Olly Olly | Oxenfree Review

I generally don’t like horror games, but sometimes I can’t help but gravitate towards them. Oxenfree had such a cool art style and premise that it only took one trailer for me to immediately download it. The watercolor art style, mixed with the cliché teenage camping trip gone wrong, couldn’t be passed up. Telltale meets old-school horror, what’s not to love? I won’t say Oxenfree is a must play, but it’s certainly a unique game that is worth checking out if you’re in the market.

You play as Alex. A normal enough girl that has some witty remarks that she manages to utter even when all hell is breaking loose. Apparently Alex has just met her new step-brother. She takes him with her to camp out on an island with a few of her friends or more accurately frenemies—because when can a teenage girls’ life ever be easy.

Alex and her friends planned to camp out on Edwards Island for some fun underage drinking and drug use. Alex’s friend Ren made her bring an old radio to tune into some supernatural elements. After doing this and hearing creepy noises. Naturally, Jonas decides it’s a good idea to investigate further into a cave. Alex and Jonas end up unlocking or unleashing something that soon makes the whole trip a nightmare.

You have to explore the island to reunite with your friends all while using this old-school radio to communicate with spirits. It’s not about the exploration so much because the game doesn’t have many extra sites to see, but it is very pretty in a creepily mysterious way. The art looks like brush strokes and styled after a watercolor painting. I’m not an artist so my vocabulary is limited when trying to describe the beauty of some artistic style. It’s pretty with a unique style, let’s leave it at that.

As you explore the island you have someone with you to share a conversation with. You choose the responses and they range from what you might expect: pleasant, uncaring, or downright rude. It’s with these conversations you discover more about the characters in the game and that’s really what Oxenfree is all about.

The horror element intrigued me, but I could already tell that these characters all had their own secrets that I needed to discover. There was no character that felt completely thrown in for no reason. They all had a backstory that affected their lives deeply enough it had altered how they were as a person. Some of the most moving and rewarding moments of Oxenfree are figuring out what happened to them all. It all started with a game of Truth-or-Dare and quickly went to dark places. That jump-started my interest and the rest of the game I spent trying to figure out what happened to everyone.

Truth-or-Dare also immediately paints a clear picture of the characters right up front. It didn’t take long for me to immediately hate Clarissa and that’s what the game wanted me to feel. I was happy to discover she had reasons for why she acted in such a hostile and rude way. Instead of just making a character mean to be mean, Clarissa is a fully fleshed out character that even if you don’t like, you can appreciate that she may have had something happen to her in the past to make her who she was today.

This remains true for all the characters in Oxenfree, albeit some more than others. Discovering their past or how they all come to be who they were really made the game for me. Oxenfree is about your choices and interactions with the other characters. There are some serious life lessons dished out in this game about moving on and overcoming loss. It adds a depth that draws you into the horror story more than faceless characters with no purpose behind their actions. Even if you don’t care for the horror side of Oxenfree the character interactions are extremely well done and are arguably the real feature of the game.

Oxenfree does another thing really well aside from making interesting and thought out characters. The entire game is very creepy. It’s not exactly scary and I never really jumped. I definitely was tense playing this late at night with all the ghoulish radio static whispering to me. Oxenfree succeeded with its eeriness and disturbing situations. I want to go into detail about them but I think it would only ruin the experience.

I really need to applaud the sound design because as a 2D game there are more huddles to jump over when trying to make a horror game. The sound is what really makes Oxenfree work so well in bringing that level of creepiness everyone is looking for. The music, radio channels, and voice actors really did their part and carried Oxenfree to the next level. I didn’t really think a 2D game would make me scared but that just shows how well-crafted Oxenfree truly is.

Aside from walking and choosing dialog options the only other gameplay is tuning your radio. It’s fun and creepy at first. Some channels blast old 40’s style music or Morse Code (I actually downloaded an app to see what it was saying). It can also be used to learn more about the island. I used it constantly to learn more about what was going on hoping I would catch a hint here or there.

The radio is a creative feature in a game and it’s fun at first. Eventually the creepy element vanishes as you are tasked with using it so frequently. Later in the game you are given a radio with even more frequencies and then it became a real bother. I stopped using it unless I had to. It slowed the already poor pacing of the game down.

Oxenfree is pretty to explore and holding a conversation with someone is entertaining. The problem is when that conversation runs out and you are walking in silence. I wished there was a run button just to speed Alex up. This only worsens when you have to backtrack through a few areas throughout the game. There are some story elements that break up the walk, but when all the commotion died down I grew bored moving back across the map. I would receive a new location to go to, and outwardly sigh thinking about how I’d have to walk all the way back there. It ruined all the tension that was building in the same way I would reach a pivotal moment in the story and then struggle with tuning my radio as everyone stood by waiting for me to get the right channel.

I won’t say Oxenfree is a groundbreaking game but it’s definitely entertaining. It’s a short experience that will only last a couple hours. I wish it had the option to select chapters so I could play through specifics sections without having to redo the entire story over. Learning about the characters, finding what happened on the island, and discovering all the eeriness makes Oxenfree one of the more memorable experiences in gaming for me recently. It’s a charming game that does a few things really well, but some other things tend to frustrate when they could’ve pushed the game even further. One thing is for sure, if there are more games like this in the future I will absolutely play them.

This review is based on a retail copy of the PC version of Oxenfree developed and distributed by Night School Studio.