Afterlove EP review

Manic Pixie Dream Cortana

Image credit:Fellow Traveller

• Developer: Pikselnesia
• Publisher: Fellow Traveller
• Release: Feb 14th, 2025
• On: Windows
• From: Steam , GOG
• Price: £15.07/$18/€17.55
• Reviewed on: Intel Core-i7 12700F, 16GB RAM, Nvidia RTX 3060, Windows 11

Among the bravest risks a game can take is making you play an arsehole. Afterlove EP ’s Rama isn’t an arsehole, but he’s getting there. He’s a grieving indie rockstar who has fallen into self-neglect and hermitude - a gloom-sodden, guitar-cradling burden on friends who believe in and care for him, despite it all. As the player of this visual novel with a pinch of rhythm game, you are essentially one of those long-suffering friends. Your job is to help Rama escape his own labyrinth of bereavement, self-pity and tortured creativity. Your ally and enemy in this is Cinta, Rama’s dead girlfriend, who is now a persistent voice in his head. She’s his better self, sometimes, and at others, the voice of anguish and fear dragging him deeper into purgatory.

I like Afterlove EP’s deft writing, and enjoy its splendid and specific recreation of 21st century Jakarta. I also feel for developers Pikselnesia, who have made a game about grief while processing the loss of their own creative director, Coffee Talk creator Mohammad Fahmi. But I do not much like being Rama’s friend, at this particular moment in his life. And by extension, I did not enjoy a lot of Afterlove EP, much as I admire it.

Afterlove EP begins a year after Cinta’s death of an unnamed illness. Following that loss, Rama has cut himself off from his band mates, Tasya and Adit, and from life in general. Now, he has 28 in-game days to put everything back together, rekindle connections and even find new romance while preparing for a comeback show. You get to perform two actions each day, one in the morning and one in the evening. These mostly involve choosing who to spend time with, but you can also free-roam the game’s boisterous, hand-drawn city, dipping into shops and alleyways to experience the artful layering of the overworld score, and chatting to bystanders whose optional dialogue consists of pleasingly Squaresofty two-sentence brainfarts.

Image credit:Fellow Traveller

There are places that trigger flashbacks to your days with Cinta, and eventually, places where you can busk, which involves ad libbing from a selection of awful rhymes. (Among his other faults, I found Rama to be an abysmal lyricist.) The most involved it gets at the level of the buttons is some cursory prompt-matching during rock band performances, with a soundtrack contributed by real-life Indonesian crooners L’Alphalpha. Beyond that, it’s a traditional visual novel in that you’re trying to guide the plot towards a selection of Good or Bad endings. There are three well-telegraphed romance routes to undertake, while dividing time between trips to a therapist and some tense rehearsals with Tasya and Adit.

The constant throughout is the mysterious disembodied voice of “Cinta”. In a gently inspired flourish, she is the only character with full dialogue voice-acting; everybody else in the game gets bibbly-bobbly speech effects. Cinta sits by implication at your elbow, keeping up a fickle, flirty, fighty commentary that is surely going to be a massive inconvenience for the Let’s Players. Rama is the only character who can hear her. He has a habit of talking to her out loud without realising, sometimes meeting her eyes through the screen, which is naturally rather disconcerting for his friends. The game never fully explains Cinta’s persistence in any unambiguously clinical or fantastical sense, but it’s obvious what all this represents for Rama: his inability to let go.

Image credit:Fellow Traveller

I suspect Pikselnesia have different influences, but for me, Cinta is a literalisation of the North American cinematic archetype of the “Manic Pixie Dream Girl”, coined by Nathan Rabin in 2007 with reference to Kirsten Dunst’s character in Elizabethtown. Briefly, Manic Pixie Dream Girls are unstoppably upbeat, weird ’n’ wacky cuties who exist “solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures”, as Rabin puts it. Cinta is that idea thrown into a crockpot with phantom Chef Gusteau from Ratatouille . Thankfully, Afterlove EP is very much concerned to dismantle this soggy masculine hallucination. Part of teaching Rama to let go of Cinta is reminding him of who she really was, before she became his lo-fi Cortana. This involves opening himself up to the fact that other people remember her differently and have been grieving for her too.

