Oxenfree

The simple review tagline for Oxenfree is that you’ll like it if you liked Life is Strange or Night in the Woods, but in actuality, that just puts you in its target audience. Whether or not you’ll actually like it comes down to your tolerance for a number of things, namely: bugs, unintuitive design, and ubiquitously clever, sarcastic dialogue. While I do have my limits, I’m generally on board with the latter, and with that in mind, I found Oxenfree’s script quite endearing. Its major inadvertent flaw is that there seems to be too much of it for the space provided. In a game otherwise built around “walk and talk” presentation, having to pause before doing anything other than walking in order to hear the end of an exchange is a regular occurrence.

I initially thought that the game was going for mumblecore-style naturalistic dialogue, but I think this might have been a bug passed off as a feature. In practice, what it means is that you often need to choose between responding to a character and hearing the entirety of the line you’re responding to. The plot isn’t strictly hard to follow (although the exact paranormal logic that it runs on is a little hazy), but this aspect does make conversation unnecessarily disorienting. In a vacuum, it’s an interesting ghost story that forms a container for its central character dynamics to collide and coalesce within. Its presentation is solid as well; harsh digital effects representing the supernatural are juxtaposed against understated painterly backgrounds, and there’s some atmospheric audio design running through it all.

If asked to summarize the gameplay of Oxenfree, I’d have to go with “surprisingly janky.” Its control issues aren’t hugely problematic, but they are frequent and especially distracting in a side-view point-and-click adventure – didn’t we figure out how these things should work decades ago? The main non-dialogue mechanic is tuning a radio to accomplish a variety of paranormal tasks, which is a textbook case of minimal gameplay being so minimal that I’d rather it just not be present. Leaving aside the fact that I encountered multiple irritating bugs associated with this feature, slowly turning a radio dial to find a specific frequency without any hints is not remotely fun. There’s a perfectly serviceable narrative experience within Oxenfree, but in its current state, the emotions it evokes are all tempered by a sense of bewilderment.