Created by Bahiyya Khan, after HOURS is a vignette/FMV game about a young woman’s story who was sexually abused when she was a child, leading to Borderline Personality Disorder as a result. This experience has been roaming through the internet for quite some time, and it has been announced today that it’s finally coming out this October.
I found out about Khan’s work previous to last year’s GDC while she was starting a crowdfunding campaign to cover travelling costs. The video was shared on Twitter and, fortunately, she was able to attend to 2017’s edition of the event. It wasn’t long until I discovered after HOURS, a quite different experience for a young game developer, portraying herself as the main character, Lilith Gray, throughout the story.
While in a black and white tone, there are different sketches and drawings on both the character and the objects that players can interact with, from a diary to dialogue vignettes.
Shared today by the booth at Play NYC highlighting marginalized game developers Friendship Garden: “By spending a night alone with Lilith in her bedroom and subsequently, her head, players learn Lilith’s story by adopting a double gaze: that of the player witnessing Lilith’s story and piecing together why she behaves and responds as she does and to an extent, the gaze of Lilith.”
After HOURS isn’t Khan’s first game. You can play her previous projects Fuck The System, war & pieces and The Room on her itch.io profile page. Also, you can find more about her inspirations in a talk she has done at Amaze below:
In addition to Bahiyya Khan (who works in game design, writing and actress), Claire Meekel (cinematography, editing and animation), Tim Flusk (programmer) and Abi Meekel (sound design) have also been contributing to this project.
While there isn’t an official release date, you can download an outdated version of after HOURS if you want to know more about it, just keep in mind that it can only be played on Windows. Make sure to give the developers a follow on Twitter, too.