One of the writing’s strengths is watching “Cinta” change, for better and worse, as Rama engages with old and new acquiantances. She is by turns the angel and the devil on his shoulder. At her worst, she relentlessly misinterprets feedback as mean-spirited, and prompts him to lash out. She guilt-trips Rama about leaving her behind, while piling on the reassurance that he is a good guy and a great artist who is entitled to all the forbearance his friends have shown him. She discourages him from opening up to his therapist. But there is a certain kindness informing everything, and sometimes, Cinta’s thoughts are constructive or usefully caustic, be it reproaching him for ignoring Adit, his oldest friend, or just encouraging him to go out for a walk before the big show.

The progress from one Cinta to the other isn’t smooth or irreversible. She’s a believable barometer for Rama’s own fluctuating mental health, though certain fluctuations have more to do with the underlying architecture of a visual novel made up of semi-standalone stories that don’t follow a fixed order.

Image credit:Fellow Traveller

In particular, as you make headway through the core storyline, “Cinta” starts to become a source of more genuine insight on the living Cinta and her mixed feelings about Rama, who was anything but the perfect boyfriend. You catch whiffs during those ostensibly rosy, couple-bonding flashbacks of his controlling tendencies and inability to listen, masquerading as deep feeling. “You couldn’t see me outside of your own expectations,” she says, at one point. Plus ca change, etc. This echoes the tough love Rama receives from Tasya and Adit. During a rehearsal of new material, Tasya expresses ambivalence about Rama’s lyrics. The way he writes about Cinta is reductive, she says, condescending. Cinta was so much more than this. The Cinta in your ear is atypically withdrawn during this exchange.

In addition to making room for memories of the “real” Cinta, Rama’s journey towards the big comeback performance slowly makes room for the trials and travails of newcomers. One of your possible love interests is a queer man who had to survive on the streets after being kicked out by his homophobic parents - a trauma that tentatively makes itself felt between the lines of his teasing. Another love interest is trying to navigate the sexism and ageism of the modelling industry, while dealing with a long overdue break-up.

Image credit:Fellow Traveller

I found these people good company, not least because their energy and appetite for life make a nice contrast to doom-ridden Rama. Afterlove EP’s script in general is adroit, fleshing out each character without lapsing into the exposition that could easily encumber a game set One Year On from its prologue. It flows together well with artist Soyatu’s roster of character portraits, which communicate volumes in miniature: Adit’s peacemaker tendency to talk at you over his big round shoulder, Tasya’s businesslike eye-rolling, Rama’s way of looking down despondently while picking at one of his headphones.

Admittedly, I came and went with the game’s art direction. Early on in the story, you meet somebody in a pharmacy who is lost in raptures over a box of painkillers. “There’s something so beautiful about the simplicity of painkiller packaging,” they tell you. “Somebody chose this color. This layout. This font. This is somebody’s art.” Is that the game commenting on itself as a commodification of grief, I wondered, tugging on my stinky culture pundit goatee? I wouldn’t call Afterlove EP’s 2D hand-drawn art “simple”, but it does cultivate an unrehearsed spontaneity, with lines and colours that overflow with careful, mildly anaesthetic scruffiness. It feels warm and self-deprecating in a way that suggests there will be no real ugliness in store, that even the worst arguments will have the corners rounded off, like the fonts. Thankfully, that’s not how it plays out. Afterlove EP may be “wholesome” on some level but it’s wide-open to the emotions of spitefulness, regret and defeat.

Gosh, that’s a fair amount of praise, given how I opened this review! Again, the big issue I have with all this is simply that I do not like Rama. Spending time with him makes me feel the need to shower. At his worst he is a caricature of a sadboi slouching around his own personal hall of carnival mirrors. At his best, he is a creature with the capacity to care but no pressing aim in life beyond writing another rock tune - and while I think the compositions are polished, the game’s brand of indie soft rock leaves me cold.

All this is, whisper it, a very subjective thing to hang a review on, and possibly a show of my own unkindness toward a suffering younger man. Grief makes morose, entitled dickheads of us all, and I’ve read other reviews that find consolation in Rama’s difficulty coming unstuck. But I guess where I can make a more convincing case against the game is that the format of the visual novel sort of encourages Rama at his shittiest.

