Bottom Line: Afterimage is one of the most beautiful Metroidvanias ever drawn and one of the most confusing ones ever written. Aurogon Shanghai built a sprawling, mechanically rich world and then forgot to hand you a compass — but at this price, across these platforms, the trade is worth making.
The Gameplay Loop
Afterimage's combat is fast, floaty in the good way, and built around chaining light attacks into sub-weapon cancels and Afterimage abilities. It reads well: hits land with weight, animations have real follow-through, and the six weapon classes aren't cosmetic reskins — a greatsword build and a dual-blade build play like different games. The first ten hours are exhilarating, because you're constantly finding gear that changes your options rather than gear that raises a number.
Then the seams show. Around the midpoint, the enemy design starts repeating itself more than the equipment does. You have 200 pieces of gear and roughly 170 enemies, but the enemies cluster into a much smaller set of behavioral archetypes — charge, projectile, area denial — reskinned per biome. The result is a build system with more expressive range than the encounters ever ask you to use. You end up optimizing against a problem the game isn't posing. That's a design imbalance, and it's the single biggest thing separating Afterimage from the genre's top tier.
The bosses fare better. Thirty of them, and the good ones — maybe a dozen — have the readable-tell, punishing-but-fair rhythm the genre lives on. The rest lean on health pools and screen-filling attacks that read as noise on a small display.
Navigation, and the Map Problem
Here's the sharpest critique, and it's structural: the map is hard to read. Afterimage's world is enormous and genuinely non-linear, which is a real achievement — the interconnection is thoughtful, shortcuts loop back satisfyingly, and secrets reward the kind of obsessive wall-tapping the genre trained you for. But the map interface doesn't scale to the world's ambition. Regions blur together at zoom levels where you need them distinct. Marking systems are thin. Fast-travel nodes don't always sit where your intuition says they should.
The consequence is backtracking that feels like navigation failure rather than exploration. When you can't find the door you need, a great Metroidvania makes you feel like you missed something. Afterimage frequently makes you feel like the map lied. That's a UX problem, not a difficulty one, and it's fixable in a way the art never would have been.
The Story, and the Translation
The narrative is ambitious and largely incomprehensible. Proper nouns arrive in avalanches — factions, gods, cataclysms, mentors — with almost no scaffolding to hang them on, and the English localization compounds the problem rather than rescuing it. Lines are grammatically fine and semantically fog. Fifty-plus NPCs deliver quests and lore in a register that's clearly meant to be mythic and lands as vague.
This matters more than usual because Afterimage bothers to have multiple endings. Branching outcomes only pay off if you understood the branch. Most players won't, which means the game's most narratively ambitious feature is functionally invisible to the audience it was built for. That's not a small miss — it's a whole system paying rent for a room nobody enters.
Onboarding
Front-loaded and thin. Afterimage explains its buttons and then abandons you to a systems stack — Afterimages, six weapon trees, sub-weapons, accessory synergies — with minimal guidance about how they interact. Genre veterans will figure it out and enjoy the figuring. Newcomers arriving via the App Store Editors' Choice badge will hit a wall of menus in hour two.