I’m a big fan of Oxenfree. I remember playing it for the first time alone while on a business trip to China, locked up on my own in a quiet, lonely hotel room. What surprised me most was that, although I was alone in reality, I didn’t feel alone – Night School Studio’s characters would chat, joke, and argue their way through Edwards Island. As you explore the world, you have conversations with your friends, and what you say and do to them affects how your game ends. The dialogue and voice acting was extremely compelling, making me fully invested in what happened to the people around me. It was creepy enough that I got chills at times, but not enough that I got too scared to sleep alone in a dead quiet hotel.
Oxenfree 2 is much like its predecessor. It took longer to make than the first game, and that time and care shows in the gorgeous, dark, and neon-dripped environmental design, beautiful animations and immersive sound design. The walk-and-talk mechanic is still crucial here. You play Riley Poverly, a woman who has returned to her hometown of Camena (near Edwards Island) after years of bouncing between places and jobs. You’ve taken an environmental researcher job, tasked with placing transmitters along the coast to help a local environmental group collect data because they’ve been getting weird, untraceable radio signals. Your partner in this job is Jacob Summers, a somewhat purposeless handyman for hire and sculptural artist who lives in Camena. He accompanies you as the story unfolds, and you can choose to become great friends with him or shut him out completely.
Not only will you have conversations with Jacob, but you also have a walkie-talkie and will find locals to talk with on different channels as the game progresses. You can help them out, if you want, or ignore them completely. Having just Jacob for company most of the time is fairly lonely, although he’s a fine companion, and knowing that I can always try to radio other people to ask questions or have a chat makes Camena feel less desolate. Although there’s nobody around apart from a bunch of weird teenagers in masks, knowing that I can speak to people over the walkie makes it feel just a little more alive. You can’t talk to them all the time, though, which is a shame, but you can affect what happens to them.
Oxenfree 2, like its predecessor, is creepy, and unashamedly so now that the veil of normalcy has been lifted. The sequel opens on Riley finding herself at the foot of a lighthouse, in the middle of a raging storm, broken windows everywhere and creepy drawings on the wall. There are possessions and ghosts aplenty, though thankfully, no jump scares. It also throws you straight into the time-travel and time-loops that Oxenfree was defined by, using disorienting sounds and visuals to throw you off immediately. Time-travel is crucial to the plot of Oxenfree 2 and to great effect. I found it fascinating how much flashes of the future could change the way I acted in the present, almost out of a need to defy fate. The gameplay and story are designed so that you constantly feel like you’re trying to avoid something terrible by guiding your relationships and choices in the right direction.
That’s a common theme in this game: Oxenfree 2 is all about choice. There were choices that made me physically upset and distressed. The game does an incredible job of making you feel like you have to struggle to make the right choice, especially when it comes to crucial moments in the story. Where other games might have you make moral choices that can kill characters (Telltale games like The Walking Dead come to mind), Oxenfree 2 turns your expectations on their head by making you question if what you thought was the right thing is the right thing at all, and if you’re the bad guy in the situation. Ostensibly, you know that allowing things to happen without your intervention will lead to terrible consequences, but interfering means that big, horrible choices fall on your shoulders, and you can’t be certain which of them will mean the least harm. It’s almost a shame that it does this so well, because the rest of the mechanics seem lacking and less thought out in comparison.
Narratively, Oxenfree 2 does a great job of exploring its characters’ lives, their fears and their hopes. Mechanically, though, there isn’t that much to the game. Like in the first game, you have a radio that you use to communicate with ghosts and manipulate the world, but there are also time tears that you can enter to navigate locations as they were in the past, bypassing obstacles. Camena is larger than Edwards Island was, and is filled with beautiful natural life. You’ll find yourself doing some light platforming, but the controls are finicky enough that scaling walls sometimes gets annoying. There are also moments in which, and I can’t be specific because of spoilers, you might find yourself trapped in time loops and confused as to how to escape it – the game won’t give you hints as to how to solve these puzzles, and the ways that you’re supposed to escape these loops don’t make a ton of sense narratively, though they’re just about fun enough to complete without getting too frustrated. Your radio comes in handy often like in the first game, though I’d say this mechanic does make less narrative sense than I’d like.
I have some more minor quibbles – voiceovers often get cut off when moving from setting to setting, though this is an issue that might be fixed by the time of release. You can also accidentally have radio conversations and conversations with Jacob at the same time which results in a lot of confusion, which is unfortunate because I liked the characters enough to want to hear what both of them were saying. But finishing it just made me want to jump back in to see what would happen if I did things differently, if I changed the order in which I visited areas or was less kind to people or put my selfishness aside. I wondered what would have happened if Riley had been a different person, or rather, if I’d been a different person and played differently. Like I said, Oxenfree 2 is all about choice, and I’m choosing to replay it as soon as I have the time.
Score: 3.5/5. A game code for PC was provided.