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Afterparty
I think I'm kind of doing Afterparty a disservice by writing this post now, having played the game twice, because it didn't replay well! But on the other hand I kind of feel like I ended up going a particularly good path my first time through, so it might be less about "your first playthrough is your best" and more about me getting almost the best version of the game on my first try. (Brita, if you do play, which frankly is up to you at this point: When you can help a guy catch someone or get a woman a drink, get her the drink.)
Spoilers: I've left a spoiler gap before the last section of stuff I don't think B should know ahead of time if she plays, but everything else is fair game. Significant-ish Oxenfree spoilers in one part but I flag that at the start of the paragraph.
In Afterparty you play as Milo and Lola, best friends who find themselves in Hell shortly after graduating college. (The game can eventually reveal the specifics of how they died, but why they didn't get into Heaven is a little more opaque and something I'd like to dig into more if it wouldn't require me to play the first five hours of the game again just to play around with dialogue options to see what different choices got me.) They arrive outside of office hours and can't be checked in, so they have the night to wander Hell and find out from a cab driver that if you go to Satan's nightly rager and beat him in a drinking contest, you get to go home.
What follows is a series of tasks - you can't get into the party, but there are two people offering up spare invites in exchange for favors, so you have to choose one of those to complete. Then, Satan has some hoops he wants you to jump through before you can compete with him, so there are some more errands for you to go on. This basically makes the game a bar crawl as you're sent to meet people who are invariably out drinking in one of Hell's neighborhoods.
It's impossible not to compare this game to Oxenfree, not just because the only reason I played it was because I played Oxenfree and Brita said "I wonder what else they've made" and this was the main answer, but because the gameplay is so similar - you play a tiny-ass character moving back and forth along a fixed path, you almost always have at least one companion with you so there's ambient conversation as you move through the world, and you periodically get 2-3 dialogue choices that sometimes result in you interrupting another character.
And it's no Oxenfree! Which feels like a very unfair standard to hold Afterparty to, and I try to judge it on its own merits and not on an Oxenfree scale (which is why I gave it 4/5 stars on Backloggd, as opposed to the 2 or 3 it would get if I said "5 is Oxenfree" instead of "5 is what Afterparty was trying to be"). But it's VERY hard when the game plays so similarly not to take notice of all the ways that familiar actions don't have familiar outcomes.
For starters: Milo and Lola don't really seem to like each other, and the game KIND OF knows that, but it also kind of doesn't! It's not well written! And it's not like Oxenfree, where you can specifically decide things like "should I defend Jonah in this conversation" and ultimately find out that while your individual choices weren't generally make or break, there was a cumulative impact that decided, at the end of the game, who you did and didn't end up having a good relationship with (to say nothing of the more drastic things you can change in Oxenfree). In Afterparty, you can shape a conversation, but there's no long term impact - there was always a feeling of tension between Milo and Lola, and at one point they explicitly discuss whether it's even healthy or good for them to be friends anymore. But I couldn't salvage their relationship by spending the game selecting dialogue options that showed more care, and I couldn't destroy it by spending the game selecting meaner and more cutting dialogue options. No matter what I did before that Big Conversation, it was the same. And I could shape the Big Conversation - I could say no, there's something special here, we should still be friends, let's hug it out. Or I could say maybe you're right, maybe we bring out the worst in each other, let's go our separate ways after this, let's high five on it. And I didn't see anything later in the game that was changed by that one way or the other. The whole game is just a series of "in this moment, do you want to act like Milo and Lola are Okay, or like they're Not Okay?" and there's no cumulative effect.
