Lola and Milo, however, don't flirt with each other. They're the ideal pairing for a '90s rom-com -- lifelong best friends coming of age amid loving, antagonistic banter -- but that's not their story. No matter how close they are as friends, a lustful, romantic relationship between Lola and Milo would simply feel wrong, Night School co-founder Sean Krankel told Engadget.

"It feels forced and it would be weird," he said. "These two characters, as we developed them, we were like, why, why, why? They're more like brother and sister. They're just really good friends. Now, you can flirt with Satan if you want, you can flirt with other people. But we don't want to mix them up."

Afterparty is due to hit Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Switch and the Epic Games Store this year and it's the second full title from Night School, the independent California team behind the award-winning 2016 game Oxenfree. Though it featured a cast of teenagers and supernatural overtones, Oxenfree was lauded for its emotion-soaked story and ability to deftly handle heavy themes. Part of its success stemmed from the dialogue system, which ditched cutscenes in favor of an approach that didn't interrupt gameplay, with possible responses and questions appearing in bubbles above the main character's head as she interacted with the environment.

Afterparty builds on this dialogue system, using the same 2.5D perspective and integrated speech bubbles -- but this time around, you get to play as two characters, Milo and Lola. And these protagonists are older than the teenagers of Oxenfree; they're 22.

Before Milo and Lola died, they were preparing to leave college behind and enter the professional world. Afterparty is filled with youthful bravado, optimism and sarcasm, just like Oxenfree, but the jokes are a little more mature, coming a mile a minute in the GDC 2019 demo.

This doesn't mean Afterparty is all sex puns and morbid humor.

"People don't think this has an emotional core to it, but it totally does," Krankel said. "The thing we don't talk about in the press that much is that the game is about the nature of friendship. The ups and downs of that, and managing what it is like to be in a long-term relationship with somebody, and how maybe you backstab them and stuff."

Krankel teased this underlying narrative a handful of times, hinting at a tension that grows between Milo and Lola as they relive moments of their friendship and learn things that were perhaps best left unknown. By giving players control of both characters, Afterparty is able to build up Milo and Lola's friendship and then delicately tear it down as they traverse the bars of Nowhere, the most remote island of hell.