RSS Feeds NGN on Facebook NGN on Twitter NGN on YouTube
Friday March 29, 2024
Header logo
  1. Index
  2. » Articles
  3. » Reviews
  4. » Oxenfree
OXENFREE
Platform: PC
76

Oxenfree Review

An eerie adolescent adventure sending out the right kinds of signals

Posted by on

Radios have a funny relationship with the supernatural in fiction, don’t they? It could hardly be said to be ‘fear of the unknown’ that prompts their usage; even the smallest child has at least a vague idea of how they work. Yet there’s something about this analogue technology, capable of revealing the hidden signals that perpetually surround us at all times, that makes it an ideal window in narratives for more outlandish, fantastical elements. Tune in to the right frequency in the right place, and out of the pounding waves of white noise, patterns seem to form. Familiar voices? Music? Or just meaningless garbage? Couple that with their usage in wartime systems—where the metal box on a desk could potentially relay a soldier’s dying screams, or a nonsense message containing cryptic instructions, or a monotone synthesised voice reciting a series of numbers over and over—and it’s easy to see how they might be presented in a chilling light. Oxenfree is a teenage supernatural mystery with its sights focussed squarely on this tone, and while it weaves the eerie secrets of the wireless into its narrative in a compelling and remarkably well-presented way, the same can’t be said for its mechanics.

Oxenfree

Everything begins, like many ill-fated adventures, with a trip to an isolated locale. You are Alex, an ordinary-ish high school girl teetering on the terrifying brink of graduation, and you’ve taken the ferry to a quiet coastal island with a group of like-minded chums and acquaintances to deal with the impending threat of adulthood in the classical fashion: by drinking yourselves catatonic on an isolated beach by a bonfire. The cast is introduced promptly, with a pretty standard scattering of teen drama archetypes—the quiet one, the prickly one, the chill one, the tough one who’s been through some unspecified rough times—and for a while, at least, the game is happy to let you just slip into the shoes of a young person awkwardly discussing their future with their peers (because I definitely haven’t experienced enough of that already, thanks Oxenfree). Something is definitely up with this island, though: its only living inhabitant passed away only a few days ago, an abandoned military base clings to its cliffs like a sleeping beast of concrete and rebar, and they say that if you stand at the mouth of the beach cave and tune in to the right frequency, you can hear something struggling to be heard above the waterfall of static. Before everybody’s had a chance to get good and drunk, you unwittingly release that something, and thus begins a struggle to keep yourself—and your friends—alive until… well, if not dawn, then at least until the ferry arrives.

Let’s be honest right off the bat: Oxenfree is very much a game dominated by its narrative. You could call it an adventure game, if you really want, but it’s the kind of adventure where most of your input is concerned with nothing more than playing out your role in the events taking place around you. Puzzles occasionally roadblock you, and we’ll get to those in due time, but there’s nothing about them that suggests they’re a particularly intrinsic part of the experience. You could probably take the interactivity out of Oxenfree entirely without it suffering too badly, and yet I’m still glad it’s there. It’s easy to look at a linear narrative with minimal gameplay and ask why it couldn’t have been a movie, or a book, or a series of three-panel comics on the back of cereal boxes, but I don’t want any of those things. I want to play as Alex, even if the definition of ‘play’ in this instance is to just walk and talk until we can all go home.

Oxenfree

I suspect I partially owe this to Oxenfree’s lovely dialogue system, which is the closest I’ve seen a game get to simulating what it’s like to have a natural conversation with actual human beings. Dialogue trees are all very useful for extracting every last titbit of quest information from an innkeeper as you both stand poker-straight facing one another, but their inherent structure is so rigid and systemic that even Cleverbot wouldn’t call it a real discussion. Changing topic isn’t as simple as picking another menu option unless you happen to be in a court hearing, and nobody in the history of humanity has abruptly cut off a discussion with simply “I have to go”, unless their next course of action was to call the police and bolt all the doors on whoever they just finished talking to. Real conversation flows, diverts, and relies on everybody involved to support and steer it, and that’s exactly how Oxenfree approaches things.

