Oxenfree
Night
School Studio
“Ollie Ollie Oxenfree” was a
call I remember as a child that translated roughly as “Come Out, Come
Out, Wherever You Are”. A game of hide and seek was over, and those
still hidden could come out without being caught.
There are a lot of hidden things
in Oxenfree. Calling them out though does not go well for Alex and her
teenage company of “friends”, outbound on a boat from the small town of
Camena to spend a night just drinking and chilling on a decommissioned
military island.
There is a lot to like in this
game, most notably that the story is the thing, the relationships
between characters even more so. You spend a whole lot of time walking
and chatting and building (or unbuilding) your relationships, and
filling the back stories of the characters. Jonas is the new boy, newly
step-brothered to Alex, Ren is the Alex BFF with a hankering for Nona
that he won’t express, and Carissa the gilt edged b**ch (really, whose
friend is she??). Plus Michael, who is present in the grief of Alex.
Alex drives things, and you
drive Alex. Conversations will often involve three types of responses
available to Alex, and while you get time to think about it you don’t
get forever. The little speech bubbles will fade, and then disappear
altogether, which is akin to not responding at all. I felt the pacing
was just right, in keeping with an ongoing conversation, rather than
stop/starting while you dissected and contemplated every available
response.
You drive her around the island
as well, using the WASD keys. This might be a component that puts some
players off, especially as you do a lot of it. Walk paths that twist and
turn, climb up, jump across, climb down, walk some more. It reminded me
of a platform game in this aspect (without I stress the need to do
anything that remotely requires timing or quick fingered twitching) and
there were times when I felt the construction was a little artificial
and aimed at extending the playtime. On the whole though I thought that
it did a pretty good job of capturing the feeling of rambling about a
large island, and where if you have to get somewhere, you have to walk
the tracks and trails that exist, and occasionally climb things in your
way, or nimbly jump up or over an obstacle.
The perspective also does a good
job of portraying a large environment. Alex and her fellow characters
are quite small, and the viewing angle expands the environment
accordingly. I thought at first that the character size would be an
issue, but to the contrary, not only did it work, it became one of the
many positives involved.
There is a lot of conversation,
and while the voices are distinctive, a tiny speech bubble will appear
above the head of the talking character, just in case. You might also
get a similarly sized image of how that person has responded to a
particular response, which appears for a moment then disappears. More
importantly than the mechanics, however, there is an authenticity to the
narrative, being sufficiently teenage in language and structure to be
convincing, but not off-putting to those of us for whom being a teenager
was some time ago. There are also ums and ahs and incomplete sentences
and trailing away to nothing, just like real conversations, teenage or
otherwise.
The story you can find out for
yourself, but it involves time slips and loops, supernatural voices, an
old woman and the occasional possession. It can be a little dark and
some events might be unsettling, but isn’t scary or horrific.
All of this is presented in an
interestingly arty style, punctuated by distortions and shimmers when
the time glitches, and when the sound palette is thrown in it all comes
together rather well.
Googling reveals multiple
endings based on the dialogue choices you make and the relationships you
create. I thought mine made sense, and would be more than happy to go
back and play again to make deliberately different choices to see how
things change.
Puzzling is negligible,
consisting mainly of tuning into the right frequency with a hand held
radio in order to unlock doors and resolve some other situations. There
are also a number of tape players that you have to spin to the right
speed (move your mouse round and round), usually in order to correct a
time slippage. There are no inventory items, apart from your radio, and
apart from getting from here to there (and a map will assist) there are
no other challenges to speak of.
Which really doesn’t matter. If
you want brain busting puzzle heaven, there are plenty of games that
will give you that. This isn’t one of them, and it isn’t pretending to
be.
Some more googling revealed that
Telltale alumni are involved in Night School Studio. Which in itself
tells you something about what sort of game this is.
Like the island traversing,
there is an element of padding in the use of the radio. About two thirds
of the way through the game, you get the advanced radio, which just
increases the bandwidth through which you have to carefully scroll in
order to find the relevant frequency. I can’t see why it was necessary,
and no game explanation compensates.
There are other uses for the
radio. It can be used to tune into tourist beacons around the island,
which will give information on the whatever/wherever you are at, and you
scroll through the frequencies and may pick up snippets that might add
something to the broader narrative, or might just be irrelevant chatter.
Late in the game, the radio is also part of a treasure hunt to find
hidden letters from the old woman I mentioned earlier by tuning to the
appropriate frequency at the appropriate location. I didn’t try, so
can’t tell you how arbitrary or otherwise this hunt might be. What I can
tell you is it isn’t required to finish the game.
It clocks in at about four
hours, which would be significantly shorter if it wasn’t for all the
rambling. I didn’t feel cheated or let down though, and confess to
having an engaging and enjoyable Saturday morning.
I played on:
OS: Windows 10
Processor: Intel i7-3820 4GHz
RAM: 16GB DDR3
Video card: AMD Radeon
HD 7800 2048MB
GameBoomers Review Guidelines
July 2016
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