Playing Night School Studio's Oxenfree has been a nostalgic experience, but not in the way Indie video games usually are. Not so much in the sense of recalling memories of my salad days either, because while Oxenfree tends to focus on teenagers being teenagers and accidentally awakening some primal force of terror while carousing in a drunken beach gathering, I can't say there was anything going on in my own misbegotten youth that draws many parallels. Rather, it's nostalgic in the way it presents itself, in a manner similar to Stranger Things or Gravity Falls in that it recreates a specific sense of the 80s and 90s that speaks more to me as an avid TV watcher (and impressionable child) of that time. In fact, those two properties I mentioned perhaps best adroitly fit what Oxenfree is going for here: quiet small-town life in a rustic, forested cul-de-sac of an American berg, juxtaposed with a sudden and unwanted influx of supernatural weirdness.

Oxenfree's not so much an action-adventure game than an adventure game with some mildly action bits in it. The player can walk around each of its locations and interact with a handful of objects in the environment. Most of the time, they're hopping over small gaps, climbing up lips or walls and navigating around winding passages on Edward's Island: a popular spot for tourists and teenage no-goodnik rabble-rousers depending on the time of day. The island was once home to a US army base, and before that a mining outpost, giving the player a bit of variance as they cross over decades-old gondolas and elevators and pass through campgrounds and beaches and radio towers. It's a prime spot for a horror movie scenario, which is what Oxenfree begins to feel like from its first foreboding ferry ride across the foggy waters separating the island from civilization. An event occurs, the handful of teenagers with baggage we've spent a few minutes being introduced do are suddenly deposited all over the island, and the game becomes a contemplative journey to reconstitute the group while... something attempts to contact the protagonist Alex, her fish-out-of-water new step-brother Jonas and her friends the dorky Ren, the brusque Clarissa and the quiet Nona in a highly unconventional manner. To say more would be spoiling the game's many surprises and attempts to mess with the player's mind, along with those of its young cast.

I've been enjoying Oxenfree for the most part. The game moves at a glacial pace at times, but I think I can blame that one on this PC once again. I don't quite recall which other game I played recently had a similar problem, but it's all in the character animations: a character will gesture or emote during each statement, and the statement is completed long before the animation is, which leaves these long pauses between sentences. The player is given multiple choices whenever it is their turn to speak, with remaining silent being an ever-present bonus option, but it's never quite clear if Alex will wait for a lull in the conversation to inject her thoughts (if the player indeed chose one of her thoughts to say aloud) but will just as often lead to cases where she's talking over another character. If you don't pick any options, however, they eventually but quickly vanish and leave her silence as the "player-intended" response. It's a little awkward a system, though one clearly predicated on The Walking Dead's approach to naturalistic conversation: sometimes you will think of the perfect thing to say, but other times you won't think of anything at all. Having those conversation options on a time limit can lead to "mistakes" like forgetting to say something relevant, or saying the wrong thing entirely, because you were rushing to fill a moment of awkward silence. In that respect, it works as intended.

And don't get me wrong, I think the dialogue in this game is generally excellent. It's able to tap into teenspeak better than, say, Life is Strange by not trying quite as hard. The teens will quip and snark like the best of them, but it doesn't feel overly-scripted and self-conscious (as in, the writers feeling self-conscious, not the teenager characters who should always act and sound self-conscious regardless) in the way dialogue written for much younger people can often sound. We all remember what it was like to be young and unsure of ourselves - or perhaps a little too sure - but it can be tricky to get back into that mindset past the mid-20s when life gives you more bullshit to deal on the regular than a C- in history class. I'm being a little reductive there, sorry teens, but the point stands that the game does its dialogue fairly well, if only by being a little more safe about avoiding memes and other generational slang (though, here, I might interject that this was done to keep the time period setting deliberately vague - the kids all have cellphones of course, but they're taken out by a plot convenience relatively early).

However, if I have to take issue with the game, it's for its interminable walking. Many areas are simply nondescript screens filled with winding paths that requires a whole bunch of strolling around and climbing objects to get through. There's a few hotspots of note here and there, including a game-wide search for "anomaly spots" marked by cairns that Alex can tap into using her radio - leading to a frequency-tuning mini-game of sorts that also factors into the "other side communication" plot - for various lore tidbits and other spooky messages. For the most part, though, you're told to go to a location to find one of your missing friends, and the majority of the game is spent unhurriedly ambling your way to that locale while you swap a few bon mots with your companion(s) and get occasionally caught up in some timeloop oddness. I can appreciate that the game has to find a means to create small moments of quiet and reflection between the big set-piece spooktaculars for the sake of pacing, but it all feels kinda... redundant. If you can imagine what a classic LucasFilm adventure game would be like if it had four more screens of walking around between each NPC, you might have a sense of how it can slow a game down a little.

I'm beginning to sound a little too negative here, because for the most part I really liked what Oxenfree is and what it does. We can't settle for the same old point-and-clicks forever, and Oxenfree offers something a little more in the vein of Superbrothers: Sword and Sworcery EP or Year Walk with its uncommon approach and attention to setting and atmosphere. Importantly, it creates a central mystery that takes a while to explain itself that I found utterly engrossing. It also does the Stranger Things - to invoke that show again - trick of using a deep, heavy synth soundtrack to make itself feel both ominous and 80s as heck, and that's a nostalgia-invoking aural tactic I doubt I'll get tired of any time soon. The game's a trip, in more ways than one, and recommended to anyone who is curious about how Indie adventure games continue to develop (or rediscover) distinctive voices for the sake of delivering their stories.

Rating: 4 out of 5.