I think I had heard about Oxenfree months ago, reading about it in passing before I promptly forgot all about it. More recently, a friend mentioned that I should take a proper look at it. I am so that glad he did.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAhrOoNR4ng&w=560&h=315]
Night School Studios’s first title Oxenfree is a supernatural horror adventure game taking inspiration from 80’s teen movies, with a healthy dollop of ghost stories thrown in. Playing out in 2.5d, with an absolutely gorgeous visual style, the player takes the role of Alex.
Alex is a high schooler engaging in the traditional rite of passage of spending the night with her friends on the beach of Edward Island. She just wants to have a good time with her best friend Ren even in spite of having to drag her new step-brother, Jonas, along. Ren even knows the stories of the island, legends which state that if you bring a radio along, you might even be able to tune into ghostly frequencies of stations that never existed…
It’s Scooby Doo meets Telltale by way of 90’s Teen movies.
This is the chief mechanic of the game then, wander around the island, using the radio to investigate the strange things that happen. Basically it’s a matter of rolling the dial between a very narrow radio band, and even when not directly investigating weird stuff, the radio can be used to play around with the game’s music and try and find hidden frequencies. It works pretty well, never being too played out, although your companions constant refrain of “try the radio” do start to grate if you take too long investigating things.
Secondly, and in keeping with adventure game traditions, you have lots of conversation options in order to play things the way you want. These run the gamut of humourous, touching and sometimes a little cringeworthy, but are for the most part fairly well written. In particular though, the engagement of this dialogue system is pretty great. Playing on a controller, my face buttons mapped to my main conversation options, a la Telltale, but there was never a moment where I was locked into conversation in a cutscene. I could keep wandering around and talking, or even interrupt my friends with something in the environment. It was oddly liberating, and counter intuitively held my focus on the dialogue as a result. If only because I didn’t feel I was being forced to listen.
One thing though though, I cannot recommend subtitles highly enough. Sometimes there’s very quickly spoken dialogue and also a radio broadcast and you’re trying to think about your own responses and it’s all a bit much. Subtitles at least help parse things down slightly.
In addition, the controls are a little sluggish, and some of the in game paths require you to climb walls which result in slow animations. It’s not game breaking, but it did start to wear on me whenever I ran into a new wall to climb.
In terms of horror, this game focuses more on the unsettling and unpleasant than the gruesome and awful, though the designs on the monsters and their usage in the environment deserves credit. They are deployed just often enough that they never become boring, the developers not overplaying their hand.
The game isn’t that long, I got about four hours, though I know I missed some hidden things. I think I’ve gotten the most out of the main story, with an ending I like. However, this game does have some branching paths, and the ending does change depending on your choices. For what it’s worth, I really did care about the characters, wanting to work for the happy ending that I felt that they deserved. I’ll probably be going back in a month or two and take some other paths to see the differing character’s reactions to events. For fifteen pounds, this is a very good investment, a solid way to pass the evening that doesn’t outstay it’s welcome.