Tying into that a bit - the game just feels unpolished sometimes (which I think there's a reason for and I'll get into that in a bit). Like I don't really care about polish in terms of "characters were walking straight through each other and things seemed glitchy sometimes" but having played it twice, it did stand out that they only seemed to have done like 90% of the work of anticipating different ways to play and making sure the game responded accordingly. A couple of examples:
1. Hell is split up into a few neighborhoods. The first major choice you get is whether to run an errand in Little Rantalia or one in Bobolyne Park. The first playthrough, I chose Little Rantalia, and when I got there my cabbie gave me a little spiel about it. Later in the game, you HAVE to go to Little Rantalia, and my cabbie gave me a similar spiel about it, like I'd never been there before. It was weird but I shrugged it off, and it wasn't until I did the Bobolyne errand the second time around that I remembered the #2 spiel acted like it was my first time in LR because it was POSSIBLE for that to be my first time. But it just feels sloppy for the game not to say "hey, half the people playing this game will have been to LR for their first errand, so let's put in a different line for when that happens."
2. On my second playthrough I fucked around less and generally tried to move through as quickly as I could, because I'd figured out that none of the ancillary stuff would be any different. So there's a moment where you walk by two characters talking, and it's possible to get roped into their conversation, but I didn't bother, I just kept going. And later you run into them again while wearing a disguise, and one of them goes "hey, you sound familiar" and there are dialogue options that assume you stopped and got involved in their conversation, but...I didn't.
3. As you proceed through the game, a gallery in the menu fills up with photos of Milo and Lola's adventures through Hell, presented as social media posts by Hell's residents. These are generally crafted to account for different outcomes - if you win a dance contest, the caption will reflect that, if you lose, the caption will be someone calling you a fucking loser, etc. In the aforementioned Big Friendship Talk with Milo and Lola, the first time I played I chose every option that I thought would salvage the friendship, and at the end of the conversation I had them hug, and I ended up with a gallery photo of the hug, captioned "Hallo, said Tigger. I've found somebody just like me. I thought I was the only one of them." The second time I played, I picked all the options that seemed like they would end the friendship, had them high five at the end as they amicably agreed to go their separate ways, and got...exactly the same gallery photo. It's just sloppy behavior!!!!
Another unfavorable comparison(skip this paragraph if you don't want Oxenfree spoilers): Oxenfree replays SO much better than Afterparty, both because they put a good framing device on it (Alex is vaguely aware that she's looping, and there's some new content) and because the game uses that framing device to alleviate the more tedious aspects of the replay (almost every time you're about to head into a stretch that would be particularly boring to repeat, like backtracking across the entire goddamn island, the loop "glitches" so you get a new scene that, when it's over, drops you at your destination). On some levels it seems like Afterparty SHOULD play better because the actual plot beats of the game can change in a way that they don't for Oxenfree - I did a completely different thing for Errand #1, I chose completely different outcomes for Errands #2 and #3, and I approached the final competition in a completely different way! It should not have been such a drag to replay! But it was.
Normally I wouldn't hold it against Afterparty that it doesn't have a New Game Plus mode where you can replay and the game understands that you've already done everything before, or at least I wouldn't hold it against them as MUCH, but like...there are LITERALLY multiple points in the game that make meta little jokes about how "oh, we could get into all the backstory there, but that's really something for a second playthrough," which implies...that if you played the game again...you would get more information and not just the "second playthrough" line. BUT THAT'S WHAT HAPPENS. SLOPPY!!!!!!!
Also sloppy: Without getting too spoilery, at the end of the game it ends up being not just Milo and Lola drinking against Satan - Satan makes you recruit two "friends" you've met in your travels to get you to a team of four. And it's great that to a certain extent, the game is like "okay, well you chose X character, who has Y backstory, so they're going to behave in Z way" and that was something that I really enjoyed. But if you win the drinking contest and escape hell, your teammates get to go back to Earth with you, which...is unhinged. Some of these people would surely be delighted about it but I REUNITED A MONARCH OF HELL WITH HIS EX-WIFE AND HE WAS SO HAPPY ABOUT IT, WHY WOULD HE WANT TO MOVE TO EARTH AND WORK IN A MAGIC SHOP? My second playthrough I had [spoiler] on my team and by all rights she was perfectly happy in Hell and should have hated me for [spoiler] so WHY DID SHE COME LIVE WITH ME ON EARTH AFTER?