Image credit:Fellow Traveller

It’s being pedantic, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the fact that world literally revolves around him, advancing from sunrise to sundown only once he, Rama, has decided how to proceed. Rama is the functional centre of the universe, even when the aim is to defuse his melancholy narcissism. The dating sim element also means that characters feel too available for a story that is, on some level, about learning to respect other peoples’ time. The three romantic possibilities you’re presented with pop up from day to day, marked on your map as though Rama had bugged their phones: the same cafe table, the same bookshop, the same record store. Any lessons in empathy involved are thwarted by this sheer availability, which characterises them as unpaid therapists. In short, the choice of formal precedents both supports and undermines the tale.

This is much more of a problem when it comes to those Good and Bad endings. These compress the mushy unpredictability of grieving into a rigid puzzle. To achieve a Good ending, you’ll need to min-max the stories, devoting all your days to certain characters and disregarding others. By contrast, my approach to healing Rama was to distribute attention considerately between the cast. (I also did this, of course, because I was reviewing the game and wanted to see what each character had to offer.) This landed me with a Bad Ending that fast-forwarded to a scenario in which Rama had snapped back into resentful isolation. I get that visual novels are known, even celebrated, for such whiplash. But given the intelligence of Afterlove EP’s writing, I found it bizarre and winding to be slapped with a closing grade.

It’s a provocation to replay, of course - if you commit to all three romance routes, I think you could get 15-20 hours out of this - but I am in no mood to spend any longer in Rama’s head. Finishing the game and writing this review has been an agonising, spaghettifying descent from grudging empathy into loathing. I’ve been stringing the game along in 20 minute bursts for weeks, because that’s as much as I can take in one sitting; the last hour of my 7-8 hour runthrough felt like prying out my own teeth.

Some of that is Rama’s fault, and some of that is the game’s, and some of it, again, is my fault for being older than Rama and perhaps, having more in common with him than I care to admit. I suspect that if you are not me, you might relish this more, but please be prepared for a lot of emotional labour.

Find out how we conduct our reviews by reading our review policy .

Afterlove EP

PS4 , PS5 , Xbox One , Xbox Series X/S , PC , Nintendo Switch

Rock Paper Shotgun is better when you sign in

Sign in and join us on our journey to discover strange and compelling PC games.

All 75 Arc Raiders Blueprints and where to get them

These areas have the highest chance of giving you Blueprints

Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Embark Studios

Looking for more Arc Raiders Blueprints? It’s a special day when you find a Blueprint, as they’re among the most valuable items in Arc Raiders. If you find a Blueprint that you haven’t already found, then you must make sure you hold onto it at all costs, because Blueprints are the key to one of the most important and powerful systems of meta-progression in the game.

This guide aims to be the very best guide on Blueprints you can find, starting with a primer on what exactly they are and how they work in Arc Raiders, before delving into exactly where to get Blueprints and the very best farming spots for you to take in your search.

We’ll also go over how to get Blueprints from other unlikely activities, such as destroying Surveyors and completing specific quests. And you’ll also find the full list of all 75 Blueprints in Arc Raiders on this page (including the newest Blueprints added with the Cold Snap update , such as the Deadline Blueprint and Firework Box Blueprint), giving you all the information you need to expand your own crafting repertoire.

In this guide:

• What are Blueprints in Arc Raiders?
• Full Blueprint list: All crafting recipes
• Where to find Blueprints in Arc Raiders Blueprints obtained from quests Blueprints obtained from Trials Best Blueprint farming locations

What are Blueprints in Arc Raiders?

Blueprints in Arc Raiders are special items which, if you manage to extract with them, you can expend to permanently unlock a new crafting recipe in your Workshop. If you manage to extract from a raid with an Anvil Blueprint, for example, you can unlock the ability to craft your very own Anvil Pistol, as many times as you like (as long as you have the crafting materials).

To use a Blueprint, simply open your Inventory while in the lobby, then right-click on the Blueprint and click “Learn And Consume” . This will permanently unlock the recipe for that item in your Workshop. As of the Stella Montis update, there are allegedly 75 different Blueprints to unlock - although only 68 are confirmed to be in the game so far. You can see all the Blueprints you’ve found and unlocked by going to the Workshop menu, and hitting “R” to bring up the Blueprint screen.

