Each has their own voice, and each has their own secrets. The dialogue is all well-written, funny, and sincere: from Alex’s tentative friendship with her new step-brother Jonas to her semi-awkward non-relationship with party member Nona, the characters all feel genuine. Most of the time while you’re exploring, however, you’ll be conversing with Alex’s friends. If you decide to backtrack and scour the island for hidden clues about its history (which the game entices you to do as you near its conclusion), you’ll sometimes be walking without any talking, which can be a bit tedious. There’s no particular pleasure or displeasure in traversal–Alex’s walking speed is a trifle slow for my tastes, which I understand is to allow for conversation while you’re walking–but Edwards Island is a well-crafted, haunting joy to explore. In fact, with the exception of the beach near the start of the game, you can never really go “off the path.” The game’s thrust is entirely linear, and it’s always clear where you’re meant to go next. There aren’t really “puzzles,” in the traditional adventure game sense, and there’s no inventory besides your trusty radio, which you can pull out at any time and dial as you walk (and talk, even). Oxenfree is simple to play, as traversal and conversation form 90% of the game’s operation (a snide individual might brand it a “walking and talking simulator”). I’m thinking about playing it again after this review goes up. I went to bed thinking about it, and I woke up thinking about it, not just because I had to review it but because I had a hard time thinking of anything else. It didn’t occur to me until after I’d finished the game that it binds you to a single save file because I felt compelled to finish the entire adventure in one feverish four-hour stretch. I don’t want to reveal the ways in which the spookiness unfolds, because Oxenfree is a mystery and a thriller and much of the joy is in discovering the many secrets of the island, as well as hanging out with the game’s characters, all of whom are wonderfully three-dimensional. The only tools that Alex and company have for investigating the distressing powers at play on Edwards Island are their wits and a pocket radio. Also, the island is a hotbed of paranormal phenomena. Oxenfree is the first outing from new studio Night School, and it tells the story of teenaged Alex and her friends, who take the last ferry out to an island in the Pacific Northwest for a night of revelry only to discover that nobody has showed up. Sometimes all I would hear would be sounds–big, deep, Hollywood-special-effects-post-production noises, like I’d accidentally dialed into some cosmic frequency and I could hear the colossal sound of the planets grinding away in their orbits. But sometimes, when the theater showed horror double-features in the hottest days of summer, I’d tune into the station and just hear screams. Sometimes I’d get a few moments of swelling, orchestral score. Whenever I drove by the theater at night, I’d always tune my dial in to that frequency to catch snippets of audio from whatever was playing on the screen, which was situated deep in the woods, out of view. It didn’t have car-side speakers–you had to tune your car’s radio to a short-range FM station. When I was growing up in rural Ohio, there was a drive-in movie theater some ten minutes from my house.
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