In short
In After the Wane, the new interactive graphic novel by Nova-box, young dancer Lena navigates between the rigid expectations of classical dance in Paris and a personal search for her missing mother. The review evaluates the second-person narration, the 120,000-word branching script, the hand-drawn rotoscope animations and Illustrason’s adaptive music, judging the whole enjoyable though divided between themes that are not fully integrated.
Nova-box brings dance into an interactive graphic novel: in After the Wane a young ballerina faces life in the French capital with every choice, amid hand-drawn art and rotoscoped animation.
Like any form of artistic expression, dance is communication. What gets conveyed is determined by the interplay between the sequence of movements, the way they are performed and the accompanying sound. Over the centuries, the Sixth Art has served different purposes depending on culture and period: for some peoples it was a way to ask the gods for favor; in others it functioned as storytelling; or it can serve as a message of pacification and youthful socialization. In all these cases, the result is a specific way of communicating.
The way bodies occupy space, in short, says a great deal about what is being staged. So while some styles tell us a story written by someone else, others allow us to tell our own.
This is what Nova-box, an independent studio from Bordeaux founded in 2007 and already the author of Along the Edge, illustrates with After the Wane, where Lena, a young ballerina, seeks her place in the world of dance.
The Bordeaux Studio Behind Lena
After the Wane is Nova-box‘s sixth title and the third in a series that began with Along the Edge (2016) and continued with Across the Grooves (2020), in which each chapter entrusts a female protagonist with an identity crisis and can be played independently of the others.
Building it is a very small team: Geoffroy Vincens, writer and co-founder of the studio, who handled most of the text and branching narrative, and Nicolas Fouqué, art director and lead illustrator, who defined its visual look. Raphaël Le Bobinnec worked on the Unity code, while the music bears the signature of Illustrason, a French duo specialized in music for images that has been collaborating with the studio for nearly ten years.
For about a year now, Antonio Davisseau has also been part of the team, handling marketing and communication.
A small but well-organized team, each member with a solid professional level in their own field.
Anamnesis, a Return to What You Are
If the free expression of modern dance is strongly based on showing oneself as one truly is, classical dance leaves little room to deviate from the patterns: the rigid discipline to which dancers of this style are subjected is now well recognized, and Lena, our protagonist, is no exception. Having arrived in Paris, the girl is determined to tread the most important stages, no matter how much she will have to sacrifice. Or at least, that is what she seems to tell herself.
A voice in her head will try to call into question everything Lena has believed up to that point: her perpetual constancy was once a palliative against the loneliness born of abandonment and the death of her loved ones. But when a trail appears to find her disappeared mother, will her priorities remain the same?
Life offers us different versions of ourselves to pursue but is, alas, too short to let us take up more than one. This is why the transition from adolescence to adult life is such a tumultuous period. After the Wane explores this dilemma, which is undoubtedly the most touching part of the experience. The choice of dance, in Vincens’ words, stems from the desire to explore it as a magical ritual and as a means to investigate body, identity and performance. To sum up Lena’s story, Vincens chooses the word “anamnesis“, which he defines as the rediscovery of one’s deepest nature.
A Voice in Second Person
This almost supernatural element, which weaves itself between inner conflicts and feuds over what dance should be, is what in After the Wane gives dance an almost dreamlike quality and shrouds the events in an air of mystery. The result is fascinating and, for better or worse, contributes to dividing the game world and its narration. An authorial choice that players may welcome to a greater or lesser degree. Personally, it gave us an almost separate perception of these two realities, rather than an organic whole, especially from the second half of the game onward: perhaps because of the blend of themes, the story undergoes an acceleration that culminates in an almost rushed resolution in its ending, leaving us with the impression that dance as a ritual for exploring the self is a beautiful premise, but not one fully integrated into the universe created by Nova-box.
This “duality” is also reflected in the choice of narrator: the account of Lena’s life unfolds in second person, an atypical choice but justified at plot level by the voice in her head, which comments on everything she does. A narrative mode used less often than the usual first and third person and which, for that reason, represents an innovative choice. On the one hand it risks becoming a “caption” of events, compromising immersion; on the other, it perfectly conveys the sense of fragmentation intended by the authors.
Put Down Roots or Take Flight?
Lena’s inner life leaves room for far more doubts than she actually becomes aware of. It will be up to us to decide whether to give them room or to give up a normal life in the name of our greatest dream. Almost every choice of ours, in fact, hinges on four “tendencies” at the top center of the screen that will determine the protagonist’s future, attitudes and ambitions: the wings, the roots, the new moon and the full moon. After the Wane decides to give words the weight they deserve, inviting us to underestimate nothing: every dialogue will be weighed, contributing to transforming the girl.
At about the midpoint of the game, moreover, the possibility of choice extends to our days as an aspiring ballerina: they unfold into activities whose order we can sometimes decide, such as auditioning at the theater, teaching classes at the neighborhood dance circle, working part-time at a pizzeria, or carrying out occult research. Several interactions are woven into these days, which can lead to 4 possible romances (including the option of staying single).
This freedom is interesting in managing the protagonist’s priorities, but what is missing is a temporal structure that helps us build a mental model of chronological continuity: we do not know when one day ends and the next begins, or how many hours or days pass between one action and another. The result is a blend of activities in which everything seems like the immediate continuation of what came before.
In any case, the 120,000 words that make up the branching script promise great replayability for those who want to experience Lena’s different possible lives and further explore what the game has to offer.
Art and Music
If the narration did not always wrap us in the embrace of immersion, the artistic and musical departments are of a very different opinion.
As far as art direction is concerned, the warm and elegant touch of Fouqué and his collaborators is certainly an excellent calling card for the pull this game can exert on the catalog’s showcase and, on its own, can even invite you to stay.
The story unfolds through drawings, over 2,000 of them entirely hand-illustrated, presenting us with a warm, cozy-toned town where it would be impossible not to wish to live, alongside high-level animations. To render movement, Fouqué first tried chronophotography and then rotoscoping, that is, tracing the figures of a video frame by frame: professional dancers from Bordeaux performed the scenes from written drafts, shot with a fixed camera; Fouqué selected the frames to draw, traced the hundreds of animated images by hand and completed the scenes in After Effects with backgrounds and effects. Work that takes an enormous amount of time, of commendable quality, denoting great passion and professionalism on the part of the team and which, for this reason, deserves the highest praise.
The game’s musical accompaniment is a living organism: the soundtracks, lasting almost 3.5 hours in total, adapt in real time to the moment, to the speaking character and to the choices we make. In this way the music comes alive, becoming almost a character in its own right that joins the dance ritual.
Epilogue
After the Wane remains, in any case, an enjoyable story, one that can be well appreciated both by those who come from the world of dance and by those who find themselves immersed in it as newcomers. But above all, great empathy will be found by those who recognize themselves in the eyes of a girl devoted to her dreams, who finds herself frightened by the unknown that adult life brings with it. Because our aspirations, sometimes, may not be as appealing as we had imagined. Or they may change shape into something we would never have thought we could want. And this is, absolutely, the strongest Reflection this game raised in me.
We often confuse a satisfying life with the ambition for greatness. The point is that sometimes what we would truly desire would be to sit in a café on a Rue, eating a pain au chocolat and sipping a steaming cup. And perhaps, that is the most authentic happiness of all.
7.4/10
