Oxenfree Review

Developed By: Night School Studio

Published By: Night School Studio

Release Date: January 15, 2016

Platforms: PC, Xbox One [reviewed]

A group of unknowing teenagers visit a creepy island and bring a batch of magic brownies along – what could go wrong? After a five-hour play-through of Night School’s creepy adventure game, Oxenfree, I’ve learned about as much can go right as wrong in 2016’s most notable game, so far.

Dialed in.

Oxenfree opens with a group of friends aboard a ferry headed to Edward Island – an unassuming urban myth-rich tourist destination – looking forward to a few cold drinks on the beach. Likely because Night School Studio didn’t set out to develop Drink on the Beach Simulator, things take a turn for the supernatural. Don’t let the light-hearted opening or hand-made, nearly cartoon-ish aesthetic fool you. Oxenfree will pop your mouth open with some horrifying imagery. Quite often, I audibly exclaimed “What. Was. That?” Yeesh! Just the thought of those moments gives me the creeps.

Aside from the moody setting, the most notable aspect of Oxenfree is it’s dialogue system. Appropriately inline with its graphic novel art style, dialogue choices are presented as three speech bubbles that visually correlates with the X, Y, and B buttons on the Xbox One controller. It’s intuitive to the point that makes me wonder why this isn’t seen more often in games. In fact, there’s not much user-interface (UI) to speak of and this minimalist approach serves Oxenfree nicely, placing little between the player and the unfolding story. Even more pleasing than selecting the phrases are the theatre-quality voice performances. Oxenfree is a video game that feels like a true-to-source stage play translation. Such a production doesn’t exist, but it should.

Oxenfree proves that distortion is almost always creepy. We are innately afraid of the unknown and there’s a sense of something hidden within distortion that drives the spooky factor way up. A handheld radio, quickly activated with RB, tuned to various frequencies propels the majority of puzzles or plot-points. It’s a clever game mechanic that ties in nicely with the lore of the island.

Using the radio typically moves the story forward in a pretty linear way. Your choices, on the other hand, impact the flow of the narrative. The game is comprised of small mini-quests and, as main character Alex, you’ll choose either a sidekick to tag along or a lost friend to go rescue throughout various chunks of the story. The narrative is molded by choices like this and how aggressively or passively Alex responds to conflict within the group. Yes, that means there are multiple endings here but Night School doesn’t quite achieve the butterfly effect mechanic we’ve seen with games like other games recently.

So we have great voice acting, inspired art direction, and a spooky setting. All of this is lost if the music doesn’t hold it all together. Luckily, Oxenfree doesn’t disappoint. In fact, this is the sort of soundtrack that should be made available for purchase – or at the very least, on a Spotify playlist. Time plays a significant role in Oxenfree and the music feels like it swings around the face of a clock with an underlying tick-tock metronome

Needs a shot of antibiotics.

Try as I might, I simply could not keep a few problems with Oxenfree from getting in the way of my complete and utter enjoyment. The most insufferable aspect of Oxenfree is the dialogue system. I know. I just said it was a great system but hear me out.

Jus-

I’ll explain if you let me fini-

See? Isn’t that super annoying when somebody you’re listening to is constantly interrupted? Oxenfree, for all it does well and how polished the voice acting is, annoyingly doesn’t allow one character to finish their statement before your dialogue choice cuts them off. What makes it even more frustrating is if you wait for, say Ren, to finish talking about how disappointed he is that you partied on with, say Jonah, your dialogue options disappear. It’s a take-your-time-hurry-up situation and it drove me bananas. For some stretches of the game, the dialogue is the only thing going on and was perpetually forced to interrupt everyone. I’m a nice guy! I hate interruptions.

Edward Island is a genuinely intriguing location but unless you’re going directly towards the next mission objective, there isn’t a whole lot to see or do. A lifeless island should add to some tension or mystery but aside from the set-piece scares, I never felt like there was any danger in walking around. After a while, it can become a bit of a slog. This issue is made worse if Oxenfree delivers the same bugs to you as I experienced. Specifically, as each objective became available, it was crossed out, along with the specific destination, so I had to wander around and stumble upon each mission objective in order to move the story along.

This wouldn’t be all bad if exploration was more fun and not broken up by shockingly long load times. Oxenfree has a few moving parts with all the choices you can make, but on the surface, this appears to be a fairly lightweight game. So when each section of the map is broken up into load screens, and long ones at that, my fun-o-meter was struggling to maintain the high set within my first impressions.

And there’s one more thing. On Xbox One, there’s a good chance the game will crash during these load screens. I had to reboot the game far too often and after speaking with a few other reviewers, I learned they experienced the same thing. Luckily, Oxenfree autosaves fairly often and rebooting generally resulted in arriving at the same location so it’s not game-breaking but notably annoying.

Final Verdict

It’s unique art direction, charismatic and chemistry-clicking cast ensemble, and horrifyingly memorable moments make Oxenfree 2016’s first standout game on Xbox One. Unfortunately, problems with how the characters interact with each other stacked on top of an empty-without-purpose setting dragged my enjoyment down from meteoric heights to mediocre, err, middles. Still, with alternate endings and a perfectly-matched soundtrack, there is quite a lot to appreciate with Oxenfree and I cannot wait to see what Night School Studios has in store for us next.