Game: My Lil Afterlife
Genre: Adventure, Simulation, Indie, Casual
System: Steam (Windows)
Developer | Publisher: JSquared Games
Controller Support: Full
Price: US $3.99 | UK £3.59 | EU € 4,15
Release Date: July 28, 2026
Review code provided with many thanks to JSquared Games.
My Lil Afterlife is a cute game about a soul in the afterlife that has been tasked with cleaning up the place in order to make it livable (deadable?) for the future deceased residents. You need to decorate, collect resources, and make friends, similar to an Animal Crossing game.
The Story and Gameplay of My Lil Afterlife
The story of My Lil Afterlife focuses on a newly dead main character who has been brought to the afterlife to clean things up. You interact with the NPCs in order to raise your relationship with them, you decorate the town to make the residents happier, and you infiltrate dungeons to farm materials from unsuspecting monsters.
The interactions are pretty simple; you don’t have to have amazing reflexes or gaming skills to be able to figure out the combat or build your little town. My Lil Afterlife is not a super complicated game; it gives New Horizon vibes, but in a spooky location. You’ll spend the majority of your time decorating and walking around.
The Pros and Cons of My Lil Afterlife
My Lil Afterlife has some major issues I have found to completely destroy any enjoyment I could have had with it. In spite of a cute art style and a very Animal Crossing-like gameplay, there are a lot of things that prevented me from having as much fun with My Lil Afterlife as I did with New Horizons.
The first thing that stands out the most is the awkwardness of movement. Video game design has come a long way over the years, and a more important aspect of this kind of design is how a developer deals with occlusion. What happens when a character’s sprite walks behind an object? In 3D games, this is less of an issue, as you can rotate the camera to allow for the player to see every aspect of the object that they are behind. However, when the game is stuck on a 2D plane, like My Lil Afterlife is, it’s important to make sure that occlusion is handled well.
In most 2D games, you see a lot of occlusion transparency, which means that when a character walks behind an object, that object becomes transparent so you can still see your sprite. In ACNH, the camera instead leans forward to peek behind the object, making it easier to see or not reacting to the object at all if it is small enough.
My Lil Afterlife, however, makes everything absolutely dizzying by using proximity zoom; this informs the camera to zoom in every time a character walks behind an object. This makes running through the dungeons a nauseating experience, as the camera keeps bouncing in and out, closer and further from the character. It happens with everything, including the supports on the bridges. I made a little gif so you can see what I mean:
On top of this, the dungeons are filled with creatures that don’t attack you, and you are given very little direction on what to do next or where to go. My Lil Afterlife has a pretty small footprint, at least at first, and I found it to be so unpleasant to play that I didn’t get too far.
While I enjoyed some aspects of My Lil Afterlife, there was so much wrong with it that it ruined the experience for me. Between the repetitive music, awkward occlusion, and complete lack of direction, I felt like I was lost in a world that did not like me very much and didn’t want me there.
Conclusion
My Lil Afterlife might be inexpensive, but it’s still not worth the price. The gameplay is so awkward and unpleasant to play that I would avoid this one at all costs.
Final Verdict: I Don’t Like It.
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