LMAO THIS IS SO NEGATIVE, THE SECOND PLAYTHROUGH REALLY BROUGHT ME DOWN, BUT THE THING I LOVED THE MOST ABOUT THE GAME THE FIRST TIME I PLAYED IS SUCH A SPOILER. God. Okay. Without getting into it too much: I really liked that while Oxenfree's relationship-building aspect of "your choices matter" was missing from Afterpargty, I did often get to choose between "do a good thing that could hurt me" and "do a bad thing that will help me." I don't think those would cumulatively stack either, but I did like that the game made space for me to do that, and that whenever I had the thought "clearly my task is X, but I'm feeling some type of way about it, could I just...not do it?" that was almost always something the game HAD anticipated, and the way that plays out is ultimately why I had such a great time with the game the first time out.
I'm a little curious whether the sloppiness comes from things that happened during the game's development - it's outlined here but basically, at the same time Night School Studio was working on Afterparty, they were working on a Stranger Things project that presumably would have been much higher profile and was getting more of their attention, not least because the Stranger Things game probably needed to be out in time to tie in with S3's release, whereas Afterparty was something they could release whenever. They weren't working directly with Netflix, but with a company called Telltale that they had a solid relationship with, at least until Telltale started missing payments, and finally shut down completely, which meant no Stranger Things game. According to that article, Night School probably would have gone under because of the Stranger Things deal, and the main reason they didn't was that they could fall back on Afterparty (which came out about a year after Telltale shuttered). I do wonder if from a revenue standpoint, the Telltale fiasco left Night School in such a bad place that they ended up just having to get Afterparty out before it was entirely ready. Which is understandable, but disappointing.
ANYWAY, I had a fun time exploring and testing out the world - there's not a lot to find off the beaten path, which is a bummer (going all the way to the end of a street almost always ended with me going "oh, there's nothing here" and turning around with nothing to show for my effort), but it was a fun world to experience the first time out. It's such a great little world - even if there's not much to "find," they do a great job of making the world feel full while you're going from plot beat to plot beat. There are plenty of conversations to stop and overhear if you want to take the time to do it. I also just loved the depiction of Hell in general - I think it suffers a little bit for existing in a world with Hades and The Good Place already being such a part of the lexicon, but whatever, it had cool ideas! Satan in particular was great - as soon as the game was like "he parties all the time and the other rulers of Hell used to be his buddies but they all fell out," I was like yes, tell me more, I love this.
Drinking as a mechanic is...kind of useless in this game, in a way I wasn't expecting. There's an early sequence where you have to get past a bouncer, and one of the drinks at the bar is supposed to make you into a flirt, so I was like okay, let's try flirting our way past the dude, and that's just...not how it works! Every once in a while you HAVE to have a drink in your system to unlock a particular dialogue option that will let you proceed, and there are some bits where consuming a specific drink will lead to funnier dialogue options, but whether I was right or wrong to feel like this I had the impression that I would need to choose The Right Drink for the Situation and that was never the case.
