath is a game you don't want to miss. Start by downloading it here.

Posted by Joe Gribbin on April 21, 2010 Comments (4)


Zhou Xuanming said at 2010-04-21 11:44:

This is one really difficult Mario game, I died more than 50 times on my way to the 3rd checkpoint. Good thing the retries were quick, or else it might get frustrating even faster. Note that the game does not give you button instructions, so if you need them and are reading this: Shift = Jump, Down = activate/interact.


Joe Gribbin said at 2010-04-25 07:48:

I thought I'd add that the game has been updated. The saving issue has been fixed, and the screen size has been made larger : )


Zhou Xuanming said at 2010-04-26 18:52:

Great! Its much easier now on my weak eyes. :)


Anonymous said at 2010-05-30 11:27:

These jumping controls are horrible. As long as they were copying Mario, couldn't they have copied the variable jump height?

Also, how about WASD seriously.