It’s possible to find duplicates of past Blueprints you’ve already unlocked. If you find these, then you can either sell them, or - if you like to play with friends - you can take it into a match and gift it to your friend so they can unlock that recipe for themselves. Another option is to keep hold of them until the time comes to donate them to the Expedition.

Full Blueprint list: All crafting recipes

Below is the full list of all the Blueprints that are currently available to find in Arc Raiders, and the crafting recipe required for each item:

Note: The missing Blueprints in this list likely have not actually been added to the game at the time of writing, because none of the playerbase has managed to find any of them. As they are added to the game, I will update this page with the most relevant information so you know exactly how to get all 75 Arc Raiders Blueprints.

Where to find Blueprints in Arc Raiders

Below is a list of all containers, modifiers, and events which maximise your chances of finding Blueprints:

• Certain quests reward you with specific Blueprints .
• Completing Trials has a high chance of offering Blueprints as rewards.
• Surveyors have a decent chance of dropping Blueprints on death.
• High loot value areas tend to have a greater chance of spawning Blueprints.
• Night Raids and Storms may increase rare Blueprint spawn chances in containers.
• Containers with higher numbers of items may have a higher tendency to spawn Blueprints. As a result, Blue Gate (which has many “large” containers containing multiple items) may give you a higher chance of spawning Blueprints.
• Raider containers (Raider Caches, Weapon Boxes, Medical Bags, Grenade Tubes) have increased Blueprint drop rates. As a result, the Uncovered Caches event gives you a high chance of finding Blueprints.
• Security Lockers have a higher than average chance of containing Blueprints.
• Certain Blueprints only seem to spawn under specific circumstances: Tempest Blueprint only spawns during Night Raid events. Vulcano Blueprint only spawns during Hidden Bunker events. Jupiter and Equaliser Blueprints only spawn during Harvester events.

Raider Caches, Weapon Boxes, and other raider-oriented container types have a good chance of offering Blueprints. |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Embark Studios

Blueprints have a very low chance of spawning in any container in Arc Raiders, around 1-2% on average. However, there is a higher chance of finding Blueprints in particular container types. Specifically, you can find more Blueprints in Raider containers and security lockers.

Beyond this, if you’re looking for Blueprints you should focus on regions of the map which are marked as having particularly high-value loot. Areas such as the Control Tower in Dam Battlegrounds, the Arrival and Departure Buildings in Spaceport, and Pilgrim’s Peak in Blue Gate all have a better-than-average chance of spawning Blueprints somewhere amongst all their containers. Night Raids and Electromagnetic Storm events also increase the drop chances of certain Blueprints .

In addition to these containers, you can often loot Blueprints from destroyed Surveyors - the largest of the rolling ball ARC. Surveyors are more commonly found on the later maps - Spaceport and Blue Gate - and if one spawns in your match, you’ll likely see it by the blue laser beam that it casts into the sky while “surveying”.

Surveyors are quite well-armoured and will very speedily run away from you once it notices you, but if you can take one down then make sure you loot all its parts for a chance of obtaining certain unusual Blueprints.

Blueprints obtained from quests

One way in which you can get Blueprints is by completing certain quests for the vendors in Speranza. Some quests will reward you with a specific item Blueprint upon completion, so as long as you work through all the quests in Arc Raiders, you are guaranteed those Blueprints.

Here is the full list of all Blueprints you can get from quest rewards:

• Trigger Nade Blueprint: Rewarded after completing “Sparks Fly”.
• Lure Grenade Blueprint: Rewarded after completing “Greasing Her Palms”.
• Burletta Blueprint: Rewarded after completing “Industrial Espionage”.
• Hullcracker Blueprint (and Launcher Ammo Blueprint): Rewarded after completing “The Major’s Footlocker”.

Alas, that’s only 4 Blueprints out of a total of 75 to unlock, so for the vast majority you will need to find them yourself during a raid. If you’re intent on farming Blueprints, then it’s best to equip yourself with cheap gear in case you lose it, but don’t use a free loadout because then you won’t get a safe pocket to stash any new Blueprint you find. No pain in Arc Raiders is sharper than failing to extract with a new Blueprint you’ve been after for a dozen hours already.