Okay spoiler space before I talk about the ending in detail:
SATAN IS KENDALL ROY [IF THERE WERE ANYONE WHO ACTUALLY LOVED KENDALL], GOD IS LOGAN ROY, THE VOTE OF NO CONFIDENCE FAILED AND KENDALL WAS CAST OUT FOREVER, AND HE DRINKS TO COPE?????? YOU SPEND THE ENTIRE GAME GEARING UP TO HAVE A DRINKING CONTEST WITH HIM, RUNNING INTO OTHER RULERS OF HELL AS YOU GO AND GETTING THE VAGUE IMPRESSION THAT THEY'RE ABOUT TO STAGE A COUP AND OVERTHROW SATAN, AND WHEN YOU SHOW UP FOR THE FINAL CONTEST THEY ALL SHOW UP TOO EXCEPT IT TURNS OUT IT'S NOT A COUP, IT'S AN INTERVENTION????? So you're two college kids standing there like "uh, beer pong for our souls?" while Satan's siblings are like "Lucifer, we love you and we're so concerned for you," and you're like SHOULD I EVEN BE HERE FOR THIS??????? and it fucking RULES. It's SO fucking good and funny and well done, holy shit, and depending on which characters you've chosen to be your teammates for the drinking contest, some of them will REFUSE TO PARTICIPATE* because they don't want to enable Satan???? The first half of the drinking contest is beer pong, which the game forces you to participate in, although, like I said, some of your teammates might abstain. Once beer pong is over (doesn't seem to matter much if you win or lose), the intervention intensifies, and Satan is like FUCK THIS and transports Milo and Lola to another plane of existence where they can finish the contest without interference - but Milo and Lola can refuse to participate, to Satan's growing fury.
*This is what makes the "you win and get to go home" ending so weird. I did that on my second play, and my teammates were Asmodeus, who I'd just reunited with his ex-wife, and Apollyon, who was the main architect of Satan's intervention and the one most opposed to drinking with him. So why would she be like "sure, you completely sabotaged my brother's intervention, why don't I leave my comfortable life in Hell behind to come sleep on your couch and watch The Bachelorette" after all that??? MAKE IT MAKE SENSE.
It was during that sequence that I got the only explanation the game ever gave me for why Milo and Lola deserved Hell. They start the game with two questions - how did we die, and what did we do to land us here? You get a firm answer to the cause of death (car accident), but the game's more philosophical on the other question. Earlier in the game, you can ask Satan, and he'll go full parable - telling one of two stories of someone who puts their own interests ahead of a loved one, and it seems like not a huge deal in the scheme of things (although IMO the stories are NOT comparable), but when you ask "what did I do to deserve this?" you should really be asking "what did I do to deserve anything else?" Which is philosophically an answer but there are plenty of people in Hell that you're told are specifically there for murders or robbery or abusing the express checkout line, so it's not a concrete answer about What They Did.
HOWEVER, if you piss Satan off enough, he'll throw your own actions in your face. I SUSPECT it's supposed to be something like "you want to know why you're here, well you had no problem selling out X just to save yourself!" that refers back to choices you made earlier in the game, but...I had a pretty morally solid playthrough my first time around! So he just accused me of ENGAGING IN COMMERCE by...getting a musician a night off by finding a band that was eager to get the exposure that would come with taking her slot? The nightclub owner was fine with it and there was no indication that the new act was signed to a terrible contract or anything? It was a win/win/win/win? IDK, WEAK, but it works in the context of "Satan is an addict who's being confronted with his behavior and is lashing out in what's not necessarily a totally precise way" even if it's not great writing.
ULTIMATELY, HOWEVER, I CONVINCED SATAN TO LISTEN TO HIS LOVED ONES AND GO TO REHAB? It fucking ruled. I just got a huge kick out of the game being like "listen, if you want we can subvert the hell out of this ending" and giving me the option to not drink for my freedom. Of course, by not drinking for my freedom I did...damn myself to eternity in Hell. But honestly it seems cool! It was the better ending! Milo and Lola get jobs! (This is weird actually, because only one of them can get a job and which one it is depends on which one you sided with more throughout the game? It's the one cumulative thing and it's weird as hell. Let them both get jobs, it's not even the SAME job.) They have a bar where they hang out! They're still friends! They gossip (not unkindly) about Satan falling off the wagon! And just as you're like "is this...a happy ending? In Hell? Really?" one of their demon friends shows up and is like "hey I found another way out YOU WANT IN?" and they're like OH ABSOLUTELY FUCK THIS PLACE. It's just...I was so delighted to have steered myself into that ending, and I found it really satisfying and fun. It didn't QUITE reach the "blow all my friendships to sit in hell with you" levels I was hoping it would, but I had a fun the first time!!!!
