You can’t remember your death; you haven’t even been born yet.

Set in 1960 Madrid, the game tells the story of a soul who arrives with the memories of Carolina, a pioneer of the Madrid police force who, shockingly, hasn’t even been born yet.

As players step into Carolina's shoes, they'll be able to use magic, switch between worlds and take possession of the living to solve clever and logically sound puzzles that are closely interwoven with the storyline. A quest that will eventually require confronting the sinister forces that haunt the world of the living.

Let’s break the bad news first.

As you may have noticed from the newsletter updates, the art has been on pause for several months while we were looking for funding, and a release in 2024 is no longer realistic.

Unfortunately, we have to accept reality and postpone publication until 2025.

Negotiations with publishers have been very difficult and we are already working on alternatives.

Development Status

We've made significant progress on the game, with over 100 changes in the last three weeks. Here are some highlights:

• Replaced placeholder dialogue with final quality lines and added new conversations to deepen character backstories, including more details about how they died.

• Enhanced the pacing of the game's final scene and fixed various animation glitches.

• Added placeholder animations and improved existing placeholder images to clarify story elements for potential publishers reviewing the full prototype.

• Populated cut scenes with additional characters and improved camera movement for them.

• Created a placeholder sign for Gaspar to acknowledge puzzle completion in the demo (this will be replaced with professional art later, and we won’t release a new demo until that’s done).

• Adjusted some puzzles to reduce linearity while maintaining logical progression.

• Refined some overly obvious clues to provide a more satisfying challenge.

• Improved our automatic testing framework for dialogue options, uncovering and fixing several previously unknown bugs.

• Implemented performance optimizations that will benefit battery life on laptops and speed up our automated testing.

Key Features:

• Explore a supernatural murder mystery, blending themes of identity, courage, and destiny with afterlife, reincarnation, and the connection between past and future lives.
• Take command of various playable characters using unique possession mechanics.
• Explore the intricate stories of eccentric afterlife spirits through meaningful conversations.
• Tackle clever and logically sound puzzles intricately intertwined with the storyline. Wield magic, navigate between both realms, and employ possession mechanics to solve them.
• Immerse yourself in meticulously crafted pixel art scenes and animations.
• Experience an original soundtrack that enhances the game's haunting atmosphere.

Shadows Of The Afterland is coming to PC (Steam) and Nintendo Switch in 2025.