These objects and found footage hint at a distant past and suggest that it still has effects in the present. The player is an archeologist of sorts, unearthing cues, not unlike in Gone Home, Contrastor To the Moon. There’s an explorative aesthetics to Oxenfree – a story framed through objects and audio cues that players can stumble upon on the island. The radio is crucial in unlocking these stories. But once players dive deeper, they will find many more stories within the game that pertain to the history of the island and the ghosts that roam there. Her friends get possessed by ghosts, and caught in time loops, and it’s up to Alex to fix things with her radio ( see detailed synopsis).Īt first sight, Oxenfree is a coming-of-age game with horror elements. In a small cavern, Alex tunes her radio and unexpectedly forms a dimensional rift. After camping on the beach, Alex, Ren, and Jonas explore the nearby caves. It was once a military base and its only permanent resident, Maggie Adler, has recently died. Yes, the island that Alex, Jonas and their friends visit is not just any island. If it was me I'd be sobbing in a corner somewhere.“You are Alex, and you’ve just brought your new stepbrother Jonas to an overnight island party gone horribly wrong,” Night School (2016) writes about their game Oxenfree. My only real complaints are the lack of challenging puzzles, and the fact that the characters often seem a little too relaxed considering the terrifying things happening to them. But if you like smart, well-written adventure games with rich characters, well-realised settings, and beautiful art direction, it’s worth playing. It's a difficult game to review, because revealing so much of what makes it great would ruin the story. You start out thinking it’s going to be the typical story of a group of feckless teens being picked off one by one by some evil force, but it subverts that trope. Oxenfree uses its setting and atmosphere as a means to tell an intriguing, heartfelt story, rather than for cheap scares. I was so entranced by the story and characters that I didn’t really care. One moment made me lean back in my chair and wince, but otherwise it’s fairly tame. It’s funny and occasionally touching, but not scary, despite being, essentially, a horror game. The story is short-you’ll finish it in about six hours, maybe more if you decide to look for optional letters scattered around the island-but it’s superbly paced and written, and you’ll immediately want to play it a second time to see what other paths you can take and the different directions your relationships can go in. Alex’s journey is an emotional one, and she’s forced to confront difficult things in her life. Your predicament has close ties to the island, and also your own past. It’s mostly a game about exploration and story. It has adventure game stylings, but there are no real puzzles to speak of. Outside of the character relationships, there isn’t much to Oxenfree. It’s not a massive space, but makes up for its limited scale with rich world-building. On the island you'll find, among other things, an abandoned military base, a campsite, a forest, and a small, uninhabited town. When you see a sign with a certain icon, you can tune your radio into a frequency that reveals the island’s history-including a story about a tragedy involving a World War II submarine. It has a storied past which you learn as you wander. The group becomes separated, and Alex takes it upon herself to find her friends on the eerily quiet, empty island. I won’t say what happens next, because this is a story-driven game and unraveling its mysteries is key to the experience, but their evening suddenly takes a dark turn.
A local myth is that if you tune a radio into certain frequencies on the island you’ll hear ghostly messages-an urban legend Alex and her friends decide to investigate. You play as Alex, a blue-haired teenager who comes to Edwards Island with a group of friends, and her new step brother, to hang out, drink beer, and explore.
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