AFTERPARTY! MY FEELINGS ARE MIXED LIKE A DRINK! DON'T PLAY IT TWICE!
Spoilers: I've left a spoiler gap before the last section of stuff I don't think B should know ahead of time if she plays, but everything else is fair game. Significant-ish Oxenfree spoilers in one part but I flag that at the start of the paragraph.
In Afterparty you play as Milo and Lola, best friends who find themselves in Hell shortly after graduating college. (The game can eventually reveal the specifics of how they died, but why they didn't get into Heaven is a little more opaque and something I'd like to dig into more if it wouldn't require me to play the first five hours of the game again just to play around with dialogue options to see what different choices got me.) They arrive outside of office hours and can't be checked in, so they have the night to wander Hell and find out from a cab driver that if you go to Satan's nightly rager and beat him in a drinking contest, you get to go home.
What follows is a series of tasks - you can't get into the party, but there are two people offering up spare invites in exchange for favors, so you have to choose one of those to complete. Then, Satan has some hoops he wants you to jump through before you can compete with him, so there are some more errands for you to go on. This basically makes the game a bar crawl as you're sent to meet people who are invariably out drinking in one of Hell's neighborhoods.
It's impossible not to compare this game to Oxenfree, not just because the only reason I played it was because I played Oxenfree and Brita said "I wonder what else they've made" and this was the main answer, but because the gameplay is so similar - you play a tiny-ass character moving back and forth along a fixed path, you almost always have at least one companion with you so there's ambient conversation as you move through the world, and you periodically get 2-3 dialogue choices that sometimes result in you interrupting another character.
And it's no Oxenfree! Which feels like a very unfair standard to hold Afterparty to, and I try to judge it on its own merits and not on an Oxenfree scale (which is why I gave it 4/5 stars on Backloggd, as opposed to the 2 or 3 it would get if I said "5 is Oxenfree" instead of "5 is what Afterparty was trying to be"). But it's VERY hard when the game plays so similarly not to take notice of all the ways that familiar actions don't have familiar outcomes.
For starters: Milo and Lola don't really seem to like each other, and the game KIND OF knows that, but it also kind of doesn't! It's not well written! And it's not like Oxenfree, where you can specifically decide things like "should I defend Jonah in this conversation" and ultimately find out that while your individual choices weren't generally make or break, there was a cumulative impact that decided, at the end of the game, who you did and didn't end up having a good relationship with (to say nothing of the more drastic things you can change in Oxenfree). In Afterparty, you can shape a conversation, but there's no long term impact - there was always a feeling of tension between Milo and Lola, and at one point they explicitly discuss whether it's even healthy or good for them to be friends anymore. But I couldn't salvage their relationship by spending the game selecting dialogue options that showed more care, and I couldn't destroy it by spending the game selecting meaner and more cutting dialogue options. No matter what I did before that Big Conversation, it was the same. And I could shape the Big Conversation - I could say no, there's something special here, we should still be friends, let's hug it out. Or I could say maybe you're right, maybe we bring out the worst in each other, let's go our separate ways after this, let's high five on it. And I didn't see anything later in the game that was changed by that one way or the other. The whole game is just a series of "in this moment, do you want to act like Milo and Lola are Okay, or like they're Not Okay?" and there's no cumulative effect.
Tying into that a bit - the game just feels unpolished sometimes (which I think there's a reason for and I'll get into that in a bit). Like I don't really care about polish in terms of "characters were walking straight through each other and things seemed glitchy sometimes" but having played it twice, it did stand out that they only seemed to have done like 90% of the work of anticipating different ways to play and making sure the game responded accordingly. A couple of examples:
1. Hell is split up into a few neighborhoods. The first major choice you get is whether to run an errand in Little Rantalia or one in Bobolyne Park. The first playthrough, I chose Little Rantalia, and when I got there my cabbie gave me a little spiel about it. Later in the game, you HAVE to go to Little Rantalia, and my cabbie gave me a similar spiel about it, like I'd never been there before. It was weird but I shrugged it off, and it wasn't until I did the Bobolyne errand the second time around that I remembered the #2 spiel acted like it was my first time in LR because it was POSSIBLE for that to be my first time. But it just feels sloppy for the game not to say "hey, half the people playing this game will have been to LR for their first errand, so let's put in a different line for when that happens."
