Summary: 60/100

Introduction

Afterlife is a one-player game where you are in control of two growing cities. Residents arrive at your city through gates and enjoy the sights of your towns. Some stick around for a while and then leave, while others stay permanently. It's your job to build roads, buildings, marine ports, dormitories, and other buildings for the residents. Your goal is to live within your financial budget, while satisfying the needs of your growing towns.

Oh, one other thing I forgot to mention: your towns are Heaven and Hell.

Overview of the Game

As the all-seeing DemiUrge, you watch disembodied souls arrive from a distant planet, and then seek out their just rewards. The basic scenario is straight out of Dante: a person receives in the afterlife a reward or punishment that ironically befits his or her practice of the seven deadly sins and virtues in life. So a soul that acted out of gluttony might be consigned to a punishment where he is endlessly force-fed gourmet food, while a soul who practiced humility would arrive in Heaven to find himself rewarded with the sight of a film crew eagerly waiting to shoot a major documentary of his life.

So as the city planner, if you expect a lot of gluttons to arrive at your Hell, you'd better have lots of those force-feeding establishments for them to get put into. This illustrates one of your biggest jobs: zoning. Heaven and Hell are just empty real estate when you start, broken up with some rocks and a couple of other things. You map out regions and assign them to one of the seven sins (or rewards). So, while looking at a map of Hell on your screen, you might use your mouse to sweep out a rectangle of city blocks and color them green, for envy. Then envious souls will arrive at Hell through the gate you built earlier, and walk on the roads you laid down until they arrive at this fitting punishment. The demons who work in Hell are always ready to build bigger and better structures for you when needed. So although you simply labeled this region as appropriate for "envy", the demons got right to work and built some low-occupancy envy housing (with appropriate punishments inside). When there are too many envious souls competing for the same beds, the demons will automatically upgrade the housing into a larger size. Each increasing class of building has its own graphic image on the screen, and a corresponding text description, which on the average are clever enough to warrant reading. The angels in Heaven provide a corresponding workforce for building rewards.

Of course, it's not quite this simple. Housing only happens if the area has good "Vibes"; otherwise souls get tired of looking around and get "lost," which costs you cash (measured in Pennies From Heaven). Souls who believe in reincarnation eventually leave their building and head for a Karma Portal, where they are reincarnated back on the planet to live another life (and, of course, end up returning to your afterlife). And occasionally disasters befall your afterlife, causing destruction from which you need to recover.

I've left out lots of bits and pieces, but that's the general idea.

The Game Philosophy

There are two sides to this game: the spirit of fun behind it and the actual experience of playing it. The spirit of fun is wonderful, and infects the whole playing with an upbeat and funny feeling.

The fun of the game is in the goofiness of the objects and their screen images, the appealing music, and the wit of the building descriptions. As you might expect, this wit ranges from the uninspired to the really clever. The best descriptions of Heavenly rewards tend to be gentle but fun, while Hell's punishments are juicier, and drip with as much irony as they could pack in.

Playing the Game

The game is pretty good fun in the early stages. You get to read and enjoy the new building descriptions, see the pictures for the first time, and watch your domains slowly grow. You begin to get a feeling for how things work, and you can influence the development of the game.

Then you find yourself wasting a lot of time micro-managing your buildings. The game designer made what I felt was a very bad decision in making it your endless responsibility to manually tweak every individual building. To make your buildings efficient (which increases your revenue and helps the buildings grow), you need to click on each one, and then move a slider until a color bar turns white. It's mind-numbing robotic work, boring and repetitive. There is an "auto-balance" feature to do this for you, but it's very expensive and very clumsy; you can't automatically balance just the buildings that you choose.

I eventually decided to forget about this idiotic task, and just fork over the cash to occasionally balance all of Heaven and Hell. Recently, I found an FAQ for the game compiled from the net, and it includes testimonials from other people who came to despise manual balancing and came to the same, financially expensive (but worth every penny) conclusion.

The Downside

Although the manual balancing I discussed in the last section is bothersome, in the later stages of the game (when you've built up some mone), you can just ignore it and spend the cash to balance automatically every once in a while, which is what I did.

There's a bigger problem: this game is not about what it seems to be about.

The game appears to be about managing resources, anticipating traffic flow, working within budget, planning, scheduling, and so on. Even with all the silliness of the descriptions, this is basically city planning. And the first part of the game follows this expectation. But then it changes into a different game.

