Afterlife



"The last word in sims!"

Afterlife is a resource management game released in 1996 by Lucas Arts. In it, you play as a sort of celestial mayor called a "demiurge," with the ability to design a custom afterlife for the dead. It's sort of like Sim City, only the citizens are the souls of the departed and you are punishing them for their sins or rewarding them for their good virtues.

Help can be summoned to you by in the form of an angel called Aria, and Jasper, the demon who really wishes he wasn't here right now. It's not all easy, though- multiple random (and weird) events can happen and mess up things badly. Like many life sims, the game doesn't end in the traditional sense, but you can lose the game in multiple ways.

Just remember not to cheat too many times. If you do, the Death Star will come and start destroying everything you've built.

Not to be confused with the ITV 1 show of the same name, or the 2009 film starring Christina Ricci, Liam Neeson, and Justin Long.

This game features examples of:


 * And I Must Scream - Most of the Lust punishments.
 * A Worldwide Punomenon - Almost everything has puns in its title or description.
 * Bat Out of Hell - Literally. And hell buildings hit by their droppings increase productivity.
 * Bloody Bowels of Hell - The punishment "The Bowels of Hell".
 * Celestial Bureaucracy
 * Clap Your Hands If You Believe
 * Crystal Dragon Jesus - The fake religions. There's no actual Jesus analogue, but there are prophets you can inspire to spread one or more tenets.
 * Deadpan Snarker- Jasper
 * Death Isn't Permanent - If you believe in reincarnation, that is.
 * The Ditz- Aria.
 * Endless Game - Like most Simulation Games, it never ends.
 * Not exactly, it's very possible to lose the game. Train too many angels and demons, and the unemployed ones decide that whole War-Between-Heaven-And-Hell thing would really solve their boredom. Lose too many Souls, and The Powers That Be perform the Heaven and Hell Fall, everyone vanishes miracle. And like many simulation games, don't go too far into the red - or you'll get the Four Surfers of the Apocalypso destroying everything you've built.
 * Female Angel, Male Demon
 * Fluffy Cloud Heaven
 * Fire and Brimstone Hell
 * Gameplay Automation - The automatic balancing of buildings.
 * Good Angel, Bad Angel- Parodied. Aria's the nicer of the two, but she is by no means the smartest.
 * Fun with Acronyms - Almost everything. EMBOs are Ethically Mature Biological Organisms. When they die, they become SOULs, Stuff Of Unending Life.
 * Hey, It's That Voice! - Diablo 2's Ba'al was voiced by Jasper Wormwood, your demonic assistant in Afterlife.
 * Horsemen of the Apocalypse - Actually, Surfers of the Apocalypso.
 * Ironic Hell - Most of the punishments qualify to some extent, and there's actually a low-level building that crops up every once in a while that deconstructs the concept; the amount of time the demons within spend finding the most Ironic Hell conceivable is actually rather inefficient.
 * Linear Warriors, Quadratic Wizards Heaven is easier to run early in the game, because Heaven prefers short travel times for SOULs to walk, while Hell perfers the Damned walk a long time. As the game goes on, and both plane's road systems become more complex, and Aria will inevitably start whining about it, and there's nothing you can do.
 * Loading Screen - Which has jokes, of course.
 * Logo Joke
 * Man of Wealth and Taste - Jasper dresses in a snazzy business suit.
 * Mundane Afterlife: A lot of the heavenly rewards bring to mind an indefinite vacation at an expensive resort hotel, something like a cross between Center Parcs and Disneyland.
 * Our Souls Are Different - or, "Our SOULs (Stuff Of Unending Life)"
 * Post Modernism - one of Heaven's fate structures is... "Game of After Life", in which the SOULs play a Heaven/Hell building game
 * Powered by a Forsaken Child - Omnibolges, massive buildings capable of punishing billions of SOUL at a time, are the remains of other Hells that were so actively evil that they collapsed in upon themselves. The horrible thing is that these buildings are still fully-functioning Hells themselves. That table? A super-compressed Lust punishment. That coffee cup? A super-compressed Sloth punishment.
 * Interestingly, Heaven gets something similar with their Love Domes. Instead of collapsing upon themselves, Love Domes are other Heavens that became so happy and peaceful that the entire Heaven ascended to pure happiness. That chair you're sitting on is composed of trillions of heavenly SOULs.
 * Shout-Out - from the rewarding structure "Casino Royale" to the punishment "The Real Underworld", passing by the Death Star mentioned above (it's a Lucas Arts game, after all)
 * The Powers That Be
 * Ungrateful Bastard: The creator of the structures you receive when you hit population milestones. He started as a angel who found issue with EVERYTHING in heaven, no matter how pleasant, relaxing or beautiful they were, and made the heavenly ones to make the surrounding area more pleasant based on which sense it represented.. Eventually, the Powers That Be tossed him down to Hell....where he Preceeded to do the Exact samething in hell, focusing on trying to make Hell even more Crapsack than it already was.
 * War Is Hell / Hell Is War : The Ultimate Punishment for Wrath, War: What is it good for?