Somewhat more troublesome is that your dialogue choices have a tendency to time out, sometimes very quickly. Movement, for example, can be a little finicky. One thing I couldn’t see from watching my friend’s livestream is that Oxenfree’s gameplay has some minor hiccups, though nothing too frustrating. The soundtrack is very ambient but sells the spooky atmosphere excellently, and the sound effects and voice acting are strong. Something else Oxenfree shares with TSW is fantastic sound design. It helps sell the surrealism of the game quite well. Taking a cue from The Secret World, Oxenfree also likes to mess with its own graphics, blurring, shifting, and turning things upside down, among other things. I’m normally not a fan of the whole 2.5D thing, but the art here has a really nice style to it, and overall Oxenfree is a nice game to look at, even if it was clearly done on a budget. The graphics are unusual, but interesting.
It’s more strange and creepy than genuinely frightening. Don’t expect to be jumping in your seat or yelping in terror. It’s closest to horror, but it’s not a particularly scary game, really. If I had to put a label on Oxenfree, I’d call it horror, but it doesn’t fit any genre particularly well. Personally I think The Broadcast is one of TSW’s best moments, so any comparison to it is a very good thing.
There’s are also very strong echoes of The Secret World, especially its Halloween mission The Broadcast. There are definite shades of Life Is Strange here, right down to having a teenage girl with blue hair, but there’s less lesbian romance and more surreal creepiness. The island is famous for its mysterious radio signals that seem to come from nowhere at all, and while investigating those signals, the main character (Alex) accidentally opens a bizarre rift in space. The story is about a small group of sometimes troubled teenagers holding a beach party on an abandoned island.
It’s part of the new generation of highly story-driven games with little to no substantive gameplay. The Steam summer sale provided me the perfect opportunity to finally grab Oxenfree, and having now experienced the game both first and secondhand, I will now bring you my thoughts on it. So much so, in fact, that I resolved to buy and play through the game myself, even though I’d already seen all of it via her livestream. I had never heard of the game beforehand, but it intrigued me. Some months back, I watched a friend livestream Oxenfree over the course of a couple nights.
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