2. On my second playthrough I fucked around less and generally tried to move through as quickly as I could, because I'd figured out that none of the ancillary stuff would be any different. So there's a moment where you walk by two characters talking, and it's possible to get roped into their conversation, but I didn't bother, I just kept going. And later you run into them again while wearing a disguise, and one of them goes "hey, you sound familiar" and there are dialogue options that assume you stopped and got involved in their conversation, but...I didn't.
3. As you proceed through the game, a gallery in the menu fills up with photos of Milo and Lola's adventures through Hell, presented as social media posts by Hell's residents. These are generally crafted to account for different outcomes - if you win a dance contest, the caption will reflect that, if you lose, the caption will be someone calling you a fucking loser, etc. In the aforementioned Big Friendship Talk with Milo and Lola, the first time I played I chose every option that I thought would salvage the friendship, and at the end of the conversation I had them hug, and I ended up with a gallery photo of the hug, captioned "Hallo, said Tigger. I've found somebody just like me. I thought I was the only one of them." The second time I played, I picked all the options that seemed like they would end the friendship, had them high five at the end as they amicably agreed to go their separate ways, and got...exactly the same gallery photo. It's just sloppy behavior!!!!
Another unfavorable comparison(skip this paragraph if you don't want Oxenfree spoilers): Oxenfree replays SO much better than Afterparty, both because they put a good framing device on it (Alex is vaguely aware that she's looping, and there's some new content) and because the game uses that framing device to alleviate the more tedious aspects of the replay (almost every time you're about to head into a stretch that would be particularly boring to repeat, like backtracking across the entire goddamn island, the loop "glitches" so you get a new scene that, when it's over, drops you at your destination). On some levels it seems like Afterparty SHOULD play better because the actual plot beats of the game can change in a way that they don't for Oxenfree - I did a completely different thing for Errand #1, I chose completely different outcomes for Errands #2 and #3, and I approached the final competition in a completely different way! It should not have been such a drag to replay! But it was.
Normally I wouldn't hold it against Afterparty that it doesn't have a New Game Plus mode where you can replay and the game understands that you've already done everything before, or at least I wouldn't hold it against them as MUCH, but like...there are LITERALLY multiple points in the game that make meta little jokes about how "oh, we could get into all the backstory there, but that's really something for a second playthrough," which implies...that if you played the game again...you would get more information and not just the "second playthrough" line. BUT THAT'S WHAT HAPPENS. SLOPPY!!!!!!!
Also sloppy: Without getting too spoilery, at the end of the game it ends up being not just Milo and Lola drinking against Satan - Satan makes you recruit two "friends" you've met in your travels to get you to a team of four. And it's great that to a certain extent, the game is like "okay, well you chose X character, who has Y backstory, so they're going to behave in Z way" and that was something that I really enjoyed. But if you win the drinking contest and escape hell, your teammates get to go back to Earth with you, which...is unhinged. Some of these people would surely be delighted about it but I REUNITED A MONARCH OF HELL WITH HIS EX-WIFE AND HE WAS SO HAPPY ABOUT IT, WHY WOULD HE WANT TO MOVE TO EARTH AND WORK IN A MAGIC SHOP? My second playthrough I had [spoiler] on my team and by all rights she was perfectly happy in Hell and should have hated me for [spoiler] so WHY DID SHE COME LIVE WITH ME ON EARTH AFTER?
