Afterimage

Every few years a Metroidvania arrives that looks like it was made by people who genuinely love the genre rather than people who noticed it sells. Afterimage, from Shanghai-based developer Aurogon Shanghai and published by Maximum Entertainment, is unmistakably the former. It is hand-drawn frame by frame, scored with 40-plus original orchestral tracks recorded by the International Master Philharmonic Orchestra, and stuffed with enough equipment, biomes, bosses, and branching endings to embarrass studios ten times its size. This is a small team swinging at Hollow Knight and Ori, and connecting more often than not.

The setup is genre-standard to the point of parody: Renee, an amnesiac girl, wakes in the ruins of Engardin after a cataclysm called The Razing, hunting for her missing mentor and stumbling into a mystery about who gets to build the next world. You’ve read this premise. What you haven’t seen is quite this much of it — dozens of interconnected biomes, roughly 170 enemies, 30 bosses, 50-plus NPCs with side quests, over 200 pieces of gear across six weapon classes, plus sub-weapons, armor, accessories, and the titular collectible Afterimages that grant abilities for combat and traversal alike.

Market positioning is where this gets interesting. Afterimage is a premium, offline experience — no ads, no in-app purchases, no battle pass, no live-service tail — released March 28, 2024 on PC, Switch, iOS, and Android at $5.99. That last pair matters. The mobile version isn’t a stripped companion app; it’s the full game. In a mobile ecosystem where “action RPG” usually means a gacha storefront with a combat minigame attached, that’s a genuine statement of intent.

Reception has leaned positive, with critics warmer on the craft than the writing. Both camps have a point.

• Hand-Drawn Everything: Not filtered pixel art, not vector puppets. Every frame is drawn, and the biome variety — dozens of visually distinct regions — is where the budget clearly went.
• Deep RPG Systems: 200+ equipment pieces across six weapon classes, each class with its own moveset and combo identity. This is closer to an action RPG’s build economy than a typical Metroidvania’s linear upgrade tree.
• The Afterimage System: Collectible spirits that grant traversal and combat abilities, doubling as the game’s gating mechanism and its build-variety engine.
• Orchestral Score: 40+ original tracks with a real philharmonic — a rare level of audio ambition at this price.
• Branching Endings: Multiple endings driven by player choice — an unusual commitment for a genre that usually treats narrative as connective tissue.
• Premium Across the Board: One purchase, offline play, no monetization hooks. Same game on a Switch, a gaming PC, or a phone.

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 early game is built to exhilarate, with 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. Players 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 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 players 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 intuition says they should.

The consequence is backtracking that feels like navigation failure rather than exploration. When the door you need can’t be found, a great Metroidvania makes players feel like they missed something. Afterimage frequently makes them 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 the branch was understood. 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 players 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 will hit a wall of menus in hour two.

This is where Afterimage earns its reputation, and the praise is deserved. Nintendo Life called it one of the best-looking Metroidvanias, and that’s not hyperbole. The hand-drawn art has an illustrated, watercolor-adjacent softness that avoids the mannered gloom the genre defaults to. Engardin is bright in places — floral, sunlit, overgrown — and the biome-to-biome variety means the twentieth hour should still deliver a screen worth stopping to look at. Parallax layering is dense without muddying the foreground, which matters enormously in a game where enemy tells need to be read against busy backdrops.

The score is the other half. A real orchestra, 40+ tracks, and — crucially — thematic coherence across regions rather than forty disconnected mood pieces. Headphones recommended.

The UI is the weak link, and it’s the same weakness as the map. Menus are functional and visually inconsistent with the art’s confidence — dense grids of stats that feel bolted on rather than designed. When a game has 200 pieces of equipment, inventory management is a core interface, and it’s treated like an afterthought.

As a 2D game of this scope, Afterimage is light on hardware by design, and nothing in its technical profile suggests a dealbreaker — though particle-heavy boss fights are the kind of content that tends to strain modest hardware hardest.

Steam is the definitive version. A controller is strongly recommended — this is a game about frame-accurate dashes and combo cancels, and it’s built around gamepad input. High resolution also does the most for the map problem: more screen means more legible geography.

Nintendo Switch is the natural fit. Metroidvanias and handhelds have always been a good marriage, and Afterimage’s pick-up-explore-put-down rhythm suits it. The tradeoff is the small screen wrestling with that already-dense art.

iOS and Android are the surprise. Aurogon ported the whole game — no cuts, no monetization, no compromise on scope. The game supports external controllers, which is how it should be played. But be honest about the ergonomics: an unforgiving action game with a hard-to-read map does not get easier on a five-inch display. Touch works. Touch is not how this game wants to be played. The mobile version is best understood as an extraordinary value proposition with a controller attached, not a commuter game.

Afterimage is a game with top-tier presentation and merely solid design discipline, and the gap between those two things is the whole review. Aurogon Shanghai clearly had the artists and the composer. What it lacked was a ruthless editor — someone to say the map needs a redesign, the enemy roster needs behavioral variety more than it needs another reskin, and the script needs a localization pass by someone who cares about English prose rhythm rather than accuracy alone.

But this is a far better game to cover than another competent, forgettable one. The ambition is real, the world is real, and the positive reception reflects players who made the same trade: forgiving the fog for the view. Ship it on four platforms with no ads and no IAP, and you’ve got one of the most honest value propositions in the genre.

We recommend it — to the right audience. Bring a controller, and bring your own notes for the map, because the game won’t provide them.