Afterparty

We’ve all been there, right? Besieged by a hangover so physically and emotionally crippling that all you’re able to do is yearn for the sweet relief of eternal sleep. The memories of the night before thankfully fleeting; injuries from the night before alarmingly excruciating; both immortalised by the lens of a camera phone, the evidence already circulating around the internet. God bless social media. Alcohol is trash and only garbage people drink it… you know that you’ve repeated that thought before. You’re never drinking again, this will be the last time that you feel this way. You’ve shouted that into the void before too. But it’s okay; we’re all friends here. We both know that it’s only the last time until the next time.

Night School Studio’s latest independent project is an exploration of just that. Of dealing with the world’s worst hangover by embarking on the pursuit of another, a hangover that could quite literally be the difference between life and death. At its heart, Afterparty is a coming-of-age story starring Lola and Milo, two college students that wake up dead after a bender that went very much awry, unable to remember all that much of the night before. But they are resilient, quickly coming to understand that they have but one chance to escape the quite-literal hellscape that has befallen them before it consumes them entirely.

What if the only way to reclaim your soul, to earn safe passage back to the land of the living, was to school Satan in a demonic contest of alcohol retention? Well, you know what they say: when it’s time to party we will party hard. If it sounds ridiculous, that’s because it absolutely, unashamedly is. “Yeah, we wanted to take a pretty hard left from what Oxenfree was,” laughs Sean Krankel, co-founder of the studio and co-creative director of Afterparty. “Oxenfree was fairly serious with a dash of humour, and I think that Afterparty is kind of the flip. It’s still an adventure, but it’s a funnier take that still has some seriousness within it.”

“When Afterparty begins you think you’re still at a college party,” Krankel says of the story. “Then the walls fall away and you’re being mocked by demons who are actually pulling a prank. It’s sort of like a low-budget play of your last night out,” he laughs, before giving us just a little insight into the weird and wonderful world you’ll inhabit. “As it turns out you’re late to getting processed because of this, so you’re told to head down the road to go to what is basically the DMV… except, you know, you’re in actual hell now.”

It’s here where you get your first taste of the off-kilter version of hell that Night School has created. “You get assigned your own personal demon, one that