LMAO THIS IS SO NEGATIVE, THE SECOND PLAYTHROUGH REALLY BROUGHT ME DOWN, BUT THE THING I LOVED THE MOST ABOUT THE GAME THE FIRST TIME I PLAYED IS SUCH A SPOILER. God. Okay. Without getting into it too much: I really liked that while Oxenfree's relationship-building aspect of "your choices matter" was missing from Afterpargty, I did often get to choose between "do a good thing that could hurt me" and "do a bad thing that will help me." I don't think those would cumulatively stack either, but I did like that the game made space for me to do that, and that whenever I had the thought "clearly my task is X, but I'm feeling some type of way about it, could I just...not do it?" that was almost always something the game HAD anticipated, and the way that plays out is ultimately why I had such a great time with the game the first time out.
I'm a little curious whether the sloppiness comes from things that happened during the game's development - it's outlined here but basically, at the same time Night School Studio was working on Afterparty, they were working on a Stranger Things project that presumably would have been much higher profile and was getting more of their attention, not least because the Stranger Things game probably needed to be out in time to tie in with S3's release, whereas Afterparty was something they could release whenever. They weren't working directly with Netflix, but with a company called Telltale that they had a solid relationship with, at least until Telltale started missing payments, and finally shut down completely, which meant no Stranger Things game. According to that article, Night School probably would have gone under because of the Stranger Things deal, and the main reason they didn't was that they could fall back on Afterparty (which came out about a year after Telltale shuttered). I do wonder if from a revenue standpoint, the Telltale fiasco left Night School in such a bad place that they ended up just having to get Afterparty out before it was entirely ready. Which is understandable, but disappointing.
ANYWAY, I had a fun time exploring and testing out the world - there's not a lot to find off the beaten path, which is a bummer (going all the way to the end of a street almost always ended with me going "oh, there's nothing here" and turning around with nothing to show for my effort), but it was a fun world to experience the first time out. It's such a great little world - even if there's not much to "find," they do a great job of making the world feel full while you're going from plot beat to plot beat. There are plenty of conversations to stop and overhear if you want to take the time to do it. I also just loved the depiction of Hell in general - I think it suffers a little bit for existing in a world with Hades and The Good Place already being such a part of the lexicon, but whatever, it had cool ideas! Satan in particular was great - as soon as the game was like "he parties all the time and the other rulers of Hell used to be his buddies but they all fell out," I was like yes, tell me more, I love this.
Drinking as a mechanic is...kind of useless in this game, in a way I wasn't expecting. There's an early sequence where you have to get past a bouncer, and one of the drinks at the bar is supposed to make you into a flirt, so I was like okay, let's try flirting our way past the dude, and that's just...not how it works! Every once in a while you HAVE to have a drink in your system to unlock a particular dialogue option that will let you proceed, and there are some bits where consuming a specific drink will lead to funnier dialogue options, but whether I was right or wrong to feel like this I had the impression that I would need to choose The Right Drink for the Situation and that was never the case.
Okay spoiler space before I talk about the ending in detail:
SATAN IS KENDALL ROY [IF THERE WERE ANYONE WHO ACTUALLY LOVED KENDALL], GOD IS LOGAN ROY, THE VOTE OF NO CONFIDENCE FAILED AND KENDALL WAS CAST OUT FOREVER, AND HE DRINKS TO COPE?????? YOU SPEND THE ENTIRE GAME GEARING UP TO HAVE A DRINKING CONTEST WITH HIM, RUNNING INTO OTHER RULERS OF HELL AS YOU GO AND GETTING THE VAGUE IMPRESSION THAT THEY'RE ABOUT TO STAGE A COUP AND OVERTHROW SATAN, AND WHEN YOU SHOW UP FOR THE FINAL CONTEST THEY ALL SHOW UP TOO EXCEPT IT TURNS OUT IT'S NOT A COUP, IT'S AN INTERVENTION????? So you're two college kids standing there like "uh, beer pong for our souls?" while Satan's siblings are like "Lucifer, we love you and we're so concerned for you," and you're like SHOULD I EVEN BE HERE FOR THIS??????? and it fucking RULES. It's SO fucking good and funny and well done, holy shit, and depending on which characters you've chosen to be your teammates for the drinking contest, some of them will REFUSE TO PARTICIPATE* because they don't want to enable Satan???? The first half of the drinking contest is beer pong, which the game forces you to participate in, although, like I said, some of your teammates might abstain. Once beer pong is over (doesn't seem to matter much if you win or lose), the intervention intensifies, and Satan is like FUCK THIS and transports Milo and Lola to another plane of existence where they can finish the contest without interference - but Milo and Lola can refuse to participate, to Satan's growing fury.
