💾 Archived View for anjune.lol › gmi › oxenfree-thoughts.gmi captured on 2023-12-28 at 15:21:59. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2023-09-08)
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Finished Oxenfree. Was good. Then played through it again (if you play it, you’ll see why). Lots of walking around in the gloomy storybook art, though, so not sure I'll embark on a third playthrough just now. (Edit: make that "fourth". (Edit: "sixth".)) Great soundtrack; will have to dig it back out if I ever open a self-replenishing antiques store in a lightless post-time universe. Spooky radio things everywhere, good.
Cons: 1. Mundane dialogue initially bores and annoys until you’ve grown more attached to the characters. Some of it is important, and you’ll regret not paying attention. 2. It’s not always clear when Alex will execute your dialogue choice in a sarcastic rather than genuine manner. 3. You'll have to read and decide fast; those dialogue options fade quickly. 4. The walking and climbing is another thing to get used to... the atmospheric art and music help.
Could go either way: This game’s mostly about the supernatural mystery plot and the relationships between the characters, with not a whole lot of simulationist depth to the world model. It has this plot-serving mechanical simplicity in common with many modern adventure games, so I don’t really mean to single Oxenfree out here. You’re in it to explore interactions, backstories, and your options.
…you’re in it to soak up the broken radio atmosphere and unreliable reality and utter lostness of your little *moppets*, lonely but *watched* and fucked with every step of the way…
The sound design is *brilliant*. WHY DO WE NOT GET BOLDFACE HERE. Fucking HELL is it ever good.
Another thing I like about this game is the way the characters react to each other and to the discoveries they make. They’ll tell their friends and/or frenemies about them, they’ll (occasionally) try to figure things out, they’ll worry about and get mad at each other... even trying a locked door or wardrobe will be woven into the ongoing conversation, with not a single repeated or stock response. In other non-Firewatch games I can think of right now, it’s really you-the-player who makes the earth-shattering discoveries — all the while your player *character* stoically ignores just about anything and appears to have no situational awareness at all outside of cut scenes. The effect in Oxenfree’s case is that you don’t so much feel you are controlling these vulnerable people or watching them or projecting yourself onto one of them as protecting them, or trying to.
(To be fair to those other games, Oxenfree is far smaller in scope and far more limited when it comes to decision-making *outside* of dialogue. It's got its story to tell; it can play out in different ways, but it can't become a *different* story.)
We're a bunch of teens spending a night on a not-so-touristy-any-more island that’s had all sorts of uses but most importantly used to be a military base with a radio communications school and near where the US experimental nuclear submarine Kanaloa was destroyed in WW2. Up until her death a few days ago the island's only human resident was a woman called Maggie Adler, who owned most of it.
For unknown reasons the island has no regular radio reception, but anomalous broadcasts that appear to be from the past and often have a military theme can be picked up in numerous locations that previous visitors have identified and marked with stacks of stones.
This time though there’s going to be more to it as tuning into the most prominent of these broadcasts at the mouth of a cave opens a sort of gate from some limbo dimension to our world, allowing the ghosts of the sunken crew to mess with us and with the flow of time. They very much appear to want to leave but are largely unable or unwilling to communicate clearly, using either just fragments of WW2 broadcasts to piece together sentences or ending up thinking in game terms like playing tag… they want *us* to be their vessels, to live again; can we escape? How many times has all this played out before, and what difference does it make to change this one iteration? The more we appeal to their individual identities, the clearer the communication – can we reason with them? What price are we willing to pay for escape, this time?