Afterlife | God Game Citybuilder 1996 LucasArts (text version)

Ever thought about playing god? I don’t mean playing god with the lives of virtual mobs, in most games players are basically Death incarnate anyway, no. I’m talking more about playing god in the sense of the minutia of managing the rewards and punishments of immortal souls. Because if that’s something you’ve been thinking about at all - and, who hasn’t? - then Afterlife might just be the perfect title for you.

Good mornin-afternoo-vening dear readers and welcome to the Afterlife, don’t worry, this isn’t your afterlife, instead it’s the afterlife of sentient creatures that are totally not humans from a planet that is totally not Earth but which shares a strikingly similar culture to our own. And you’re the one in charge of catering to their immortal souls.

Afterlife is a god game/citybuilder released in 1996 by Lucas Arts - just before they started focusing mostly on Star Wars games, and wow, is it a completely different type of experience than most other titles one usually associates with the now Disney-owned developer. You can tell it’s a Lucas Arts title though by the logo at the beginning and the very weird and funny intro scene which is only somewhat related to the game.

You play as the Demiurge - a sort of local deity, an artisan-type figure - empowered by the Powers That Be to look over the souls of creatures from this Planet, which again, is totally not Earth, but has identical beliefs in terms of the concepts of Heaven and Hell. The humanoids living on this planet are called EMBOs - which stands for Ethically Mature Biological Organism - and each EMBO has a SOUL, or Stuff Of Unending Life.

Once an Embo dies, their soul goes to their concept of the afterlife, and that’s where you come in.

Your actual job is to create functional Heaven and Hell experiences meant to reward or punish the denizens of the planet. The special twist and feature of the game is that you do this at the same time.

The Demiurge is in charge of building up anything and everything that souls might need once they shuffle off their mortal coils. This means that you’ll have to build appropriate divine gates, roads, fate structures and a bunch of other things that I’ll get to later.

The most important aspect that you need to be aware of now is the fate structures. This is where the souls will be hanging out during their stay in either Heaven, Hell or both. There are seven types of fate structures for Heaven and an equal number for Hell, corresponding to seven virtues and the seven deadly sins, with an eight added to each, made up of every type of fate structure, to work as a sort of buffer.

You’ll also need to arrange for the souls to be able to reach their desired or required fate structure and that means you’ll have to build roads to connect your Heaven and Hell gates to your fate structures, as well as build housing and training infrastructure for your angels and demons.

Of course, you can’t have an afterlife without either of those last two, and in the game they play a crucial role, acting as your employees. Well not just acting, that’s what they are, because they cost money, and dealing with the costs associated with them is one of the more important things you’ll be doing, once we get into talking about the finances.

The other main management features of Afterlife, that you’ll have to constantly keep an eye on, will be the type and location of Vibes and balancing your fate structures.

Much like in the vein of SimCity 2000 before it, Afterlife isn’t devoid of natural disasters. Granted, here they’re called “Bad Things” and are considerably more funny and tongue-in-cheek than in your usual citybuilder or god game but they serve the same function, wreckin your stuff.

That being said, there are also catastrophes that take place on the Planet, but as far as you’re concerned, these are usually a great boon to your bottom line, since it means that a lot of souls will be showing up at your gates. So you better be ready for them with fate structures, otherwise they’ll disappear into the nether, and you’ll never get them back.

There’s no real way of winning at the game per se - much like with most god games, as opposed to citybuilders - each game will just go on for eternity ba-dum-tss there are however, several ways of losing a game, so it’s sort of a really prolonged Kobayashi Maru-type exercise. But much like that fictional Star Trek training exercise, Afterlife will definitely test your character and problem solving capabilities, and while you can’t really redefine the problems you’re faced with, there are certainly some things you can do to increase your chances to not lose.

But enough of this general stuff, let’s jump into some gameplay. Check out the video below.

https://dlive.io/video/stefanonsense/f568cdd1-9f08-11e8-b99a-0242ac110003

Don’t forget to upvote, resteem, comment and follow!
…
You can find me in these places as well:
YouTube: youtube.com/user/CNonsense/featured
dTube: d.tube/#!/c/stefanonsense
Twitter: twitter.com/StefaNonsense
Facebook: facebook.com/CNonsense
Instagram: instagram.com/stefanonsense
Join me on my friends' GaminGHD Discord Server discord.gg/CZSXJwy
Gaming-Related Friends you should follow: @free999enigma @unacomn @gaminghd @ropname @vladalexan