After the Wane

Overview

After the Wane is a hand-illustrated interactive graphic novel from Bordeaux studio Nova-box, out November 10, 2026 on Steam for $13.99 with a launch discount. It is the studio's sixth game and the third entry in the loose trilogy that started with Along the Edge (2016) and continued in Across the Grooves (2020). All three games follow a woman at an identity crossroads, mix urban fantasy with eerie magical realism, and can be played in any order without missing anything.

You play Lena, a dancer newly arrived in the capital with two goals: break into the ruthless professional dance world and find out why her mother, also a dancer, gave her up at birth. Instead of answers she gets a tug of war between Deborah's elitist company holed up in a theater with an uncanny atmosphere and Fernand, a watchful patron of the fiercely independent local scene. Oh, and a voice lodged in her head that only she can hear, which has recently stopped being content to observe.

Who it is for: readers who like their choices to actually matter, fans of Along the Edge and Across the Grooves, and anyone drawn to hand-painted art and dance-as-magic-ritual themes.

Who should skip it: players looking for mechanical challenge. There is no fail state, no puzzles beyond decisions, and no action. The gameplay is reading, choosing, and rereading to see what changed.

Getting Started: First Playthrough Plan

1. Play blind on run one. The branching is the game. Your first pass should be pure instinct: answer as you would, resist or cooperate with the voice however feels right. The endings are designed to be discovered, not optimized.
2. Expect one run to last roughly a novel's worth of reading. Nova-box games run long for visual novels because the text density sits closer to a comic book series than a typical VN. Do not rush chapters; the eerie details (the theater's odd atmosphere, the voice's remarks) pay off later.
3. Pick a language and stick with it. The game ships in English and French, both written by Geoffroy Vincens, the studio's writer. Switching languages mid-run is fine, but tone lands differently; French is the original voice of the text.
4. Use the no-timer design. Nothing in After the Wane is timed. Play at your own pace, back up if you misread a choice, and use touch or controller if reading on the couch. Remote Play on a tablet turns it into a proper bedtime graphic novel.
5. Save before major path forks. The three-way split (elite company, independent collective, occult path) is where runs genuinely diverge. A save at the fork lets you sample each world without replaying the whole opening.

Beginner mistakes to avoid

• Treating the voice as a tutorial. It is not guidance; it is a character with its own agenda. Cooperating with it, resisting it, or playing coy are all mechanically meaningful and alter what you see of the plot.
• Chasing all 43 achievements in one run. Radically different endings are required. One playthrough cannot come close. Plan two to three runs minimum.
• Ignoring romantic subplots for "efficiency." Relationships feed back into which mysteries open up. A run with no love interest is not a neutral run; it is a different story.
• Skipping re-reads of dialog with the mother mystery. Small wording changes in early scenes flag which path you are on. If a line reads oddly familiar, that is the branching talking, not déjà vu.

Core Mechanics Explained

Three paths, three realities

The spine of the game is a choice between three worlds, and the Steam description is explicit that they are mutually exclusive:

Writer Geoffroy Vincens has said dance interested him as a sort of magic ritual, and the occult route is where that idea runs furthest. The company and collective routes keep their weirdness subtler: coincidences become troubling, and the strange creeps into daily life before anyone names it.

The voice: ally, secret, or entity

Every dialog offers choices, and the most consequential ones concern the presence in Lena's head. The game frames it as a genuine three-way question: protective ally, buried secret, or ancient and dangerous entity. Your stance toward it (cooperate, resist, interrogate) changes your perspective on the plot, meaning the same scene can read as comfort or threat depending on how you have treated the voice up to that point. This is the game's smartest system, because it re-colors everything you already read without reloading a save.

Rotoscoped dance, painted everything else

The animated scenes are drawn frame by frame over real dancers' performances. Art director Nicolas Fouqué first tried chronophotography, layering a whole movement sequence into a single frame; some of that survives in the finished game. The rest of the visuals are hundreds of painted illustrations in a sketchy, boldly colored style, deliberately younger-feeling than the previous games since Lena is a younger protagonist. The music is by Illustrason, a French duo Nova-box has worked with for the better part of a decade.

Step-by-Step Strategy: Getting the Ending You Want

1. Decide your run's question before you start. Each run answers one question well: Who is my mother, in the company's version of events? What is the voice? What does dance become as ritual? A run that spreads attention evenly reveals the least.
2. Commit to a path at the fork. Half-measures give you the blandest version of each world. If you enter Deborah's theater, audition properly; if you stay with Fernand's collective, invest in its people. The writing rewards wholehearted choices with the sharpest scenes.
3. Keep the voice close in run one. Cooperating yields the most exposition about Lena's heritage. Save resistance runs for later, when you already know what "normal" looks like and can spot what changes.
4. Track the mother's thread across runs. Her abandonment is the mystery that connects all three paths. Notes on what each world says about her (the company's records, the collective's gossip, the occult readings) assemble the full picture only after multiple endings.
5. Plan achievement cleanup for run three. With 43 achievements tied to routes, romances, and endings, the efficient shape is: blind run, opposite-path run, then a targeted cleanup run with a fork save for the last few branch-specific achievements.

Advanced Tips

• Change one variable per rerun. Same path, different stance toward the voice, is more revealing than changing everything at once. Nova-box's branches respond to small attitude shifts, not just big forks.
• Read scene descriptions, not just dialog. The painted panels and their captions carry the eerie payload. Players who sprint dialog lines miss the moments where reality starts cracking.
• Romance affects endings, not just scenes. Several possible romantic interests exist, and the game asks outright whether you will sacrifice loved ones on the altar of your art. Which relationships you deepened is part of the ending calculus.
• The demo is a separate taste of tone. A demo exists (also on Nova-box's itch.io page). It covers early material, so use it to decide language preference before buying, not to learn late-game systems.
• Play the other two games between runs. Along the Edge and Across the Grooves are independent stories. Playing them sharpens the recognition of Nova-box's patterns: personality shifts that change appearance, realities that shift underfoot, endings that argue with each other.

FAQ

Do I need to play Along the Edge or Across the Grooves first? No. All three Nova-box games in this line are independent, with different protagonists and self-contained plots. The connective tissue is thematic: urban fantasy, a woman at a turning point, and consequences that reshape identity. Play them in any order.

How many endings are there? Multiple, and the store page says radically different endings across narrative routes. The exact count is left for players to discover, but one run cannot reveal them, and the 43 achievements roughly map the surface area of the branches.

Is After the Wane fully voice acted? No. It is a graphic novel: text, painted art, and rotoscoped animated dance scenes set to an Illustrason soundtrack. The performance comes from the art and music rather than voice-over.

How long is one playthrough? Longer than a typical visual novel route, closer to reading a full graphic novel. Expect several hours per run depending on reading speed, with the total experience spanning multiple runs for the full branch map.

What platforms does it run on? Windows, macOS, and Linux, with full controller support and Remote Play on phone and tablet. The accessibility options are unusually thorough: keyboard-only, mouse-only, and touch-only are each viable.

Are there any timed choices or action scenes? None. The Steam listing explicitly includes "Playable without Timed Input." Every decision can be weighed as long as you like, which suits a game whose whole mechanic is choosing who Lena becomes.

What is the connection to dance, really? Writer Geoffroy Vincens describes exploring dance as a sort of magic ritual, questioning embodiment, identity, and performance. The choreographies were captured from real dancers on fixed-frame video, then redrawn frame by frame, so the dance scenes carry the story's physical and emotional peaks.