I recently reviewed Oxenfree 2, and while the game has gotten criticism for not being able to let go of its past, that flaw made sense to me thematically. I don’t want to read too far into the developers’ intentions and draw connections where they don’t exist, but Oxenfree 2 is a game about cycles and choices. The game's core mechanic is time-looping, with many puzzles locking you in a situation until you do things correctly. Terrible things will happen over and over, in different permutations, until you figure out how to escape the cycle. Only you can do it, nobody else. You have to free yourself.
I’ve been to a lot of therapy in my life, for a variety of mental health disorders and addiction issues. There was a point in my early 20s, when I asked my therapist if I was doomed to always end up hurt and hurting other people. She took out a piece of paper and a blue marker, and drew a circle for me, scribbling notes along the edge of the line. Then she held it up and she explained to me, “You drink, you do something that hurts yourself and others, and you drink more so you don’t think about it. And then you hurt someone because you drank.” She paused. “You’re so deep in the cycle that you can’t even see the cycle. But once you see it, it’s all you can see. You’re the only person that can break the loop.”
After that session, I committed to sobriety for a time. For almost a year, I avoided binge drinking, actively refusing to become the person I knew I could be after I’d had one (or four) too many. I had seen the cycle, and I was terrified of being locked in it again. Oxenfree 2 reminded me of that exact feeling, of being trapped in a scary situation and trying to feel your way out blindly. You try something, and it doesn’t work, so you try something else. Eventually, you escape, but you know that some things are out of your control. You could get locked back in a loop at any moment and have to use all the tools at your disposal to find your way out.
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There was a TikTok sound that went viral a couple of years ago, and I think about it all the time. In it, a woman says, “You must break the pattern today, or the loop will repeat tomorrow”. Playing as Riley, that sound rang over and over in my head. Riley, herself, has had drinking problems. She’s given advice from the past and spoken to by people in her future, and still she struggles to make the right choices for herself and the people around her. After all, she can only do the best she can with the tools she is given – unlike us, the players who can hunt for all possible endings, she can only try to do the right thing at the moment and regret it later. After a single playthrough, I found myself yearning to go back and do things differently, to see if the people I’d affected would have been better off. I get that feeling a lot in life, too, but these are the tools I have now.
As Riley, I played with empathy, and an eagerness to trust my companions, and I think the ending I got was pretty good as a result. I can only hope doing that in real life will give me the same outcome. I may not have flashes from the future showing me my fate, but I can defy the fate that my own destructive cycles would have led to. She broke the pattern, so the loop wouldn’t repeat tomorrow. So do I.