♪♪
[typing]
Have you ever been playing Sim City 2000 by Maxis
and just thought to yourself, "Man,
this game would be great, if it would just go to Hell?"
Or go to Heaven.
Or hang around in Limbo for a while.
Well, you would not be alone.
In fact, there was a game publisher
that you may not expect to have come up with this idea.
[VO] Afterlife,
developed and published by LucasArts Entertainment in 1996
for DOS, Windows and Macintosh computers,
although we'll be looking at the DOS and Windows version here.
"The Last Word in Sims,"
claims the box art boldly,
and being a game by Michael Stemmle, it has good reason to,
being a designer at Telltale Games nowadays,
and previously co-designer of LucasArts classics Sam & Max Hit the Road
and Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis.
"Afterlife: Create the hereafter in the here and now."
A phrase so catchy that it probably gave some copywriter
an erection worthy of an emergency room visit.
And to be fair, a vast majority of the game revolves around puns and clever wording like this,
so don't expect it to end with the marketing blurbs.
In fact, the box continues its cunning antics with the package design itself.
not only mirroring the logo to represent Heaven and Hell,
but opening in the middle to reveal the contents.
Encased within, you'll find the game on CD-ROM,
the twelfth issue of LucasArts' product catalog, The Adventurer,
"The Last Word in Technical Manuals" addendum,
ads for the official strategy guide,
and the jewel case manual.
While this is helpful for understanding the basic concepts of the game and interface,
it leaves something to be desired in terms of explaining
the finer minutia of the game's deeper concepts.
Afterlife launches with a before death intro cinematic,
showing some poor alien being operated on by a doctor
that seems more interested in swearing and hitting on his assistant
than actually performing surgery.
ASSISTANT: We've lost him.
DOCTOR: Damn!
DOCTOR: So... you wanna go out for a drink?
This is Afterlife,
a game where you don't play doctor at all,
but we already rendered this cool animation and it was expensive,
so we're leaving it in there.
Anyway, the game then presents you with a decidedly average-looking menu,
allowing you to start a new game, load a saved game or scenario,
watch the self-proclaimed cheesy video again,
and a button that lets you quit if you want to,
lets you leave your friends behind.
Yeah, and if you want to jump right into the game and start playing,
you can choose a scenario, but you're gonna get boned by hard gameplay truth,
unless you know how everything works first.
So for that, you may as well start a new game on easy and begin the tutorial.
Not only do these eight sequences show you how Afterlife plays,
but they also introduce you to your two advisors:
the demon Jasper Wormsworth
and the angel Aria Goodhalo.
ARIA: Hiya, Wormy!
JASPER: Oh, look what the cherubs dragged in.
We'll discuss my compensation later.
ARIA: Oh, pooh, don't be such a meanie!
LGR: These two are with you throughout the entire game.
Always available for a bit of comedic bickering,
as well as functioning just like city advisors in Sim City 2000.
In fact, the entire freaking game functions more or less the same as Sim City 2000,
starting with the user interface itself.
You've got scroll bars, drop-down menus and a toolbar off to the left
filled with all the main building, viewing and informational controls,
and the graphics imitate SC2K and many other games of the time
using a zoomable and rotatable diametric perspective
to simulate 3D graphics in 2D.
So the basic gist of the game is you've got a randomized map
representing Heaven, Hell and the space in between.
It's your job as demiurge of the afterlife
to manage each of them to give souls from the nearby planet
somewhere to exist, either in pleasure or in pain.
Naturally, those in Heaven need places to go to be rewarded,
and those in Hell need places to go to be punished.
You've got angels and demons acting as workers
but they'll need souls to work with,
so the first thing you'll want to do
is place a gate to both Heaven and Hell.
And, yes, you need to place these buildings in both realms separately,
although there are some that exist only in between realms,
but we'll get to that.
Once you have gate, you'll need to place roads,
because apparently the afterlife is restricted by the same Newtonian physics as Earth.
Although, the manual makes it clear that the nearby planet that the souls come from
is not Earth, but is in fact a fictional alien world.
Convenient, then, that the planet's ethically mature biological organisms, or EMBOs,
are labeled with the same sins and virtues we have on Earth,
specifically in traditional Christianity.
Which means you've got souls in Heaven that lived by one of the seven virtues:
contentment, charity, temperance, diligence,
humility, peacefulness and chastity.
And souls in Hell that lived by one of the seven deadly sins:
envy, avarice, gluttony, sloth,
pride, wrath and lust.
As such, you'll need to zone areas for the dead
that is appropriate to how they lived.
You just click and drag to place them wherever you have a free tile,
and as long as you have resources, transportation and demand,
the zones will begin to develop on their own.
These developments are known as Fate Structures,
and each of them are creatively designed to fit their sin or virtue,
and often contain plenty of delightfully dark humor in their descriptions.
It's very satirical, sometimes twisted,
and often downright cynical,
but it's definitely one of the best parts of the game.
Reading about a place where souls are always winning
Publishers Clearing House-style prizes,
or a torture device for gluttons that works like a demonic human centipede,
just makes me smile.
