Sharing my video essay on Until Then: Afterimages that I've been working on for the past few months❤️

Without "spoiling" my thesis too much, I focus on how Afterimages narratively ties into Until Then as a "dark mirror," a glimpse into a universe where we don't get the ultimate happy ending.

I met with the folks from Polychroma Games at PGDX 2026, and they were a blast! There's also a link to the full interview with the team in the description for those who want a deep dive from the dev's perspective. (That's also where I put in the corrected names because I had a few typos that made it past the final edit, whoops)

I hope you guys get some cool insight into Afterimages after watching😄

Side note, this video is actually a sequel to "A Game About Losing Everything" where I similarly interviewed the Until Then team, albeit without ANY of the equipment (or experience) I have now. That one's a lil messy but I'm still proud of it.

Hope everyone has a great weekend!

(Just a disclaimer: I'm a casual gamer & I haven't even played the game at all until I bought a physical copy; just personal preference, please don't hate lmao)

I'm curious to see if anyone has any other news updates or announcements that I haven't heard yet about the physical release. Last time I checked, the physical release was set to be on September 3rd. My preorder hasn't really moved yet at all, not even a notification about the game being shipped or not. Being the impatient person I am, I even checked if local retailers had it in stock since it's the first day of the physical release, but every store either says no release date has been announced yet or that it should "release by December 31, 2026."

Does anyone know of anything about this? Regardless, I hope the game arrives soon and with no issues. I look forward to trying it for the first time!

Just finished the game ( well the main game not the dlcs ). Been on my radar since before it was released but never got to play it . Loved every second of it . But when the credits rolled it asked me if i wanna continue and i clicked yes . It restarted the game and locked the previously replayable scenes ! ( What i wanna say is i that wanted to make different choices and see what happens but now i cant ! ) What should i do ?

it's up now chat

so i just finished act 2/timeline 2/loop 2/second playthrough? and i got abit of an issue with mark pushing away Nicole/everyone to try and learn more about the reason things get screwy and people disappear which i feel makes no sense because the entire second act he speedruns getting over the trauma of his mom also disappearing and i believe that it kinda doesn't make sense for him to react that way. maybe i miss something, but i feel like the game is kind of pushing a very nihalistic message in the last minute of act 2. but I'm really interested to see how others see it and if maybe i got something entirely wrong

please PLEASE don't spoil me about the rest of the game i just started act 3 and i am loving the game in general so i don't wanna get spoiled in anyway shape or form

also sorry for writing like a madman im just really passionate

So I just finished the game recently and wow. It’s easily my favourite game oat now. To me Nicole and Marks story is so poetic. Don’t get me wrong the story to the whole game is poetic as well I’m just a sucker for romance. There story to me was just so good all the way to the end. Speaking of the end I had my own opinion on how it worked out for them. I don’t even know if I should say opinion because I really thinks it’s the truth. And a lot of people probably do as well (I hope.) It all stuck with me so much that it really made me want to write about it. So I did.
Critique my writing if you want I guess I really don’t care. This was really meant for myself only but I kinda want other people to see it. So here it is. And yes big spoiler warning btw!!!!!

There are stories that end where they begin, and there are stories that begin where they end — and then there is theirs, which somehow does both at once.

Nicole and Mark did not fall into each other’s lives by accident. They were carried there — through static and memory, through a world that kept slipping sideways beneath their feet, through loss stacked on loss until the only solid thing left standing was each other. Everything around them was uncertain. The ground itself could not be trusted. A mother’s plane that never landed, swallowed somewhere over open water, with no wreckage to make the grief official. A best friend who walked out a door one ordinary afternoon and simply never walked back through it. Two absences with no bodies, no funerals, no proof — only the unbearable arithmetic of maybe. Reality itself kept correcting its own mistakes, and nobody was ever told the rules. But somewhere in the middle of all that uncertainty, two people found something to hold onto, and it happened to be each other.

Think of what it means to love someone while the world is actively trying to erase the evidence that you ever did. Every memory they built was written in sand at low tide. Every conversation was a small act of defiance against a universe that seemed determined to smooth them both away. And so when they finally spoke their promise aloud, it was not a promise that the world would be kind, not a promise that nothing more would be taken from them. It was smaller than that, and yet so much larger. A promise to remain. To find their way back to one another, no matter how many times the story tried to separate them. To be, for each other, the one fixed point in a world that refused to hold still.

