I love FMV games. There is something about the modern-day delivery on the mid-90s promise that I’ve found delightful. It has also been good to see people looking at what works and what doesn’t when delivering titles that rely on filming real actors and stages and how to splice all of this into coherent branching stories. There has been a natural evolution from titles like The Bunker that I talked about during an Xbox Tavern podcast – where it became clear that watching the same transitioning videos doesn’t work and being able to skip previously witnessed scenes was vital to keeping the flow of the game fresh.
Enter The World After, a game made by Burning Sunset, a small French, film/music team that has also made a handful of games and not learned all the lessons.
The premise is an interesting one – the player controls Vincent, a Parisian writer that has retreated to the countryside during a pandemic to write his novel. Bored and listless, he finds a postcard under his door that shows some castle ruins and decides to investigate. From there the story turns into Sci-Fi mystery.
The gameplay itself is a point and click adventure with Vincent having to find disparate items and combine them to solve puzzles and talk to different people in the village to unlock clues and path ways. There are also QR codes to scan with Vincent’s phone that unlock cutscenes that hint at a deeper more mysterious explanation for the pandemic.
The solutions to the puzzles are solid and never veer too close to classic adventure logic – for example, I never had to combine cat hair with honey to make a moustache. Later, there is a bit of chicanery with the Sci-Fi stuff but the logic of the puzzles is in line with the twists.
The conversations are entertaining too, with a lot of wry humour that does not infringe on the more serious main plot. My personal favourite is clicking on the wine bottles littering a garage and Vincent starting by calling the owner a ‘connoisseur’ but by the time you click the 6th bottle Vincent admits ‘Hey, I think this guy has a drinking problem’. I also liked Vincent’s scoffing ‘Stupide’ comment whenever I tried to combine two items that clearly wouldn’t work.
Sadly, the A plot of The World After doesn’t hold together quite as well. I don’t want to spoil it too much but threads that the game spins up – an underground experiment, a mysterious figure called Dumas, a questionable reality – never really pay off. There is a promise of three different endings and it really comes down to one branching path halfway through the game (slight spoilers – I recommend manually saving just before opening the suitcase in the castle ruins) and then there are basically three variations of the end that shed a tiny bit of light on what the writers were trying to say. At least, what I think they were trying to say; I walked away unsure whether the endings were supposed to generate more questions, or indifference. There is a visual novel to unlock if you get the Good Ending, but I don’t know what that clarifies as World After bugged out for me and I was never able to access it.
There are some other bugs in there as well. Reloading a manual save caused a puzzle to break, trying to open a menu during a choice caused me to select the wrong choice, and those added up to worsen the experience.
There is also the problem of the padding. Each time Vincent must move to a new area, the game plays a cutscene of him walking. It is possible to skip these by holding down the Y button but there is just enough friction there that I found it aggravating on my third play through as I tried to avoid bugs and get the last ending.
The World After is a solid indie attempt at an FMV game, there were some genuinely bright moments and chuckles in the delivery, but overall the experience left me feeling disappointed with little to no payoff.
Conclusion
The World After is a good attempt at a point and click adventure using live footage, there is some good dialogue and the puzzles aren’t likely to slow people down. Unfortunately, the plot doesn’t reveal much and it ends with more of a shrug than a bang.
This game was reviewed based on Xbox S|X review code, using an Xbox S|X console. All of the opinions and insights here are subject to that version. Game provided by publisher.
