Reviews
[Review] Night School’s Bar Crawl Through Hell ‘Afterparty’ Forgets the Devil is in the Details
Afterparty is a mumbly, awkward trip to an underworld so liquor-soaked it’s a wonder it’s not even more on fire.
Night School Studio’s follow-up to Oxenfree casts the player as Milo and Lola, a pair of recent college grads… who also happen to be recently damned. Neither remembers how they ended up in hell — the game opens with the pair sulking at a miserable kegger that suddenly morphs into the underworld — but they’re certain they don’t want to stay there any longer than they have to. To that end, they’re pleased to find out that there’s one way to get out of the inferno: drinking Satan under the table.
That’s a great concept, one that’s had me excited to get my hands on Afterparty since it was first announced. The idea of a new game from the makers of Oxenfree that sets out to capture the feeling of a rollicking night out, with the added twist of a rich, choice-driven approach to dialogue and a debauchery-in-the-depths set-up made Afterparty one of my most anticipated games of 2019. Unfortunately, this sophomore effort makes some missteps that prevent it from delivering the shot of focused story-telling that Night School delivered in their freshman PC and console outing.
Afterparty feels like a point-and-click adventure game without the puzzles; less like an alternative approach to adventure game design, à la Night in the Woods or Telltale’s The Walking Dead, and more like the LucasArts games of the ‘90s. The colorful 2D presentation, the variety of distinct locales, the ridiculous tasks that Milo and Lola are asked to accomplish in pursuit of their redemption; all of it lends Afterparty the vibe of a Schafer and Gilbert-era point-and-click. As in those games, you’ll spend much of your time backtracking through vividly rendered locations, participating in a quest defined as much by tracking down MacGuffins as by the colorful characters you meet along the way. The problem that Afterparty encounters is that, in lieu of puzzles to provide structure, the only thing it has to offer is a whole lot of writing.
You’ll find those extra words at the bottom of a glass. Each time you arrive at a new bar, you’ll stop by the demonic barkeep and grab a drink. Each beverage imbues different attributes in whoever drinks it. Some drinks make you horny, some drinks make you talk like a pirate, some drinks make you aggressive, and so on. Each opens up an additional response in dialogue, and the writing, impressively, stretches to allow for a wide variety of conversational turns.
These talky bits play out like Oxenfree Lite. Word bubbles pop up as characters speak and when it’s your turn to respond, four responses — one assigned to each of the face buttons — are available; three standard, and one unlocked through your drink. To accommodate the wide variety of options that drinks open up in conversation, Oxenfree’s system has been simplified. You can no longer interrupt people while they speak. Instead, Milo and Lola wait until their conversation partners finish up before they begin. That may not seem like a big deal. But, Oxenfree’s dialogue system worked as well as it did — and felt revelatory — because it sought to replicate the messy flow of real conversation. You could ignore people, you could cut them off. Night School wrote and recorded a ton of filler dialogue to make this work; dozens of variations on “Well, as I was saying,” and “Anyway.”
Without these mechanical representations of the ebb and flow of conversation, Afterparty instead writes the hemming and hawing into the dialogue itself. There was some of this in Oxenfree: its protagonists were high school kids, uncomfortable in their own skin, to begin with, and placed in uncomfortable circumstances. They paused, hesitated, ummed, y’know-ed. Afterparty doubles down on this. Characters are constantly qualifying their statements, stammering, struggling to finish their thoughts. In an effort to create naturalistic speech without the mechanical avenues that allowed for it in Oxenfree, Afterparty’s characters become grating to listen to. On more than one occasion I felt like shouting “Just spit it out!” at my computer screen.
When characters do finish a thought, the writing is okay, though at times it veers into the cringe-y. When one character expresses plans to “party-hardy,” Sam, a taxi driver voiced by Ashly Burch, replies, “Hey, party-sharty works too if you’re wearing the right underwear.” That line bewildered me, and the game is full of similarly puzzling dialogue. And that matters a LOT because there’s nothing else for the game to lean on. Earlier this year, I wrote a pretty positive review of Gibbous, Stuck in Attic’s Lovecraftian point-and-click comedy, a game that was significantly more poorly written than Afterparty. Despite dodgy dialogue, Gibbous was helped along by the strength of its engaging puzzles. But, in Afterparty, writing is everything. Its major new mechanic — the effects of drinks on the conversation —is just an opportunity to include more writing. That the writing often falls flat is a major blow.
It doesn’t help that the game is a little buggy. During the sections when Sam is ferrying Milo and Lola from bar to bar, the framerate chugged like it was trying to outdrink Lucifer himself (though this has been significantly improved by the Day One patch). Additionally, I heard the same minute-long conversation multiple times, like it had been copied-and-pasted from one point in the script to another, but not deleted from its original context. And, at one point, with about an hour or two left to go in the game, Milo pulled out his phone to send a message — yes, there is surprisingly good cell reception in hell — and then kept his phone out for the rest of the game. Hours of Milo walking around looking at his phone! Wild!
