Afterlight

Finding your way out of a labyrinth is a pretty exciting feeling, especially in video games when you’ve been stuck for a few minutes. However, most games feature simple mazes that do not provide you with a real challenge, which is quite a shame if you love the genre and would like to see how you’d fare against something a lot tougher for a change.

Afterlight is a puzzle game in which your goal is to navigate out of a maze that’s not even visible, which is that much more difficult and frustrating. Naturally, the difficulty level is a lot higher than in most games of this type, but the rewards are much nicer as well. On the other hand, frustration might kick in after a while, which is not ideal either.

As such, you start in a blank landscape that features a single tile and the door you must reach, while everything else is hidden from sight. In order to reveal a hidden cube and the path ahead, you must use a gun. You can also just walk and watch the tiles appear beneath you, but it’s obviously very difficult to stop if the tiles suddenly run out and you find yourself floating above nothingness.

Even if the world is basically made out of cubes, it can still be quite gorgeous if you manage to reveal most of it. There are special spheres that reveal a great portion of the maze if you shoot them, but that doesn’t make your task any easier, because it’s still tough to find the right path. On the other hand, at least you get some sort of idea about where everything is.

The controls are quite smooth as well, although it would seem like the main character has a tendency to slip if you walk and try to stop too suddenly. That’s quite realistic, but then again this is a game about invisible cubes. Thankfully, at least the graphics are powered by Unreal Engine 4, so the game world is wonderfully rendered and nicely lit.

All things considered, Afterlight is not a bad game, but it feels unfinished and quite annoying sometimes, probably because there’s no actual purpose to anything you do. However, all these things can be fixed in later versions if the developer keeps at it.