Afterimage, the beautiful hand-drawn Metroidvania-style adventure, launched on Xbox this week, and though I’m almost at the end, poor achievement pacing means I have just seven out of 46 to show for my efforts so far… We all love the sound and feel of a good achievement pop or else we probably wouldn’t be here (on TrueAchievements specifically, not just in general). But every now and then, a game comes along that really feels like it’s holding out on you, and the downright stunning Afterimage is guilty of doing precisely that. I’d like to preface this by saying that this isn’t just me getting the grump because I want the game to be spitting out achievements left and right — it’s just that in an epic adventure this sprawling where key upgrades are found way away from one another, things like the system-level achievement system offer a way of filling that downtime between major in-game progress points with an ever-satisfying chime. Not only does Afterimage not do this, but it also skimps out on a lot of the typical ‘story progress’-style achievements you might expect to pop along the way… I’m over 30 hours deep, almost level 80, and have picked several areas completely clean, yet I’ve only seen one achievement that I know for a fact is unmissable, with a couple of others that would at least be probably pretty tricky to avoid getting. Afterimage: Beautiful, engaging, stingyThe Afterimage achievement list just feels like it’s way too back-loaded. I was sat on 4/46 for so long that I worried the achievements might have broken on me, felling boss after boss and reaching milestone after milestone with nary a single Gamerscore to show for it. Looking at the list, the vast majority of the achievements appear to fall into several distinct categories. One set is for specific named boss kills, and aside from one for the very first boss (which falls over when you so much as blow on it), they’re all endgame encounters — bar that easy wolf kill, I’ve managed to tick off one and find another so far, both in the last few hours of play and at the far corners of the map. At least in something like Elden Ring, achievements like this come fairly frequently as you explore and take down the main threats, so it feels a little weird that there’s such a huge gap here between the first boss pop and the next one hours and hours later.Then there are the ‘do everything’ achievements. Kill every boss, find all the shinies, collect every piece of gear (yikes), complete the Beastiary [sic], hit max level, eat every type of food, learn every skill… you get the gist, and they apply to seemingly every aspect of the game, so you won’t be getting any of these until extremely late (I have one). Most of these are linked in some way to both main and side quests, with others requiring rare drops from enemies just to add a dash of RNG into the mix. Quests themselves also have a selection of related achievements, specifically for reaching the final part of each of the side stories that plays out as you find various characters in strings of increasingly unlikely places around the world. The kicker here is that Afterimage isn’t particularly friendly when it comes to keeping track of these events, with journal entries often simply mentioning what happened already rather than what the next step might be — if you’re not paying attention to the one-time cutscene dialogue or come back after some time away from the game, you could be left trekking all over the land just to start the next part of a quest line, and some questionable translations don’t help with this, either. As a result, I’m still not entirely sure whether some of these side hustles may even be missable, since there are quests in my log where I haven’t bumped into the relevant NPC in forever despite multiple sweeps of the majority of the massive map… unless they’re in hiding out there somewhere, it could be that some unknown points of no return (or doing things in the wrong order) has blocked progress, but I guess I won’t find out for sure until around the time I’m done with mopping up all the other completionist achievements.Before we get onto the last subset of achievements, I’d like to take a little detour of my own to explain exactly why having to re-explore so much of the map so often is an issue in Afterimage. You see, fast travel isn’t free, neither in the sense of cost nor actual freedom. Each absolutely gigantic area has just one main checkpoint that is part of a network that can be hopped between at will, although even that is something that doesn’t unlock until a decent way into the game. Until then, or if you want to visit any of the secondary checkpoints without hoofing it, it’ll cost you a specific item per trip, heavily gated world loot finds which you’ll be lucky to get one or two of in each region. The only vendor I’ve found selling these is also located in super-late-game areas and, unless I’m missing something, seems to cheekily only be found in places that require you to use one of these rare items to reach, so it could even be that you’d be out of luck if you used them all up. This scarcity is often enough to push you into another leisurely cross-map stroll, with even the fastest free option being to get to the nearest ‘main’ node (and some of these don’t unlock until deeper into a given area, only reachable on a later return visit), zoom to the one closest to your destination, then find your way there on foot… only to often find that you’ve gone to the wrong place and need to repeat the process.In an era where game maps tend to be splattered with all kinds of icons, Afterimage’s decision to have players mark up the map for themselves is certainly a breath of fresh air. But it’s also a system where unless you know that going into the game and are actively leaving icons in your wake from the start, you probably won’t realise how important it is until it’s too late. Good luck finding that chef who asked you to find a rare ingredient again if you didn’t note down their location, and have fun constantly revisiting old dead ends if you don’t mark them up as needing keys, abilities, or whatever else when you first find them. Even the markup process isn’t exactly ideal (icons are huge even compared to the maximum map zoom level), but it does the job once you know how crucial it is when faced with a lack of guidance from the rest of the game. One expensive teleport later, we’re back to that last set of achievements, with just the cryptic ones left. These largely take the form of musical references in their descriptions — the likes of Pixies, Alice In Chains, My Chemical Romance, Eurythmics, and more all get paid lip service here — but that leaves us with no idea what the actual conditions might be without stumbling upon something that sounds like it might fit the bill and hoping it works. I’m all for these kinds of ‘riddle’ achievements usually, but without some more frequent rewards on the list as well, it’s just more Gamerscore that you’ll either luck into at some point (which nobody has yet, apparently) or need to save until last when you’ll also be popping the vast majority of the other achievements. This is a genre where a constant sense of progression is paramount in avoiding the sense that you’re stuck wandering aimlessly, which, frustratingly, can be exactly what it feels like here. There’s a lot to be said for cumulative achievements in games like this (assuming the numbers aren’t ridiculous), making for intermittent unlocks between other events to assist in that constant validation that this system has led us to crave over the years.There is actually one final achievement on the list that doesn’t really fit into the other categories, and it’s pretty silly. The Number Of The Beast asks that you land a hit that deals (predictably) 666 damage, although having swung for more than that with a spicy greatsword crit counter, I can confirm that it isn’t at least 666… it’s exactly 666. No doubt we’ll see some big brain strategy for this down the line that combines specific gear and perks on an endgame build to make finding that triple-six somewhat easier, but it’s still likely to be a bit of a crapshoot… and another achievement you have no hope of unlocking until your power eventually ramps up to the required level after dozens of hours. For me, a good achievement list is one that provides steady unlocks, which as mentioned can even help fill in for when the game itself isn’t actually giving you anything new. Vampire Survivors, while admittedly working with a much bigger list, is a fantastic example — that massive list plays host to achievements for many unlocks and upgrades, both permanent and temporary, making it super easy to focus runs and come away with something or another in a matter of minutes. Here, meanwhile, you get a couple of early participation medals, nothing for hours, then a few more pops before you have to start knuckling down and actively chip away at all of the other achievements in the endgame.Honestly, I’ve been really enjoying Afterimage in spite of its reluctance to cough up achievements. It’s definitely one of the best Metroidvania games I’ve played in some time, even if there’s perhaps an argument to be made that the map is a little too big for its own good. It looks great, the simple combat is tight and satisfying, and there’s a surprising amount of depth and versatility to the build-crafting thanks to the handful of different weapon archetypes and supporting gear and abilities, as well as an unusually packed bestiary with tons of different critters and cronies to fight, not to mention the myriad bosses. But in a game where everything is just so spread out, it really does feel like a missed opportunity to not use a system-level tool like achievements to help fill in the blanks, as a lot of the other greats of the genre on Xbox already do extremely well. Is Afterimage your kind of game? How much does something like achievement pacing matter to you? Let us know down in the comments!
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