Oxenfree Review

Originally published on Trevor Trove on January 18, 2016

TL; DR(eview) – Oxenfree strikes me as one of those games people might accidentally overlook at the end of the year in the Game of the Year conversation because it is a smaller title launched in the first couple weeks of 2016 but the game’s visual aesthetic and storytelling should absolutely put it in the hunt come December.

As someone who was so scared of a lightbulb popping that it kept me from completing Gone Home for two years, jumping almost immediately into a 3rd-person ghost story people were hailing as “terrifying” was not exactly at the top of my list. But the art style intrigued me, as did the notion that it was a pretty short story. Having played through it three times now in two days, I’m glad I gave it a chance.

The Story

The story of Oxenfree is certainly the game’s highlight and best experienced for oneself so I won’t go too deep in this review. But without getting into spoiler territory, you play as Alex, a high-school junior embarking on the traditional end of the school year pastime of spending the night drinking and exploring the nearby island. Accompanying you on this escapade are her lifelong friend Ren, the object of his affection Nona, Nona’s best friend Clarissa (who also used to date Alex’s big brother Michael), and Alex’s new step-brother Jonas, who she also happen to be meeting for the first time on this adventure.

What starts out as an innocent local tradition turns into something more when you and your friends accidentally unlock another dimension by exploring an old wives tale involving radio frequencies on the island. Then, you stumble into trying to uncover the mysteries of the island, as well as what these “ghosts” have in store for you and your friends before the morning dawns.

The Gameplay

Similar to games like those produced by Telltale, the main mechanic of Oxenfree involves timed “choose-your-own-adventure” responses for your protagonist, Alex. I found the script to be often incredibly smart and funny, even if the characters were sometimes treating their potentially life-or-death situation with a little bit too much snarky humor to really feel believable.

As is standard with these kinds of narratives, the choices you make will affect how the other characters respond to you, both in the moment as well as later in the night. In my second playthrough, I found myself intentionally making different choices to see how they would affect the narrative.

Admittedly, I have been conditioned by Telltale games at this point to expect a drastic change in the narrative when given a “help this person or this other person scenario,” but I was disappointed when early on, you are given this problem and there aren’t drastic changes based on who you help first. Yes, the characters will comment “I can’t believe you helped them before me,” but the scenarios you encounter at each companion will play out the same, either way. Especially noticeable in the second playthrough was the discovery that both of these options introduce the same new mechanic to the player but only one of them actually has the characters respond to it. So you can conceivable experience this new element without your characters commenting on it, then experience it a second time and only then do they respond (as if it’s happening for the first time). Effectively it winds up feeling like the narrative for was designed to be played moment A, then moment B, then moment C even though they give you the option to play C before B.

Now that’s not to say your actions can’t drastically change the games outcome because, as I learned in my third playthrough, they absolutely can. But it winds up being that a lot of little moments throughout the game can add up to a big change. In my first and second playthroughs, my endings were a little similar because I had put an overemphasis on changing what I thought were the “big” moments. But when I changed pretty much all of the “little” moments in the third session, I had an ending completely different than either of the first two. And I’m still eager to play through it again to see what else might be out there waiting for me.

Minor Issues

Somewhat annoyingly, I did come across a few issues throughout each of my playthroughs. Once or twice per game, I would get booted from the game as I entered a new area. I never lost any progress as the game auto-saved before kicking me out. It just seems to have been a weird glitch where it would close the game instead of loading the area. When I immediately rebooted the game and hit resume, I would always start in the area I had planned on visiting.

Another issue that was identical across all three playthroughs came in a moment where I opened a chest and had some dialogue with the other characters. The game’s next moment involved another character coming up the stairs to look in the chest and advance the plot. Each time I got to this spot, it took fifteen to thirty seconds for the game’s scripting to realize that it was supposed to send that character upstairs. So I just sat there, unable to move but still clearly in control (I could pull out the radio and play with the dial) while I watched that character stand silently at the base of the stairs for a bit before the game seemingly caught up to what I was doing.

Neither of these were critical issues but I was surprised to see them consistently across my three separate sessions. I imagine they’ll be patched eventually.

The Verdict

It might seem like I had a bad time with the game given the bugs and narrative points I highlighted above, but that’s only because I would have to get more specific in describing the story to highlight all of the brilliant moments I experienced and, like Gone Home, they are best experienced first hand with little to no understanding of what to expect.

For a game that can be played over the course of a few hours, I am impressed at how much I know about the history of this fictional island and how much I was invested in these characters. That’s all a testament to developer Night School Studio’s ability to fit in an incredibly dense and rich story into such a small (and visually stunning) package. As my first new game played in 2016, I’m absolutely going to keep this one in mind for my Game of the Year awards come December.

Oxenfree is available now on Xbox One and Steam. It will likely come to PlayStation 4 at some point in the future once it’s timed-exclusivity deal with Microsoft runs out.