After You: Level Escape

After You was first released on PC back in 2020, where it received mostly positive reviews from the people who played it. Now, three years later, it’s coming to the PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X and Switch under the name After You: Level Escape. It appears to be the same game with the same frustrating puzzles, only now with a baffling subtitle. I have no idea what “Level Escape” means, but I do know what I think of this game. And this is my review of After You: Level Escape.

After You has one of those intriguing mystery set-ups that you can’t help but get sucked into. It tells the story of Aron, a man who wakes up one day to discover that something terrible has happened. His family and neighbors are missing, a truck ran into his fence, there are abandoned cars everywhere and it looks like somebody may have murdered the family down the street. What’s going on? Are we connected to the violence? And, more importantly, should we be fleeing the scene before more cops show up?

In this case, we decide to stick around and investigate, unravelling a story full of secrets, lies and infidelity. We learn about the neighbor’s marital problems, the rich family’s criminal dealings and a local bar where everything seems to go down. Of course, that was before everybody in the small neighborhood went missing, a mystery that continues to haunt our protagonist as he pokes around the other houses.

After You is the kind of game where you mostly walk around looking for pieces of paper that advance the story. These are diary pages and confessionals from all of the people who have mysterious disappeared. These story bits include everything from lurid details about affairs to clues that will help you solve the game’s many puzzles. You see, when you’re not picking up pages of the story, you’ll be looking for solutions to the puzzles.

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With rare exception, pretty much every puzzle involves some sort of keypad, something that is usually connected to a safe or a door. This means that you’ll often need to look for three-digit clues in order to type in the right password. Of course, it won’t be that easy, and a lot of the puzzles are completely nonsensical. In fact, I’m going to highlight two early ones to show you exactly how frustratingly obtuse this game can be.

In one example, we find a series of alcohol bottles with three-digit codes. Clearly, this is a password for something, but where is the keypad? As it turns out, on the second floor of the bar are a number of rooms, each with numbers. Even though they don’t look like buttons and we haven’t been clued in that we’re supposed to hit them, these apartment numbers are in fact the keypad. Something I only discovered because I was desperately clicking everywhere.

In another puzzle, we’ll need to count the number of outlined body parts at a particularly gruesome crime scene in order to open the family’s safe. This is a pretty cool concept, but it makes absolutely no sense. In order for the family to come up with that password, they would have needed to see their own murder and the crime scene outlines. Once you realize that the puzzles are being done for the player and are not organic to the world Aron is existing in, it completely breaks the illusion.

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It doesn’t help that the initially compelling story keeps getting sidetracked for no reason. There’s a whole chapter in this game where we visit a small town that has been completely decimated by a tragic mudslide. Much like before, everybody is missing, but the whole thing feels like busywork. We find the shovel to dig up this remote control, which will eventually lead us to this destroyed house where there’s a key to the gas generator. And if you think that’s bad, just wait until you go to the office and are tasked with throwing away the garbage. Yes, that’s a real puzzle in the game.

Unfortunately, it’s not just the puzzles that let this game down, but also the writing. Specifically, the localization. This is a game developed by K148 Studio, a Spanish company that is making a game set in the United States. The result is a game with a lot of grammar problems and some unintentionally hilarious translation issues.

To show you what I’m talking about, here’s a letter you pick up that was supposedly written by an American cop: “I have been in the body for years and I’ve never seen anything like it, there’s blood everywhere. Neither I nor my companions are used to this, this is a very quiet town, at most we have to deal with some drunk and that’s it, but what I have seen here today will not be forgotten in my life.”

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To be fair to the developer, it’s easy enough to see what the translator was going for. When they talk about being “in the body for years,” they clearly mean that they have been on the force for a long time. Similarly, they probably meant “colleague” or even “partner” instead of companion, but we get what they were trying to say. The problem is that every page of the diaries and confessionals are filled with these types of errors, creating a game where nobody sounds authentic. I didn’t buy that this was set in America for even a second.

And that’s a shame, because the visuals are pretty good. I like the simple, low polygon design, and there’s an eeriness to the early section that truly left me unsettled. I’m a big fan of the way the wind whips through the grass and trees, and I could see this being used to great affect in a better horror game. The graphics are the best part of After You.

That’s not to say that you won’t have any fun exploring the three environments and solving their puzzles, but the game goes out of its way to make things as frustrating as possible. Hell, there isn’t even an options menu, so don’t even think about changing the camera controls. There’s a solid set-up here, but everything that comes after that is a crushing disappointment.