Oxenfree (2016)

Some sequences were very cool and creepy, but the story wasn't very intriguing. When the gameplay consists of walking around and pressing 1 button, the story has to be captivating, like in Gone Home or What Remains of Edith Finch. But I just didn't care.

I say that the game "felt too linear" because it felt like I didn't need to be in control of my character. I would have had the same experience from just watching the story play out. There were choices to make that supposedly affected the ending? Or maybe they just affected my relationship with the other characters. Either way, I wasn't interested enough to go back and try out a different choice.

It is annoying when you have to choose a dialogue option while one of the characters is still talking, so the options either time out or you interrupt the character. Luckily, neither the characters nor story were interesting so I don't think I missed much.

Within the first hour or so, I thought I wasn't going to enjoy this. I eventually warmed up to the characters over time. This is a bit like Firewatch in how it will railroad you into interaction and responses within a timed window. It's also a bit like Firewatch in how it is somewhat more linear than it seems to appear (although there are multiple endings apparently) The art style is okay. You can for the most part make out whatever you might have to interact with. The music is actually fantastic. I also thought the radio mechanics that will change the soundtrack every now and then if you tune it to that music was a pretty neat idea.

For a 5 or so hour game I thought it was satisfying enough. I loved the ideas that it explored, and thought it did a good job expressing those ideas.

I love sci-fi, I love horror, I love good characters. The story is excellent and with all the dialogue and ending options, the replay value is very high, which I appreciate. You can play this at least 3 times and find some new interesting aspects to the story.

The gameplay itself is fairly simple. I think the only frustrating part is not being able to move faster, but that forces you to go at a certain pace and maybe that's the point. This is mostly a choose-your-own-adventure-style game - dialogue selection is the most important mechanic, but I love that the secondary mechanic is playing with the radio frequency.

Overall I think everything pulls together into a very immersive experience. I look forward to revisiting the game again to see what new things I discover.

I knew Oxenfree was a darling in indie gaming circles, so I was truly excited to try it for myself. I had no real idea what to expect story wise, because not only were all the summaries of the game quite vague, I intentionally avoided reading about it, which I always do particularly when it comes to games that have mystery as the centrepiece of their narrative. And in this narrow sense, Oxenfree definitely delivered an interesting experience, not as much in the direction it took the story but in the creepy, cryptic way in which it told it. Great use of lighting and solid voice acting (though somewhat let down by the less impressive dialogue) were quality buoys that kept the narrative afloat from start to finish. I ultimately had mixed feelings about it - certain aspects of the story were fantastic, others felt dull and uninspired, and the payoff wasn’t as satisfying as I had initially hoped for -, but had it all been like this, I would’ve really had a great time with Oxenfree. The problem was everything else.

I don’t know if this is particularly related to the Xbox port but I had a terrible time with this game, technically speaking. The worst offender were the transition moments. Oftentimes, when moving to a different area (which of course happens all the time in 2D side scrolling games) the game would get stuck during what seemed to last an eternity. I’m talking minutes here. I couldn’t do anything. No button prompt worked. The first couple of times it happened I genuinely thought the game had crashed, which led me to believe my save was corrupt and, consequently, to start a new game. I eventually realised this was a thing, and conformed to do something else whilst the game was coming to terms with itself in those moments. But still, I had never seen anything like that before. Then, I get the letter crash. Every single time - and I do mean every single time - I picked up a letter for the first time, the game would crash to dashboard. Got quite annoying after a while. Then, I get the sound issue. The music volume was impossible to adjust separately from the rest of the audio. As in literally impossible. You can’t turn it off. You can’t turn it down. Like, what? Even the most basic of games came with this feature back then. Things is, I wouldn’t have really noticed this (I rarely adjust the audio in a game), but the problem in Oxenfree is that the sound mix is all over the place, and in order to listen to the dialogue, the music needs to be absurdly loud. For someone who plays almost exclusively at night with headphones on, this was particularly irritating. Add to that the fact that a lot of the tracks weren’t atmospherically fitting to begin with - conveying zero eeriness and feeling completely out of place -, what you’re left with a soundtrack that works as a massive hindrance and nothing else.

