Afterlove EP review: Sigmund Feud's comeback and farewell is an emotional gut punch

If you have never had the displeasure of being in a room with a band where nothing is quite working it's hard to articulate just how deeply uncomfortable a situation it is. Friends attempt to collaborate to create something beautiful only to continually cut each other on the thorns of one another's opinions, egos, and passions. It’s the social equivalent of a broken clutch stopping you from shifting gears, and it’s excruciating to witness. That is what Afterlove EP is about.

The game follows Rama, the guitarist, vocalist, and lyricist of Jakarta-based band, Sigmund Feud. The game’s prologue shows us a run-up to a gig as Rama and his two best friends, Adit and Tasya, hang out with Rama’s girlfriend Cinta, who suffers from an unnamed chronic condition. After the successful show, Cinta peels off still dealing with bouts of coughing, and the three band members go out for drinks. When Rama gets home he decides to get some music out of his head and work on a new song, all the while missing calls and texts from Cinta. By the time he notices it’s too late.

Life After Cinta

The game picks up a year after Cinta’s death with Rama finally trying to put himself back out into the world. However, he still hears Cinta — she talks to him (one of only two voiced characters in the game - and the other character only gets VO for a single scene) and he talks back. Cinta’s running commentary and Rama’s responses give us a glimpse into his head and it quickly becomes clear that he has decided it is time to get back to living not because he has actually dealt with his grief, but because he feels like he should have gotten over it after a year.

From here we spend a month in Rama’s shoes — September 1st to 30th, 2017 to be exact — trying to reconnect with friends we’ve shut out, restart the band after a year-long hiatus, finally visiting a therapist to get our friends off our back, and maybe, just maybe, meeting someone new. However, Afterlove isn’t a clear-cut story about moving on and getting the band back together, it's an examination of a pretty shitty friend who became so absorbed in his own grief that he’s forgotten that the world didn’t stop while he was away. As Adit and (mainly) Tasya make clear to you at your first rehearsal, they both had to keep the band going by reposting old content on social media, as well as living their own lives, working jobs, finding new hobbies and dealing with other bands trying to poach them.

These scenes where Rama refuses to deal with the elephant in the room, thus allowing dysfunction in the band to fester, is where Afterlove is at its uncompromising best. Rama is messy, and complex and flawed and his blindness to his friends’ own troubles is only exacerbated by an idealized and selfish version of Cinta in his head clouding his consciousness. Things quickly break down and you have to watch the band stutter and jerk like a car that hasn’t seen a garage for too long. Soon Tasya gives you an ultimatum: get your shit together by the end of the month or the band will split up.

From here Afterlove takes the form of a social sim akin to a truncated Persona without the demon fighting and highschool drama. Rama can spend his day with one person (or activity) and his night with another, with each week bookended by increasingly fraught band practices that involve a small rhythm mini-game as you jam. You choose whether to take Rama to therapy each week or if you want to hang out with some of your growing circle of friends.

Messily moving on

Some of these relationships are clearly helping Rama get his act together: talking to your therapist and having your thought process and Cinta’s best intentions challenged is often uncomfortable but necessary. But other relationships might not be so helpful. Spending time with the record store owner and his queer friends might help Rama come back out of his shell (and maybe even learn a little about his own sexuality), but hanging out with Adit’s recent ex-girlfriend could be playing with fire if it turns into more than just hanging out. However, you can also pass the time just reminiscing about your times with Cinta, the real Cinta, and reflect on who you were then and where you are now.

All these choices will affect your ending, which can vary from feel-good triumph to melancholy acceptance, all of which see Rama move on in a different way. It’s worth highlighting just how well these relationships are depicted. Be it the dysfunction of the band failing to fire on all cylinders, the nostalgic reminiscing you do with the fading memory of Cinta, or the adorable razzing as Satria chides you about your own obliviousness to your sexuality while still firmly being protective of his queer community, it is all palpably authentic.

The music and vibe of Afterlove are both fittingly beautiful with the contrast in difficulty in certain rhythm sections doing a great job of showcasing Rama’s focus at the time. When things are going well with the band or he’s playing an old song the note highway is noticeably easier than when things are rocky or he’s trying to justify his new sound for the group (it helps that music courtesy of Indonesian indie band L’Alphalpha is killer throughout). While the animated hand-drawn art style of the game does a great job of giving Afterlove its own visual identity while also allowing the developers to showcase the culture and atmosphere of urban Jakarta.

The only negative thing I can bring myself to say about Afterlove EP is regarding the elements of its technical performance. Both PC and PS5 seem to suffer from different, but persistent, issues. The PC version will often glitch out in such a way that Cinta’s voiced dialogue gets cut off mid-sentence until you close the application. On PS5, the textboxes consistently break after a few minutes of play, resulting in text dialogue scrolling painfully slowly. Neither of these are game-breaking bugs, but having to close the game and restart from a previous save frequently can really interrupt the pacing.

If anything these minor glitches are a testament to this game’s release being something of a minor miracle. Without going too much into the details, Aftterlove’s creative director, Mohammad Fahmi, tragically passed away in 2022. It is thanks to the teams at Pikselnesia and Fellow Traveller that the game was seen through to release. I can’t imagine a more beautiful tribute to a developer who is only ever spoken of in the highest terms by his peers than Afterlove EP — a game that understands that even if things will never be ok again, we can still keep living.

This review is based on a Steam and PS5 code provided by the publisher. Afterlover EP is available on PC, Xbox Series X|S, and PlayStation 5 on February 14, 2025.

Lexi Luddy

Contributing Editor

Lex Luddy is a freelance writer and journalist. She has written for Vice, Fanbyte, PLAY Magazine, Gayming Magazine, Push Square, startmenu and more. She can be found on BlueSky @basicallilexi.bsky.social talking about Like A Dragon, Kirby, and queer representation in media.