Grief, death, and divorce are just a few that are brought up in the first 30 minutes, and it only goes into deeper territory from there. Without getting into spoilers, it’s worth noting that Oxenfree deals with several tricky themes. Each character, including Alex, has their faults, but I ended up growing attached to them all by the time the credits rolled. Thankfully, Oxenfree features a cast of distinctly different characters that are all flawed (but ultimately likable), and feel layered. ![]() While the dialogue system in place rocks (and it must’ve been a lot of extra work to record variants of lines just in case the player interrupted them), it would be all for nothing if the writing wasn’t good. That’s not the case here, and it’s brilliant. In past adventure games, I distinctly remember standing around doing nothing while I waited for a character to finish their story, afraid to examine items in fear that I’d interrupt the scripting and never get to hear it. It’s seemingly simple, but it ensures that players don’t miss out on backstory just because they were exploring. Particularly impressive is how you can interrupt a character talking by examining an object (thus forcing Alex to speak up about what she’s examining), and the computer character will naturally bring up the point he was going to make. Branching dialogue has been done in a lot of games at this point, but none have done it as well as Night School Studio. ![]() ![]() One area where Oxenfree absolutely knocks it out of the park is in its dialogue system. Players will lead Alex around the island, use her radio to tune into the supernatural (and the oldies station that barely gets reception), and make sure none of her friends go off the deep end (and there’s naturally some pent up aggression when dealing with teens). The latter of which are in a pretty questionable state after what happens early on in this memorable (if not for all the wrong reasons) night. All she has with her is a map of the island, a radio, and her wits. Players are put in the skater shoes of Alex, Oxenfree‘s cyan haired protagonist.
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