There’s nothing particularly remarkable about how your input is handled—picking A, B or C from a list of predetermined, distinct responses—but what matters is the way it’s worked into dialogue. You aren’t the driving force behind every conversation; you’re a participant, mired in the same social conventions as everybody else. The game doesn’t stop everybody in their tracks so you can deliberate over your choice of words; your chance just organically presents itself, often as little more than a minor break in the chatter, and if you can’t decide on what to say in time then you simply won’t speak up at all. It’s a very human way of doing things that more or less obscures the invisible flow-charts driving every exchange. Still, the system isn’t without its stumbling blocks: often your options are presented while somebody else is still talking, and it’s completely ambiguous whether picking your response early will cause you to politely wait for them to finish or just sharply cut them off like they were about to reveal what they caught you doing in the shower block on summer camp. The end result is identical, of course, but I’m invested in playing this role, alright? I’d like to have some fine control over it.

Oxenfree

It helps that the dialogue itself has clearly been written by an actual human being, rather than a committee of wastepaper baskets that achieved sentience by absorbing a phenomenal amount of discarded Sonic the Hedgehog fanfiction. I find it hard to believe that anybody in the group talks like an authentic teenager—not enough memeing, for one thing—but given that that would probably make them about as likeable as a swarm of horseflies, I’m prepared to accept ‘twenty-something with a propensity for saying “like”’ as a reasonable substitute. The game focusses on the relationships between the characters as much as it focusses on the supernatural forces—normal person relationships, not awkward stumbling adolescent romance, thank god—and this opens the door on a lot of rather humanising conversations that are a joy to engage in. It’s not just a case of choosing an option and seeing where it takes you, either; there’s an opaque system of some kind working in the rafters that invisibly gauges how everybody is feeling towards one another—occasionally making itself known with a little thought bubble above characters’ heads—and at the end of the game it lets you know how you stacked up against everybody else who played, pie charts and all. It’s a little bolted-on, I suppose, but it does remind you that you’re not playing in a void.

And yet… it’s hard to genuinely feel anything for anybody involved in the plot. Perhaps this is just a consequence of the game gently guiding you towards playing Alex’s role more than playing as yourself, or perhaps my standards are just a bit more unrealistic in a post-Undertale world—which showed beyond a shadow of a doubt that a humble format is no excuse not to make me care about the plight of a cartoon skeleton—but looking back, nobody in the ragtag group stood out as anything more substantial than the archetype they embodied at the start. There’s a bit near the end where you’re given the option to commit a certain atrocity to a character to ensure the safety of yourself and your remaining friends, and while I did end up taking the high road on that particular choice, it was less about how I felt for that character in particular and more about just doing what I felt was right.

Oxenfree

So what’s happening in the time between all this? Not a lot, to be honest. Once upon a time, in a game like this, it would’ve probably been filled with nonsensical inventory item puzzles or a finicky text parser, but at some point we realised that those things made the experience flow like an S-bend full of regurgitated toffee, so now they’re gone. Oxenfree strikes me as the kind of game that recognises this absence, and despite its heavy narrative focus, feels bound by the invisible conventions of game design to give you something else to do, even if the something in question is so menial that you might as well be twiddling your virtual thumbs. Consequentially you’ll find yourself largely preoccupied with just walking from location to location, navigating areas so small that not even a Roomba could get lost in them, and occasionally carrying out tasks of the ‘walk across a room and press a button’ variety. It all feels very token; interactivity for interactivity’s sake, rather than any serious attempt to engage through mechanics.

Wait, I tell a lie: Oxenfree has a puzzle. I say “a puzzle” because even though it appears multiple times throughout the game, each instance of it is functionally indistinguishable from the others. Remember how I waxed on about Oxenfree’s mystical presentation of radios? Here, at last, is where that finally crops up. Your radio is your all-purpose roadblock removing device, capable of opening doors, opening gates, opening portals to the world beyond the veil, and on occasion, even communicating with your pals. Whenever something’s in your way, chances are the solution is to pull out your radio and give it a twiddle. Unfortunately, what this means in practice is slowly panning back and forth across your band of frequencies, through snatches of conversation and barely-audible bars of music, until something finally happens. That’s it. It’s a lockpicking minigame for the terminally ham-fisted. Now look, I could perhaps see this being an interesting way to break things up if there was any way to ‘solve’ it other than mindlessly scanning from one side to another—if you had to hone in on a particular sound through the cacophony and the white noise, or listen for ghostly instructions at a particular frequency—but when you’re just gradually turning a dial until the obstacle in your way magically removes itself, it really just feels like another menial task to throw on the pile.

