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.

I think that character animation issue you described is definitely your PC man, That didn't happen at all on mine. If anything how well those synced up with the audio, was one of the more impressive aspects of the game

This was one of my most disappointing games of last year. I found the exploration tedious and the dialogue system semi frustrating for the reasons you point out - ie not knowing if you're going to interrupt someone.

But most of all I felt like they totally missed the mark on what actual teens sound like. I thought the characters all sounded too much like quippy 20 somethings. Throwing around way more information in way more interesting ways than teens ever could. It's weird that this bugged me so much in this game where in a movie like Juno it didn't really bother me. Either way I found most of the characters unbelievable and it made spending time with them a chore.

Oxenfree was a welcome surprise in early 2017 for me. About 15 minutes in I was really not sure whether I was going to like it... a couple of days later, I had played through the game 4 complete times to see several different endings and sequences, and get all the Steam achievements.

My main gripe was that it's difficult to tell whether choosing a dialog choice too quickly was going to cut off the flow of dialog and lead to you missing out on some info. It's a shame - the way the dialog system worked made it so I could not see myself being able to share this with my wife in a way that we could collaboratively choose how to respond to dialog choices - we'd have missed out on a lot since missing the relatively short dialog choice windows causes you to simply not respond.

On subsequent playthroughs I found I really got in the groove of both the dialog system (i.e. waiting until all other dialog completes before choosing your response) and quickly traversing the world (there are some shortcuts, and by the 2nd or 3rd run you know exactly where you are headed), and could complete the game from start to finish in about 3-4 hours. The "lore" of the game gets pretty deep and you can discover quite a bit about the supernatural happenings (and have things revealed to you, depending on your choices). I loved it.

I kinda like the game, but I had some issues that keep me from liking it too much. The walking didn't really bother me until the item hunt at the end, when there are no more conversations to be had while walking but I have collectibles to get in every part of the island. The ending is a bit more cruel than I prefer, seeing as no matter what you choose, you remain stuck in a time loop. I looked up the ending they patched in on youtube, and I'm frankly not gonna play a highly linear story again for an ending which warns some parallell universe version of the characters to not go to the island.The game is also terribly short. There's just no time for me to get to know and love these characters, especially when you're not around most of them most of the time. This isn't helped at all by the very zoomed-out camera that never gets close enough to tell how the characters are emoting or specifically look like, the portraits at the end surprised me with how the character designs actually are. I think Alex reviewed the game and mentioned that it felt like it lacked a second act, and I agree, it needed something more to have that lasting impact on me. As it is, it's pretty good, but it's brief and impersonal and nobody in it hit home with me like other teen casts in Life is Strange or Persona 4.

I like the conversation system, anyway.

The voice acting ruined it for me. You would think an indie studio wouldn't go with cheesy professional sounding voice actors. I would have preferred teenagers that sounded like actual teenagers.