SPOILER-FREE REVIEW
Offering a smart blend of supernatural thrills and adventure, Oxenfree’s sharp writing, naturalistic dialogue and memorable characters create a striking, multi-layered narrative well worth experiencing.
Back when I was in university, I used to go over to a friend’s place after class, and together with a small group, we’d spend many an evening scaring ourselves to death playing horror games and watching pulpy horror films until the sun came up. In the quieter hours, after we’d either finished or just gotten bored, we’d jump onto YouTube and pick out a few episodes of Ghost Adventures. For the unfamiliar, it’s a TV show featuring ghost hunters with the gift who investigate haunted locations, fiddle around with fancy equipment and jump at every innocuous creak of the floorboards. It’s entertainment of the highest order, capable of stirring your curiosity and giving you a good case of the spooks. I never thought I’d play a game that could do the same thing. In fact, Night School Studios’ debut game, with its sharp writing, manages to do even more.
You are Alex, a high school senior dragging her brand-new stepbrother Jonas along to a wild party being held on the shores of Edwards Island off the coast of her hometown. After getting bored with party games and drinking with their buddies, they decide to investigate an odd cave: the source of a truly weird urban legend. When Alex starts fiddling with her pocket radio, she inadvertently opens up a spectral rift, unleashing an evil force tied to the island’s cryptic past. Alex and her friends must figure out who or what this entity is in order to escape its attempts to possess them.
Oxenfree is billed as a supernatural thriller, so I didn’t check my expectations for horror games at the door. After all, nobody’s crying at The Conjuring, except maybe out of fear. But this game works on several different levels simultaneously, and holds your attention in a vice-grip. It’s a slow-burning, spooky tale about being pursued by an unknown entity tied to past events that happened on the island, which skewers classic horror tropes and cheap jump scares in favour of a creeping sense of dread. Within the first ten minutes, the game offers an intriguing glimpse of the island’s storied history, which promises thrills, mystery and dangerous adventure.
It’s complemented by a coming-of-age story, from which the game sources its strong characters, complex relationships and realistic dialogue. Alongside Alex, who’s brought to life by a phenomenal performance by Erin Yvette, the game also features a small cast of friends and frenemies, including Jonas (Gavin Hammon), her stoner friend Ren (Aaron Kuban), the introvert Nona (Britanni Johnson), and the popular girl Clarissa (Avital Ash) who are written with subversive depth. They too are a source of mystery, and the awakening of this paranormal force brings the group’s pre-existing tensions to the surface, adding potent fuel to the fiery character drama that serves as Oxenfree’s driving force. You’ll have to contend with Jonas’ troubled past, Clarissa’s undefined hatred for Alex, and Ren’s drug-fuelled insecurity. Unravelling these little mysteries, you’ll find the answers to your questions are not as simple as they seemed.
You can’t escape from yourself either, since you also have to deal with Alex. The player decides how Alex treats her friends, and I felt like what I had Alex say not only shaped her as a character, but it also mattered in the grand scheme of things. The way she reacted when the group got into an argument said something about who she was. So did the choice of whether she tried to reconcile with Clarissa or simply delivered a few stinging retorts of her own before abandoning her. It chooses to go further and say something, meditating on personal grief and touching on the self-destructive toxicity of anger, both universal parts of the experience of being human.
It spins a good yarn, with devious plot twists and an ending that had me questioning everything I had just seen. Dialogue options allow the story to branch out following the direction chosen by the player, and this not only produces an assortment of different endings, but also a powerful compulsion to return immediately and see what else could have happened. The very idea of a second playthrough is embraced and folded into the wider story rather than kept at arms’ length, with new dialogue options opening up for the player to choose. It’s where Oxenfree shines, and it becomes a necessary part of the overall experience, in contrast to the typical New Game Plus modes which are usually optional and add nothing new.
For most of the game, you’re also free to explore Edwards Island. It’s a haunting place, rendered in a beautiful, painterly watercolour style that highlights the isolation and decay, and creates a palpable sense of mystery: people lived here once, what made them leave? As Alex and Jonas trek through the woods, tiptoeing through the ruins of an abandoned military installation, they chat about happier days and troubled pasts and it becomes hard not to be drawn to them. Oxenfree isn’t a game for people looking for action; its focus is on telling a story using all the tools at its disposal, so the most you’ll do is the lightest of light puzzle solving. Throughout the game, Alex can use her portable radio to tune into strange signals to reveal auditory anomalies: bursts of sound, old music and whispers. Later, tuning into the right frequency at the right spot reveals clues to the locations of buried letters which give further insight into the true identity of the entity stalking Alex and her friends.
That being said, there are a few tweaks that would have improved the experience. The characters walk almost at a snail’s pace, and no matter how enamoured I was with the story, I became slightly irritated by the long treks it took to get where I wanted to go. The synth-heavy soundtrack by scntfc accentuates the expertly crafted tension and discomfort, but the audio balance seems off and sometimes at precisely the wrong moments, it drowns out the dialogue in a sea of noise. There doesn’t appear to be any option to tweak the music volume, at least on the Switch, so subtitles become a must.
Oxenfree rarely has trouble telling its story though. Rather than just going for straight horror by using cheap jump scares or tropes, it aims for something different. It’s a thrilling story about the supernatural, but it’s also so much more. It’s about anger and fear, loss and decay, and a group of teenagers struggling to decide who they are. The ghosts that feature in all those shows and movies are scary in their own right. But turning to face the things in the dark only to find yourself staring at your own reflection? Oxenfree understands why that might be even more unnerving.
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