The cherry on top of this technically nightmarish cake is the fact that the controls felt somewhat clunky. This happens often in these types of games and I normally don’t mind, but combined with the rest it was the straw that almost broke the camel’s back. Now I’m usually quite tolerant of bugs and glitches in games (I’m a huge fan of Bethesda titles for example), and I don’t know if all these issues are circumscribed to the Xbox version, but I have never experienced a game as unoptimised as Oxenfree. Which was an absolutely shame, because underneath this mountain of issues lies a pretty solid narrative with some intriguing, original concepts, a great use of light and shadow, a visually attractive backdrop, and a fantastic last-minute reveal. But I can’t detach any of that from the barrage of technical problems that marred my experience, which ultimately leaves me with very conflicting feelings about this game. 6.5

Oxenfree was an enjoyable time and well worth the 5 hours or so spent on it. You know a story is captivating when your eager to know what comes next and that's exactly what I got here. It's dark, personal and engrossing, capped off with well written characters and gorgeous art work. I was satisfied by the end and I look forward to seeing what they do with 'Lost Signals'.

Playing Oxenfree, I felt like the developers had too many cool ideas they tried to force to work at the same time, and it just didn't click for me.

It's a narrative focused adventure with some exploration and light puzzle elements. The game is quite short to encourage replays to try different choices. Many if not most conversations are designed to play out as you slowly walk from one area to the next which keeps pacing slow and makes the game feel longer, and it makes any backtracking if you misinterpret the map a bit annoying.

Puzzles mostly boil down to just finding the right frequency on a radio, which is pretty cool in how it's done, but it can get old.

A lot of your fun will likely come down to if you end up liking the characters or not. I never felt like I got to know them at a meaningful level, and found most of them annoying in the end.

My final point is that is that dialogue the characters have is setup to try to seem natural, so if you don't respond or interrupt them with your response, they'll take your silence as a response most of the time and continue from to talk. I do wish they just added maybe a couple more seconds to decide on an answer or didn't make so many a situation where you had to interrupt them if you wanted to respond. I ended up just being silent in many situations because I either wanted to finish hearing what they had to say, or just didn't have time to decide on a response.

Tl;dr The gameplay felt tedious to me, the game itself felt long to play despite being short, and I hated the characters and dialogue system. The spooky ideas and setting was pretty cool though.

You play as Alex, a teenage girl who goes to a small island with her friends for a beach party. You then stumble across some weird supernatural things. The game also has different endings depending on how you treat your friends and the choices you make. This had me guessing until the end which was exciting and means you can do multiple playthroughs.

I liked the story and the writing was believable and well acted. The graphics have this cool oil painting/scrapbook style that looks great. The music was surreal and unnerving but also calming in places.

A couple of things I found kind of annoying were the slow movement speed of your character. I get that it's slow, walk-and-talk style game but it would have been nice if they included a run button.

Also I found the dialogue options disappeared very quickly, usually before I had time to think about what I wanted to say. You can pause the game during these speech choices though so it didn't bother me that much.

If you like point-and-click adventure/choose your own story games this is one is worth checking out.

Oxenfree has no interesting puzzles. Its plot is unsolvable on a first playthrough. 60% of the characters are unlikeable. The choices largely feel inconsequential, especially with the final moments of the game in mind. And yet I had fun.

I assumed this would be an adventure game. Like a Telltale or Supermassive game. I think the key to enjoying it is knowing it shares more similarities with a visual novel. The writing quality is about as good as video games get. And even when Alex (the protagonist) was surrounded by annoying but realistic auxiliary characters, I was drawn in. They acted like real teens. They are sarcastic, goofy, awkward, and human. Even though I would only hang out with Alex or Jonas in real life, I leaned into all of their conversations.

When I finished the game, I went on Youtube to watch some explainer videos of the story. And even after an hour of those, I don't feel like there was a consensus on what happened on that island. But I liked what happened on that island. I wouldn't play it a second time. I will instead just go on youtube to see what would have happened if I made a different decision. But I did like it and you probably would too.

Also, the music is very chill.

I loved this game. The story and the characters were complex and interesting. The dialogue system is great and the authentic writing brings the characters to life and really makes you feel like you are having a conversation with these teenagers. I also got a pretty good ending on my first run, so I'm very satisfied.

The length of this game is short, but that's a plus in my eyes. The story has a good pace and comes to a nice conclusion after 4-5 hours.