Afterparty does offer a pretty strong setting. Hell as a bruise-colored block of college bars is a fun place to hang out. But, it retains Oxenfree’s super zoomed-out perspective, which doesn’t quite work in this context. Oxenfree was a scary story about teens lost and isolated on a gorgeously desolate island. The camera’s remove communicated that sense of loneliness. But, Afterparty is a story about getting drunk and partying in hell. The zoomed-out perspective hurts its sense of energy and makes blocks and bars that should feel bustling seem a little empty.
Afterparty falls short of the standard that Night School set with Oxenfree. While it boasts a strong setting and brilliant set-up, it leans heavily on writing that just isn’t strong enough to shoulder the load. I still can’t wait to see what Night School does next, but Afterparty feels like a watered-down take on Oxenfree. Here’s hoping they can mix up something a little stronger for the next round.
Afterparty review code for PC provided by the publisher.
Afterparty is out October 29 on PS4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, and PC
You’re Dead to Me, the new Gen-Z horror film from director Juan Pablo Arias Munoz, bills itself as a love letter to ’90s horror classics, and it launches into that vibe immediately with an opening sequence clearly modeled on the opening of Wes Craven‘s Scream. It’s either gutsy or foolhardy, but right away, you get a sense of the film’s ambitions.
The problem is that when you come at something like Scream, you better not miss, and for all its well-cultivated ’90s horror vibes and its efforts to become something singular along the way, there’s a lot about You’re Dead to Me that misses. This is a movie that wants to be at least half a dozen things at the same time, and while it’s got solid visuals, a game cast, and lots of bravado, it’s simply spread too thin to make any of its ideas satisfying.
Indy (Siena Agudong) and Brynn (Jessica Belkin) are best friends, bonded by their shared struggles with loss (Brynn’s mother is gone, as is one of Indy’s sisters) and the feeling that they’re the only people in their high school who truly understand one another. When we meet them, they’ve opted to stay away from the traditional high school celebrations and host a “Too Pretty for Prom” party at a secluded mansion owned by Brynn’s absent father. It’s a chance to grow closer and celebrate their way, even if the only other guest is their mutual friend Jordan (Conor Husting) and everyone else seems to have opted for prom.
But the vibes are soon squashed. While Indy and Jordan try to work up the courage to give Brynn some bad news about their post-high school plans, a classmate turns up dead, reigniting speculation that a serial killer is operating in town. Throw in a deranged neighbor (Denise Richards) who won’t take no for an answer, and it feels like the walls are closing in on the trio, particularly as Indy starts to have visions she can’t explain tied to her sister, Brynn’s mother, and a room she’s never seen before.
A slasher and weird visions? Yes, and here’s where You’re Dead to Me starts to play with its true tribute to ’90s horror, helped along by co-writer and producer Terry Castle, daughter of William Castle, who helped get those Dark Castle remakes off the ground at the turn of the Millennium.
This is a movie that isn’t satisfied to simply be a slasher, playing within the firmly established bounds of that subgenre. It wants to be a slasher and a psychological drama and a possibly supernatural piece of Gothic horror, with notes on internalized misogyny and conformity sprinkled in along the way. There are classic slasher sequences with lots of suspense, but there are also wild dream sequences full of quick cuts, jittery frame rates, and jump scares, all eventually centering around Indy and the transitional phase of her life where the film begins.
She’s on the cusp of college, of a new life full of possibilities, but she feels beholden to the people who got her there, to the support system she’s leaving behind, and, of course, to her best friend. Her mental state is reflected in the often chaotic nature of the film, and when You’re Dead to Me is playing within these bounds, helped along with dreamy visuals and genuine tension, it’s working.
But somewhere along the way, that sense of chaos starts to grate against the audience, and You’re Dead to Me starts to drag under the weight of its own ambitions. It’s clear that the hybrid subgenre mash-up of the story is meant to render it unconventional in both the slasher space and the psychological horror space, but that can only take you so far before the film needs a narrative around which it can coalesce. The core has to stay strong, and for all the style points it racks up along the way, the movie just can’t hold on to that emotional tether that keeps us hooked to the end, in part because it wants so badly to keep us guessing that we lose all sense of direction.
I’ll give you an example: At one point, a teenage boy in the year 2025 answers a phone call from another teenage boy who simply says that he’s sending a link. A phone call just to say “I’m sending you a link.” Why? Because the film has established, in the proud Scream tradition, that when the phone rings, a killer might be calling, so the phone needs to ring to keep up suspense. In another scene, a character sits up and swears she hears something, and as we in the audience hear a very audible human scream, she says she hears “footsteps.”
Characters who come and go may as well have “Red Herring” stamped on their foreheads, and the film spends so much time building up lore and backstory that it barely leaves room for slasher chases and spectral nightmares. Then, when the spectral nightmares do come, we’re left unsure what’s real anymore, until the third act finally, sort of, explains why it all feels so disjointed. It’s a movie that aims at deliberate obfuscation and misdirection, but just ends up confusing.
Which is a shame, because there’s a lot of talent on display here, and I don’t just mean with the visuals. The young cast is earnest and exciting, the premise is interesting, there are flashes of really solid storytelling in the script, and the kills, when we get them, actually work.
If this film had picked a lane, or even two lanes, and tightened up its thematic concerns along the way, it might be something much more satisfying. As it is, it’s an overstuffed mess, but at least it’s an interesting one.
You’re Dead to Me is available on Digital and VOD on July 7.
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