The more advanced form of the game is about figuring out the game itself. In other words, the real point of Afterlife is to figure out how the Afterlife program works.

This is because Afterlife is basically a big simulator. It has its own rules, but they're complicated, and not explained well in the documentation. It's like finding yourself in an airplane cockpit, and all you have are some notes on the normal operating temperature of the engines and a suggestion that you take off and fly around for a while.

The only instructions you get with the game are in a little booklet that fits inside the CD case. It's 30 pages long (remember that these pages are only 5 inches on a side). It's generous to call it sparse. Thank goodness the store clerk urged me to buy the Official Player's Guide, which retails separately for $20 - it at least gave me a bit of context. But even with the book, some very important issues are only hinted at, or ignored altogether. When things start to go wrong (e.g. you start losing money or souls), it's never quite clear what the right solution is.

The situation is slightly improved by your "helpers" - an on-screen demon and angel that offer advice when they think it's appropriate. But as I have found with other agents, their advice ranged from cryptic to useless. Returning to the airplane cockpit, it's as though you were at 20,000 feet and someone said that one of the engines was turning too fast. Okay, you acknowledge the situation and accept that it should be interpreted as a problem, but because you don't have a mental model of how the plane works, you don't really know what to do to change things for the better. And any experiment might create a whole new range of mysterious problems.

Which brings me to my point that the goal of Afterlife is to figure out Afterlife. The only way to make things work is to try experiments and see what happens. But there are lots of variables, so you need lots of experiments, which means lots and lots of hours.

And who wants to devote hundreds of hours to figuring out the essentially arbitrary algorithms that were encoded into this particular simulator? For me, the cost is huge and the payoff trivial. The cost is in spending lots of hours tinkering with the toy past the point where it's inherently pleasurable because the game mechanics become bothersome. I'm willing to put up with the pain of learning if I'm getting valuable understanding back. But if I play for dozens of hours and figure most of this stuff out, what I get out of it is a chance for a slightly more efficient world the next time I play this game.

Winning

You don't "win" at Afterlife; it's a simulator that's happy to run as long as you're willing to play with it. You can control the game's speed; at its fastest setting my PC runs at about 6 years per minute. As your population passes certain marks, you are granted the privilege of buying special buildings that can make your life easier.

To my mind, an ideal world (real or imaginary) is a self-sustaining one. It should be large and diverse enough to be interesting, but I don't see a need for the economist's desire to grow for growth's own sake. I decided to shoot for a large world that passed all of the game's milestones, and could maintain itself indefinitely, or at least with only occasional intervention.

I played three short games of a few hundred years each until I got a feeling for the place. Then I started my fourth game, which was my big one: it's currently at the year 25,000 (that's around 70 hours, or nearly 3 days, of computer time). I have about 334 billion Pennies in the bank, about 2.2 billion souls in Heaven, and about half that in Hell. This is where the game flattens out, since all the mileposts have been passed; there's nothing new from here on out. I think of this as a climax forest: the huge, long-lived species have moved in and the ecosystem is stable. Maintaining the world now is almost trivial in time and effort, and I've already got more money than I will ever be able to spend unless I deliberately try to run out. At this point, playing the game means letting it run unattended at top speed, and walking in every few hours to tinker with it. I could probably let it run for days or weeks now, just looking in on it for about 5 minutes a night. I think I've explored every corner of the game, including the Easter Eggs and secret codes.

Conclusion

Afterlife is a simulation game that challenges you to figure out how it works so that you can start to really enjoy playing it. The irony is that by the time you figure out how it works, you can't stand to play the game anymore.

The backstory for the game is fun and engaging, and the graphics, sound, and writing are generally pretty good. The music is very good.

But the game has two serious flaws. First, manual balancing is a mind-numbing, tedious activity. Second, you need to slowly learn how to figure out how to keep your world going and get out of trouble, according to the game's arbitrary (but invisible) rules. While frustration, annoyance, and working in ignorance are part of a real city planner's life, it's hardly what I'm looking for in a game played for diversion and fun.

I give this game an A- for spirit. For casual players who just want to get a little world up and running, it's probably between an A and B, depending on how much you enjoy their writing style. But past about 5 million souls, new buildings and descriptions become infrequent, the deficiencies of the game start to appear, and the score starts a steady decline. The longer you play, the lower the score goes; I lasted until it dropped down to C-, and I think I'll stop there.