Oxenfree is another unique experience that I search Steam for, it’s odd how often I find what can be discussed into “what is a game?”
But like many of these games that I have played, such as Edith Finch, Her Story, and Orwell, there’s so much more to the story that simply dismissing it as “not a game” ignores the important question. “Is it worth the money for the experience, whether it’s a game or not?”
Oxenfree gets me to answer the question with an “Oh god yes”. It’s non-traditional in how it does it but it brought me in with a great story and then made it better for a second playthrough.
The game is played mostly by choosing options through three of the face buttons on a controller (X Y B for steam controllers) and hitting A to select objects in the world. It feels odd and simplistic but brings a feeling of a choose your own adventure.
The thing is the game is pretty average for about an hour. It is teaching you the rules and developing the characters and it does that well, which is crucial because as a choose your own adventure you’re going to have to care about these people so you can make choices. While that’s not the only control you have here, you have limited other choices like pulling out a radio and tuning it to stations. That’s about all the “interaction” you have with the game other than moving around and looking at stuff, but that’s about all the interaction you need for this story.
I would advise avoiding any hints of what the story is about because the way this game delivers it over four hours is just mastery of the form. Looking at my notes I see that about two hours in I wrote: “Ok this is interesting”. Three hours in I wrote down. “WTF? This is going to be amazing or horrible.” And the story actually is amazing. I absolutely adore the entire story of the game, in fact, I replayed the game a second time to try different things and enjoyed it even more.
And while the story takes about four hours, I will highly recommend playing the game a second time because to me the second playthrough is critical. That’s all I’ll say because this is a story that definitely deserves to be played blind.
However, the features of the game can be discussed. One interesting design choice is timed dialog. This is becoming almost common to deliver a natural dialogue in the game, and when it works and your choices are shown early enough, it shines. The dialogue choices allow the game to personalize the story to the player.
The first big thing is this game demands your focus, you don’t want to miss your chance to say anything, you have to make choices to participate in the story so it’s hard to look away even to get a text message. I’ve missed a few prompts and had to restart the screen to see what they said because they come up quite quickly.
In addition, the dialogue system has some minor flaws. If person A is talking, and Person B is responding and you change screens, the game stops that dialogue and it’s gone forever. If you are having a discussion and then do something to an object midline, that line or possibly conversation is gone forever. The game sometimes tries to recover from an interruption but it’s often done awkwardly. It’s a shame because the dialogue tends to be really good, so I’ve had to stand at exits while waiting for the dialogue to end.
The writing though is good, very good most of the time. There are a few awkward references, at least one reference to a 90s kid show that most of these characters wouldn’t have been alive during and a lot of one-liners that seem a little too overly written for a spur of the moment statement.
The choices in the game are also a mixed bag. They definitely drive the dialogue in different ways but for the most part most “say X “ or “say Y” choices don’t matter a huge amount but there are some important ones. When you do say something, a character’s head appears in a thought bubble next to other characters. Sadly, this doesn’t tell you enough. It doesn’t differentiate good vs bad effects, and the game only has a handful of choices that make major decisions but the fact that I could change how my characters were acting and ended up with different twists because of it, was interesting enough that I can say your choices do matter in a decent way.
There are also collectibles. The main collectible that the game presents to the user is incredibly worth getting even if it requires backtracking. It’s offered as a collectible, but I highly recommend going to find them on the first playthrough to get the full story.
There are also some great audio clips in the game while playing with the radio outside of the main game, it’s a cool feature but almost every clip is about 5 seconds long. Far shorter than it could be, I would have loved to hear a full old radio show or at least a scene, but these feel to be audio clips that repeat. I get the mentality, just… wishful thinking.
As mentioned without spoilers, this is a game that pretty much must be played two times. It does some interesting things and it’s a shame it doesn’t force you to replay it because I feel like some people will miss out on its real brilliance.
There is more to say but sadly I feel compelled to avoid spoilers and so much of this game can be spoiled easily.
At the same time, the one negative is to get all the achievements you’d have to do at least 3 full playthroughs and at over 4 hours for each playthrough, you’re looking at about 13 hours. The second playthrough is easily doable, but the third… there is not enough different and you have many of the same scenes for the third times.
Overall, though, I really enjoyed Oxenfree, it’s a small team game but they do a lot with a team that size. It is 20 bucks which is quite a bit, but it goes on sale and in bundles often enough. It’s easily worth at least 10 dollars though. It should give you an excellent story, and a great experience even if you don’t want to call it a “game”.
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4.0