GoKawiilI can hardly believe I’m writing a blog post about a game that came out 27 years ago, but here we are. Lucasfilm, at one time had a gaming subsidiary called Lucasarts, and they produced something that has never been sequeled or surpassed : Afterlife. Here is your elevator pitch for this game – “What if you combined Simcity with Heaven and Hell ?”
I clearly remember loving this game, playing up until 2 billion souls, and being so frustrated with certain aspects that I hex edited game files in an attempt to unlock the Omnibolges. But I don’t have all the details. After a fair amount of searching through the interwebs I have found only a few sources of information about the game. This is also the only game with no subreddit dedicated to it.
Forum Posts from 2013 laying out bits of strategy. The Afterlife FAQ – this is vintage ’90s, when we put these massive text documents together. And the really surprising thing, an Article from November 2023 from a guy who clearly loves the game and “has beaten it”.
After starting and stopping a few different games, I have thoughts about tactics and game mechanics. And I need notes to get to the point where I win as well.
BAD THINGS – Turn them off. You get half the soul rate, but leaving them on guarantees both boredom watching the nose/picnic basket, and they ruin your super fiddly carefully constructed astral plane.
MONEY CHEAT – I highly doubt you can get through the game without at least one money cheat. It’s $@! which I remember as SHIFT-421. This is due to the strange negative cashflow you start out with and need to manage down by growing the size of your heaven/hell.
ROADS – Roads are odd in this game. You want them to be inefficient in Hell which suggests one super long snaky road. Yet I also remember reaching a point where the roads have a bug – no one is on them. After they get a certain population there’s probably some overflow error. In 2023 I have not reached that point.
An example of Hell Roads. The gate on the left feeds a long snaky road on some astral real estate.
Roads in Heaven should be efficient, so think nice squares with zones / infrastructure in the middle. For neither do I think I have the best building strategy yet.
Heavenly Road example. Not perfect, I’ve found, but gets the idea across.
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