Demo becomes a reality for Afterdream

• Announcements by Jack Allin
• Published:

New side-scroller from the creator of DISTRAINT delayed to later this year for PC and consoles

Ever had a dream that felt so real and yet, even subconsciously, you somehow knew it couldn't be? It's precisely this kind of surreal scenario players will find themselves in later this year in Jesse Makkonen's upcoming side-scroller, Afterdream.

As is always the case with Makkonen's games, including the DISTRAINT series and Heal, story details are intentionally vague. However, the protagonist is grieving the loss of someone close to them when they find themselves "lost in a lucid dream, bending the lines between reality and fiction." There, beginning in a darkened, decrepit industrial setting filled with ghosts and faceless people, you must find a way to escape their "mysterious residence" and hopefully "find the purpose of your nocturnal visit" and maybe even some closure along the way.

Afterdream, like its predecessors, is a side-scrolling "2D psychological horror adventure game" controlled via keyboard with a "minimalist yet efficient interface." The art style, too, will be instantly familiar to fans of the solo developer's previous work, once again featuring a mix of pixels and hand-painted lo-res backgrounds with muted, washed-out colours and atmospheric visual and sound effects. While the focus is more on exploration and story, there will be items to collect and puzzles to solve, but with a twist: to interact with select objects you must find and photograph them "through the lens of your strange camera."

Orginally slated for release this month, Afterdream's launch has been pushed back slightly, though we should still see it published Gamera Games on PC and as-yet-unannounced consoles sometime later this year. In the meantime, a playable demo is available to download on Steam for Windows PC.

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