The spooky radio you can tune in as you wander around in the dark is back. And it has the same spirit, a vital word for this kind of experience. But the story exists on the same continuum. Will you need to have played the original game to enjoy this? Not at all. Two dimensions - at least two - colliding in sinister ways on a deserted chunk of rock surrounded by dark waters.Īnd now we get Oxenfree 2, which is an expanded and wonderfully doomy sort of sequel. Instead, a group of misfits stumbled upon some weird paranormal BS - odd radio signals, funny rips in the fabric of reality. The normal world is suspended and hierarchies are upended, but I'm pretty sure nobody trots off to marriage once it's all done. It's a Midsummer Night's Dream through a glass darkly - a Midsummer Night's Nightmare, I guess. The original Oxenfree is an evocative shaggy ghost story about a bunch of teens exploring a spooky island at night. And that was one-word stories.įittingly, I'm probably approaching all this out of sequence. A success! But even so, I wanted the moment that took me across the barrier from being impressed by what a clever game this is, to feeling - feeling what an emotionally acute and insightful game it is too.
The conversation flowed, as they say, and even the stilted moments were eloquent in that Oxenfree way: speaking to the experience of feeling your way around people you don't know as well as you think you do. But the people demoing the game really know their Oxenfree, which is hardly surprising because they made the first game and are making the sequel. I can be hands-off with an RPG or a platformer, but there is a delicious torture to being hands off with a narrative game like Oxenfree, because what you do in Oxenfree more than anything is decide what the people you control are going to say at any time, picking between two or three bubblebum choices that often appear with a wonderfully wriggling impertenence while the people around you are still saying things themselves.
I say beautifully, because that itself was a surprise. I had been waiting for the one-word stories moment or something like it through a half-hour hands-off demo for Oxenfree 2: Lost Signals conducted rather beautifully over Discord last week. A game which - I asked - is inevitably plucked from a developer's own experiences, so the plaiting of life and fiction continues. Someone who is self-aware enough to know that a game is what they need to calm them down, to orient them. What a thing! A marvel.Īnd then on the other hand - what a lovely bit of observation. I close my eyes at that and see the decision tree branching out, its bright leaves filling the space above my head. On one hand, there's that dizzying complexity going on behind the scenes, because as Jacob's friend Riley, you get to choose which word to say, which in turn must impact which word Jacob then chooses as a response. And this gets at the heart of Oxenfree 2 for me, I think. They play for one round - a silly kind of sentence emerges - and it makes him feel better.
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