Game EXP: Oxenfree (NS)

I actually finished Oxenfree on the Nintendo Switch a number of months back, but had this review article on the back burner for so long that I had nearly forgotten about it until recently.

Oxenfree is a pretty amazing game that is a combination of a point-and-click adventure game, meets The Walking Dead: A Telltale Games Series, meets another type of point and click adventure game (which TWD already essentially is) that I am unable to think of at the moment.  Maybe an interactive novel without the pages?  There is also plenty of intrigue, thrilliness, and some hints of something that Algernon Blackwood had written a modern story about teenagers in the Pacific Northwest .

But before I go into all of the things that I though amazing about this game, I want to talk about where I felt that the game fell short.

Setting up and context.  The game starts you off in a conversation between the main character Alex, and two of her friends, and even then, I was not always sure who was talking, how to respond and/or how to react.  There was no "Press B, X, or Y to respond" or any other tutorial for how the game was going to operate for the next couple of hours.  What it took me a lot of the game to figure out was the respective ages of the characters, which shouldn't be a big deal, but for me it felt like it was much needed information for playing Alex how I thought she would act based on her age.  With the static camera pulled as far back as it is, getting a decent view of the characters is pretty difficult too in order to determine age, but that seems mainly an artistic choice that I will get into later.  Another clue to determining their ages is from the voice actors, but even that is pretty ambiguous.  The characters do talk about school, and one of their reasons to go to Edward's Island is to drink, so I immediately thought they were college age, maybe freshman or sophomores.  I do not remember specifically what, when, or where it was that the final bit of information came into my brain-coffin, but it turns out the characters are all in high school.  I realize it is completely trivial, but to me, the whole time I was playing until about half way through, I felt like I was missing an integral part of the story and some context for deciding how Alex would react/respond to situations.

Definitely by the end of the game I felt like I knew the characters a lot better and I might have made decisions more from their perspective rather than that of someone playing a video game.  But that is one of the great things about Oxenfree, is that, it at least gives the impression that the choices you have made during the game matter.  I do wonder how the story would have unfolded if I had further explored an area before stuff went all buckwild.  What if I had talked to another character instead of the one that I did talk to and decided to take with me instead?  Obviously there are a finite endings to this game, but coming out of the game makes me feel like there are so many more than two.  Which leads us perfectly to all of the good things!

The storytelling in Oxenfree, the most amazing thing about this game was how the dialogue worked.  All of the dialogue in the game is spoken by voice actors, who all do an amazing job with their lines, and during conversations, you are frequently given the option of three responses, or the option of not responding at all, which is a perfectly valid respsonse.  What impressed me was that the person having a conversation with Alex would react to the response given by her in a way that made it feel that you were actually directing the flow of the conversation.  I quickly began wondering how the conversation would have been different had my response been different.  And there were plenty of times where I answered quickly cutting someone off, interjecting my words and immediately wondering what I missed.  And while it really was just one audio file stopping and another one starting, it somehow sounded like one person cutting another person off with the necessary inflection in their voice.  In reality, it is probably just my brain thinking that each line of dialogue was in response to the person who spoke before.

The story too is something that really gripped me, despite all of times that I was briefly confused as to the relations of characters and how well they knew each other.  Without giving too much away, there were times when events would happen that literally sent chills down my back, up my arms and along the sides of my face.  These were a combination of events having to deal with family and friends, as well as creepy-ass scenarios that really dealt more with game mechanics than the actual story.  But these mechanics (and you will know when they happen) never seemed to get in the way of the game telling the story, but only enhanced everything about it.  These creepy events only helped to illustrate what was happening on the island and what was at stake for the characters.  I cannot really go more into it without giving things away, that I was unaware of going into the game for the first time.

I realize I could probably go on for a lot longer (looking up at what I have already written), but I am going to close out on (briefly) talking about the other aspect of the game that really captured me.  The art and design of the game.  The picture to the left, to me at least, feels like one of those snow-scape early 20th century paintings that got turned into puzzles we had laying around when I was a kid.  Just how the proportions of the background are just off enough to make things easily visible and playable, but not quite from the correct perspective.  I do not know if this was done to make paths more visible or to try and create an uneasiness in the player, but either way I think it looks really beautiful.

I feel like I wanted to talk about the music, but sadly I cannot really remember it aside from that I know that there was music in the background (84.7% sure anyway) and that it did not get in the way.  Maybe I should track down the soundtrack and give it a listen on its own?

So, despite the one minorish flaw (through my own lack-luster brain) in the game, I love what Night School Studio did with Oxenfree and am eagerly awaiting their next project, Afterparty.  And, not that this is what they are doing, but I think a first person adventure game from them would be all kinds of fantastic.  Someone get them talking with Jessica Curry and The Chinese Room!!




~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian
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