Oxenfree

And like I say, such menial tasks feel like meaningless additions when Oxenfree already excels so much at just sitting you down and taking you for a ride. It’s a game of immaculate pacing and impressive presentation, smoothly changing gears between surreal supernatural shenanigans and small heartfelt character moments with nary a whisper from the cogs. When the game decides to be chilling—and it is in places, which is a remarkable achievement for something no more immersive than Super Mario World—its visual effects mirror its focus on analogue technology all the way through: fuzzy white noise on the borders of the screen, like an old VCR tape; faint distortions in the pitch and speed of the music, like a cassette player with a dying motor; random flashes of grainy footage just barely visible through the static. It is always about the static; about the howling inhospitable blizzard of images and words, invisible but omnipresent, harbouring signals that are just a twist of the dial away. Through all that chaos, something is fighting to be heard, and Oxenfree knows how to make it worry you.

It’s also one of the few games that I feel does multiple endings right, in the sense that the ending I got felt like a product of my actions throughout the story and discouraged me from going back and immediately trying to find all the rest. The first question on most people’s minds when they finish a game with multiple endings is usually “how else could this have played out?”, and the first impulse—assuming it’s not 3AM on a Sunday night—is to go back and make some effort to find out. Oxenfree autosaves the whole way through, and while it’s not a long game by any stretch of the word—I mean, how long can you really draw out a narrative without padding everything with tedious cover-based shooting?—the fact that you have to play it from the start really puts a lot of jagged rocks in the way of any plans to find out the alternative conclusions. Good. Unless an alternate ending radically recontextualizes key points of the story—like, say, I don’t know, Undertale—all you’re doing by seeking it out is distancing yourself emotionally from the plot. You’re interested in it as a system to be navigated, not as a narrative that stands alone. How do I achieve this particular outcome? By heartlessly manipulating the other characters with dialogue options I would never normally choose? Thanks, but I’ll leave those paths unexplored.

Oxenfree

As a narrative experience, Oxenfree feels like a product of a maturing industry; one that’s finally getting past the novelty of “hey look, your choices decide where the story goes!” and beginning to pipe up with questions like “how can we best present those choices?” or “how can we write an actual compelling story around this system without the nauseating influence of David Cage?” It may not have all the answers, but Oxenfree’s engaging dialogue and exceptional flair mark it as a pretty good effort. Sure, it’s as mechanically complex as a colouring book with half the pages already filled in, but if you just want to coast effortlessly through a ghost story that unfurls with carefully-engineered grace, Oxenfree is your game.

Our ratings for Oxenfree on PC out of 100 (Ratings FAQ)
Presentation
81
Lovely hand-drawn backgrounds feel right at home under the occasional bouts of warm, analogue noise. Voice acting is pretty good, though characters often seem unwilling to actually raise their voices in genuinely stressful situations.
Gameplay
50
One poorly thought-out minigame—if you can call it that—and a scattering of busywork. Choices drive the narrative, but the system is opaque and geared towards a one-time playthrough, so it doesn’t really feel like a mechanic to be manipulated.
Single Player
78
Beautifully paced with dialogue that shines the whole way through, but the actual characters feel flat and difficult to empathise with. Endings feel like legitimately satisfying products of your actions.
Multiplayer
NR
None
Performance
(Show PC Specs)
CPU: Intel i7-870 @ 2.93 GHz
GPU: Nvidia GeForce GTX 760
RAM: 8GB DDR3
OS: Windows 7 Premium 64-bit
PC Specs

90
Loading screens between every area seem a little unnecessary for a game with such modest requirements, but what do I know?
Overall
76
Oxenfree spins a supernatural mystery with some truly brilliant touches, but without especially interesting characters or mechanics, it’s little more than a spectre of its true potential.
Comments
Oxenfree
Oxenfree box art Platform:
PC
Our Review of Oxenfree
76%
Good
The Verdict:
Game Ranking
Oxenfree is ranked #767 out of 1957 total reviewed games. It is ranked #51 out of 138 games reviewed in 2016.
767. Oxenfree
Related Games
Oxenfree II: Lost Signals Oxenfree II: Lost Signals
Platform: PC
Released: July 2023
Developer: Night School Studio
Afterparty Afterparty
Platform: Xbox One
Released: October 2019
Developer: Night School Studio
Screenshots

Oxenfree
10 images added Jan 26, 2016 20:01
Advertisement ▼
New Game Network NGN Facebook NGN Twitter NGN Youtube NGN RSS