*This is what makes the "you win and get to go home" ending so weird. I did that on my second play, and my teammates were Asmodeus, who I'd just reunited with his ex-wife, and Apollyon, who was the main architect of Satan's intervention and the one most opposed to drinking with him. So why would she be like "sure, you completely sabotaged my brother's intervention, why don't I leave my comfortable life in Hell behind to come sleep on your couch and watch The Bachelorette" after all that??? MAKE IT MAKE SENSE.
It was during that sequence that I got the only explanation the game ever gave me for why Milo and Lola deserved Hell. They start the game with two questions - how did we die, and what did we do to land us here? You get a firm answer to the cause of death (car accident), but the game's more philosophical on the other question. Earlier in the game, you can ask Satan, and he'll go full parable - telling one of two stories of someone who puts their own interests ahead of a loved one, and it seems like not a huge deal in the scheme of things (although IMO the stories are NOT comparable), but when you ask "what did I do to deserve this?" you should really be asking "what did I do to deserve anything else?" Which is philosophically an answer but there are plenty of people in Hell that you're told are specifically there for murders or robbery or abusing the express checkout line, so it's not a concrete answer about What They Did.
HOWEVER, if you piss Satan off enough, he'll throw your own actions in your face. I SUSPECT it's supposed to be something like "you want to know why you're here, well you had no problem selling out X just to save yourself!" that refers back to choices you made earlier in the game, but...I had a pretty morally solid playthrough my first time around! So he just accused me of ENGAGING IN COMMERCE by...getting a musician a night off by finding a band that was eager to get the exposure that would come with taking her slot? The nightclub owner was fine with it and there was no indication that the new act was signed to a terrible contract or anything? It was a win/win/win/win? IDK, WEAK, but it works in the context of "Satan is an addict who's being confronted with his behavior and is lashing out in what's not necessarily a totally precise way" even if it's not great writing.
ULTIMATELY, HOWEVER, I CONVINCED SATAN TO LISTEN TO HIS LOVED ONES AND GO TO REHAB? It fucking ruled. I just got a huge kick out of the game being like "listen, if you want we can subvert the hell out of this ending" and giving me the option to not drink for my freedom. Of course, by not drinking for my freedom I did...damn myself to eternity in Hell. But honestly it seems cool! It was the better ending! Milo and Lola get jobs! (This is weird actually, because only one of them can get a job and which one it is depends on which one you sided with more throughout the game? It's the one cumulative thing and it's weird as hell. Let them both get jobs, it's not even the SAME job.) They have a bar where they hang out! They're still friends! They gossip (not unkindly) about Satan falling off the wagon! And just as you're like "is this...a happy ending? In Hell? Really?" one of their demon friends shows up and is like "hey I found another way out YOU WANT IN?" and they're like OH ABSOLUTELY FUCK THIS PLACE. It's just...I was so delighted to have steered myself into that ending, and I found it really satisfying and fun. It didn't QUITE reach the "blow all my friendships to sit in hell with you" levels I was hoping it would, but I had a fun the first time!!!!
AFTERPARTY! MY FEELINGS ARE MIXED LIKE A DRINK! DON'T PLAY IT TWICE!