One of the best ways to get Blueprints is by hitting three stars on all five Trials every week. |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Embark Studios

Blueprints obtained from Trials

One of the very best ways to get Blueprints is as rewards for completing Trials in Arc Raiders. Trials are unlocked from Level 15 onwards, and allow you to earn rewards by focusing on certain tasks over the course of several raids. For example, one Trial might task you with dealing damage to Hornets, while another might challenge you to loot Supply Drops.

Trials refresh on a weekly basis, with a new week bringing five new Trials. Each Trial can offer up to three rewards after passing certain score milestones, and it’s possible to receive very high level loot from these reward crates - including Blueprints. So if you want to unlock as many Blueprints as possible, you should make a point of completing as many Trials as possible each week.

Best Blueprint farming locations

The very best way to get Blueprints is to frequent specific areas of the maps which combine high-tier loot pools with the right types of containers to search. Here are my recommendations for where to find Blueprints on every map, so you can always keep the search going for new crafting recipes to unlock.

Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Embark Studios

Dam Battlegrounds

The best places to farm Blueprints on Dam Battlegrounds are the Control Tower, Power Generation Complex, Ruby Residence, and Pale Apartments . The first two regions, despite only being marked on the map as mid-tier loot, contain a phenomenal number of containers to loot. The Control Tower can also contain a couple of high-tier Security Lockers - though of course, you’ll need to have unlocked the Security Breach skill at the end of the Survival tree.

There’s also a lot of reporting amongst the playerbase that the Residential areas in the top-left of the map - Pale Apartments and Ruby Residence - give you a comparatively strong chance of finding Blueprints. Considering their size, there’s a high density of containers to loot in both locations, and they also have the benefit of being fairly out of the way. So you’re more likely to have all the containers to yourself.

Buried City

The best Blueprint farming locations on Buried City are the Santa Maria Houses, Grandioso Apartments, Town Hall, and the various buildings of the New District . Grandioso Apartments has a lower number of containers than the rest, but a high chance of spawning weapon cases - which have good Blueprint drop rates. The others are high-tier loot areas, with plenty of lootable containers - including Security Lockers.

Spaceport

The best places to find Blueprints on Spaceport are the Arrival and Departure Buildings, as well as Control Tower A6 and the Launch Towers . All these areas are labelled as high-value loot regions, and many of them are also very handily connected to one another by the Spaceport wall, which you can use to quickly run from one area to the next. At the tops of most of these buildings you’ll find at least one Security Locker, so this is an excellent farming route for players looking to find Blueprints.

The downside to looting Blueprints on Spaceport is that all these areas are hotly contested, particularly in Duos and Squads. You’ll need to be very focused and fast in order to complete the full farming route.

Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Embark Studios

Blue Gate

Blue Gate tends to have a good chance of dropping Blueprints, potentially because it generally has a high number of containers which can hold lots of items; so there’s a higher chance of a Blueprint spawning in each container. In my experience, the best Blueprint farming spots on Blue Gate are Pilgrim’s Peak, Raider’s Refuge, the Ancient Fort, and the Underground Complex beneath the Warehouse .

All of these areas contain a wealth of containers to loot. Raider’s Refuge has less to loot, but the majority of the containers in and around the Refuge are raider containers, which have a high chance of containing Blueprints - particularly during major events.

Stella Montis

On the whole, Stella Montis seems to have a very low drop rate for Blueprints (though a high chance of dropping other high-tier loot). If you do want to try farming Blueprints on this map, the best places to find Blueprints in Stella Montis are Medical Research, Assembly Workshop, and the Business Center . These areas have the highest density of containers to loot on the map.

In addition to this, the Western Tunnel has a few different Security Lockers to loot, so while there’s very little to loot elsewhere in this area of the map, it’s worth hitting those Security Lockers if you spawn there at the start of a match.

That wraps up this primer on how to get all the Blueprints in Arc Raiders as quickly as possible. With the Expedition system constantly resetting a large number of players’ Blueprints, it’s more important than ever to have the most up-to-date information on where to find all these Blueprints.

While you’re here, be sure to check out our Arc Raiders best guns tier list , as well as our primers on the best skills to unlock and all the different Field Depot locations on every map.

ARC Raiders

PS5 , Xbox Series X/S , PC

Rock Paper Shotgun is better when you sign in

Sign in and join us on our journey to discover strange and compelling PC games.