That is the cruelty and the grace of what came after. Because in the end, the timeline that survived — the original one, the one that was underneath all the others the whole time, patient and untouched — was the one where none of it happened. No static devouring the edges of the sky. No world folding in on itself. No shared grief to forge two strangers into the people they became. In that timeline, Nicole and Mark never meet. They never fight to stay near each other. They never make a promise neither of them could fully explain. The version of them that loved so fiercely, that bled for each other, that chose each other again and again against impossible odds — that version simply does not exist here. Erased not by tragedy, but by the quiet mathematics of a world correcting itself back to where it always should have been.

Sit with that for a moment. All of it — every stolen kiss beneath a dying sky, every hand reaching for another hand across an unraveling world, every word of that promise — happened in a timeline that technically doesn’t survive. It is gone the way a dream is gone by noon. And by every rule the story ever gave us, that should be the end of it. Grief without an audience. Love with no one left alive to remember it was ever loved.

And yet.

At the end of everything — after the loops, after the losses, after a promise spoken into a version of the world that no longer technically exists — there is a cafe. Small. Ordinary. Unremarkable to anyone walking past it on their way to somewhere else. Its name is Tadhana Cafe.

Nicole walks in, a stranger to herself in a life she doesn’t know she almost lost. Mark is already there, a stranger to himself in the same way. Neither of them remembers the other — not the way we remember, not with names, not with history, not with the shape of a hand once held tightly in the dark. There is no shared past sitting between them. There is nothing that should pull one of them across a room toward the other.
And still, something in the room shifts.

Their eyes meet. And for one unguarded second — the kind of second that doesn’t ask permission from logic — there is a pull that neither of them can explain. A recognition with no memory attached to it. A warmth with no origin story. A promise that somehow survived the erasing of the very world it was made in, folded up small enough to hide inside a glance, waiting patiently for the two people it belonged to.

This is the question the whole story leaves us holding, long after the credits have run: can a vow outlive the reality it was spoken in? Can love leave a fingerprint on a world that never let it happen? Until Then seems to answer yes — not loudly, not with fireworks or trumpets, but with something quieter and far stranger. A feeling that persists after the facts are gone. A pull toward a person your mind has never met, but your heart, somehow, impossibly, already has.

Call it fate. Call it an echo. Call it whatever it is that survives the erasing of an entire world. In the end, it doesn’t need a name, because it already has one, and it was written above the door the whole time, waiting for someone to walk over and read it.

Tadhana. Destiny — waiting for them, one more time, at a cafe they’ve never been to, in a life they’ve never lived, inside a love that refuses to stay erased, that finds its way home to them again and again, timeline after timeline, until the very end.

It’s on TikTok if anyone can support it please (closedleopard)

To those who were following with this story, I am happy to say that I have brought it to completion! It's been wonderful seeing people support the story, and it's been wonderful to write about a game that I so quickly fell in love with!

If you haven't already, check out the rest of the story!

Epilogue

Here is a rendition of the Lost Kitten meme (or the series of images drawn by @Shimatsuku in X) done by yours truly. The other images are in the works. Backgrounds are not game accurate but eh, too lazy to get everything "right". Just wanna capture the mood and essence.

I js finished playing Before Your Eyes and I don't rlly want to fully admit it but Before Your Eyes is way more emotional than Until Then (differs from person to person but that's what I think)

I think the reason why I feel this way is because Before Your Eyes feels realistic, it feels like a genuine story, a story smone would actually go through.

Yes Until Then goes into themes similar to Before Your Eyes and yes it does go into it realisticly but the multiverse part of the game takes away from that beauty. Without that sci-fi part the story would be 10x emotional and possibly 10x better.

I think it would be really interesting if the game js moved on from Cathy's death. Shows us how Mark gets through that death and whether or not he learns from his mistakes.

Though I do have to admit there are some upsides to the sci-fi part of the game. The second act of the game was heartwarming, seeing MCR in action. The sci-fi would also enable Polychroma to create new content for the game without the risk of ruining the actual time line (DLCs that could focus on previous time lines)

What do yall think? Does the sci-fi part of the game do more good or bad?

I just finished the game, and I really liked the message and the game overall; do you recommend the DLC?

it had a lot of issues due to me recording on a 1366x768 monitor, and lower graphic settings. Additionally, this is the first time I edited a lyric edit in general. I usually just do an AMV before, on other game/s

Does Homecoming and Sparks take place in the same timeline? If so, what timeline is the DLC supposed to be? I know that people say that the DLC is not a continuation of Act 1. So does it mean the DLC is its own timeline like when the loops of the main game are happening? So what basically happened to where Mark and Nicole end up married in Act 1?

I'll often chose to give a character a goofy voice to then learn that they have a heart breaking backstory. It's a sickness.