Afterimage

An ambitious, gorgeous world that's easy to get lost in

Afterimage's core pitch is scale and presentation, and on both counts it delivers something real. The hand-drawn backgrounds, character art and enemy design draw consistent praise across virtually every review in the sample gathered for this piece, positive and negative alike — "the game looks beautiful, from background to character, weapons, magic, enemies, NPCs, everything is quite nice to look at," reads a representative negative review, one of many that leads with a genuine compliment before pivoting to its actual complaint. The map itself is enormous by genre standards; several reviewers who otherwise struggled with the game still call its scope legitimately impressive, with one describing it as "the biggest I've ever seen in a metroidvania." Combat is built around dual weapon slots, a substantial skill tree and real build variety, and a meaningful number of reviewers single it out as fluid and satisfying independent of everything else.

The complaint that dominates the negative reviews

Set against that scope is a single, overwhelmingly specific problem: players getting genuinely, repeatedly lost, with too little in-game signposting to make the map's size feel like exploration rather than an ordeal. This isn't a minor recurring note — it's the dominant theme of the negative review sample almost to the exclusion of everything else, appearing in 59 of the 100 English-language negative reviews gathered for this piece. "OBSCURITY THE GAME. You have no clue where to go, where you can go and what you should actually do. You are lost — at all times. And not in the fun-kinda-way," reads one. "The world is extremely large, yet exploration rarely feels meaningful," reads another. "This game's massive map transforms what would be an otherwise decent game into an ordeal," reads a third. Multiple reviewers who otherwise praise the combat and art directly say the map size, not the difficulty or the writing, is what made them quit — "Too big for its own sake... quests are super vague... you wander endlessly for no reason," reads one from March 2026, nearly three years after launch, showing the complaint never really went away.

Story and dialogue draw a related, secondary complaint: several reviewers describe the plot as hard to follow, leaning heavily on in-universe terminology and character names introduced without enough context, with a few attributing at least part of the confusion to translation quality specifically. Difficulty, meanwhile, splits reviewers in both directions rather than converging on a single verdict — some call the game trivially easy throughout ("0 challenge," reads one, "boring" after the initial visual novelty wears off), while others describe specific late-game boss fights as punishingly difficult, with hitboxes and enemy tracking they consider unfair rather than merely hard. That inconsistency, more than either extreme on its own, is arguably the more telling criticism: it suggests uneven pacing rather than a deliberately tuned difficulty curve.

Real technical issues, and support that didn't finish the job

A smaller but concrete cluster of reports raises reliability problems worth flagging plainly. One reviewer describes a crash that deleted an 11-hour save file outright. Another, writing in 2025, says the game "is unfinished. There are two gates that simply will not open, the content was never added" — a specific, checkable claim rather than vague dissatisfaction. This sits in real tension with a more encouraging data point: a review from Christmas 2023, roughly eight months after launch, confirms the developer was still actively patching at that point and had already fixed several early complaints, including a contact-damage issue raised in launch-week reviews. Read together, these suggest a developer that did support the game meaningfully after release, but either didn't finish everything originally planned or left specific, player-visible gaps that outlasted the active patching window. Achievement data offers a rough confirmation of how far players typically get: from an 85.1% first-boss completion rate, the numbers fall steadily through the mid-20s for major story and boss milestones down to single digits for full completionist achievements — a normal shape for a long, ambitious game, but one that puts real weight behind reviewers who say the back half of the map goes underused by most buyers.

How it stacks up against its genre neighbours

It's worth noting how often Afterimage's own reviewers reach for direct genre comparisons, because the pattern is consistent and unflattering: "Afterimage is certainly no Hollow Knight. It's no Bloodstained, either... it's not even on the level of Ender Lilies," reads one; "Silksong feels like it's made by three masters of their craft, and this game feels like it's made by twenty people who had no clue what they were doing," reads a blunter one. These comparisons aren't included here to pile on — they're useful because they tell you what kind of metroidvania fan is likely to bounce off this one: anyone whose benchmark for the genre is tight, legible level design will find Afterimage's scale working against it, while anyone whose priority is sheer scope and hand-drawn art over polish is more likely to find the trade-off worthwhile.

Verdict

Afterimage is a genuinely ambitious, visually striking metroidvania let down by the one thing a metroidvania can least afford to get wrong: making a huge world feel worth exploring rather than navigating by guesswork. The art, the scale and the combat fundamentals are real strengths that earn its Very Positive standing; the map confusion raised by well over half of its critical reviewers, alongside real bugs and apparently unfinished content, are just as real and just as well-documented. Go in with a map guide on hand and tempered expectations set by its genre comparisons, and there's a substantial, good-looking game here for the right kind of patience.