Now you may think that all this talk about souls going to either Heaven or Hell
is oddly preachy or narrow in scope.
After all, for being a game made by a secular company
about an alien species,
this is a suspiciously Christian outlook.
Well, the game takes that into account, too,
featuring a belief system on the planet
that affects how things go for you as demiurge.
The souls on the planet have different tenets in their belief system,
where what they believe in life
dictates what happens to them in death.
For instance, some believe ONLY in eternal damnation,
some believe that they'll punished and rewarded for all their sins and virtues,
some believe in reincarnation,
and some believe in nothing at all.
This can also be affected by the goings on of the planet over time,
so keeping an eye on the development of the species can be just as important
as keeping an eye on your heavenly waters and lakes of fire.
Over time, the species will grow as a culture,
so if they stop believing in the afterlife or go extinct,
you'll be out of a job.
Conversely, if some terrible calamity happens or a huge war breaks out,
that's great, and it means you can expect a fresh batch of dead people soon.
I can't say I've played many games where a plague or a violent uprising is good news,
but Afterlife is certainly one of them.
Beyond the fate structures, you'll also have to worry about transportation.
Not just roads,
you've got boats and docks to get across the rivers of water and fire,
as well as karma stations and karma trains
where souls can travel to be reincarnated,
if they believe in such a thing.
These happen to exist in between Heaven and Hell,
so even though the entrances are in each,
they just kind of float in the ether.
If you don't have the appropriate structures around,
you can also risk souls getting lost,
and lost souls are bad for your bottom line.
Limbo bars are one solution to this
where souls can hang around in Limbo drinking beer
until you build the needed reward or punishment for them.
Likewise, if you don't have enough angels and demons working for you,
you'll have a problem of eternal significance,
so it's wise to build utopias and dystopias
for angels and demons, respectively,
which allows them to live near their workplace.
But importing this spiritual workforce from other afterlives is expensive,
so it's a good idea to build training centers
to train certain souls to become angels or demons
that do your bidding without having to travel from other realms.
There are also other building like banks
that provide loans if you get into trouble,
as well as ad infinitum ciphons,
which connect to rocks on the eternal planes of Heaven and Hell
and act like power generators,
giving Fate Structures an extra boost.
You also have to worry about the "vibes" of your creations,
since bad vibes in Heaven are bad
and good vibes in Hell are bad.
This works a lot like crime in Sim City,
so it can be alleviated by balancing out your Fate Structures
and placing buildings that emit the needed vibes.
Once you eventually reach population milestones,
you'll receive one of six special reward structures for each plane,
granted to you by the powers that be.
Once again, just like Sim City 2000,
these work like gifts and arcologies,
and can be plopped anywhere to help further your goal
of creating a perfect afterlife.
Lastly, you've got bad things,
because bad things happen.
And these work exactly like Sim City's disasters.
You've got Hell Freezing Over,
the Paradise Pair of Dice,
Hell in a Handbasket,
Disco Infernos and more,
that can all happen to your planes at random unless disabled.
And these serve as welcome distractions
because, honestly, the biggest complaint I have about Afterlife
is that it gets incredibly tedious and samey.
A lot of this has to do with the graphics,
because while they feature colorful and complex pixel art,
they also feature colorful and complex pixel art.
After a while, it all jumbles together and makes it hard to see just what's going on,
and even if you disable Fate Buildings from being rendered,
there are plenty of others that can't.
And micromanaging the balance of Fate Buildings
and the needs of souls and workers
is quite vague as well.
Even looking at all the graphs and knowing what to do once you figure everything out,
it just often feels more like a chore
rather than any kind of real fun for me.
Apparently the official strategy guide, that cost extra,
goes into more detail as far as how to balance everything,
what to look for and what to do when things go wrong,
but it really should have been included in the manual to begin with.
And unlike a lot of LucasArts games,
there is no specific end-goal,
but there are certainly ways to lose.
If you fail to balance your checkbook,
or work your population for too long,
you'll have things like the Four Surfers of the Apocalypso
come surfing through and wiping out the entire map with lava,
or angels and demons getting fed up with unemployment
and staging a war between Heaven and Hell.
And while these things are fun to witness,
it's also far too easy for them to happen,
unless you just stay fastidiously on top of things at all times.
And that is it for Afterlife, and wow, what a game!
While it may fall flat in terms of long-term playability for me,
it makes up for a lot of that
by luring me in with its endearing satire
and atypical aesthetic.
This game is just unique.
There's really something exceptional
about planning the perfect row of torture chambers
while one of the fantastically etherial compositions by Peter McConnell plays in the background,
and wondering when the next good flood will happen
so you can just get more souls to pester.
While it straight up duplicates a significant amount of mechanics and style from Sim City 2000,
I also think it's enough of its own thing to stand out, even to this day.
Unfortunately, this game is not for sale anywhere at the time of this review,
but if you do run across a copy and enjoy city builders,
or just comedic treatment of death and eternity,
Afterlife is a game to die for.
Okay, maybe not.
I just wanted to stick a death idiom in there before this was done.
♪♪
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