Teenagers are the only people who can care about nothing and also everything at the same time. If this dueling dichotomy progresses into adulthood it can be diagnosed into one of several disorders, but teenagers get a free pass because their brains aren’t done making them into people. Late adolescence is a bizarre stretch where you start to figure out who you might be as an adult while still exhibiting childlike emotions. Friends, by proximity, become crash test dummies for social development.
It’s a weird time, and one that seems hard to replicate in an interactive medium. There have certainly been successful games about witnessing other people (Gone Home) or even a couple (Cibele) come of age, but few that surround a teenager with an immediate group of her peers. This is much harder to do because if you screw one of these kids up, belief in the rest will fall like dominos.
Such is the plight of Night School Studio’s Oxenfree. It allows a singular protagonist, Alex, and surrounds her with four of her friends. There’s Ren (her plutonic best friend), Jonas (her newly acquired stepbrother), Clarissa (too cool for school and former beau of Alex’s deceased brother), and Nora (contemplative and hipster-ish). These friends are all chosen by circumstance. Everyone from their graduating class was supposed to sneak into the otherwise closed and mostly abandoned Edwards Island, but fate removed everyone but these five. What they discover about the island, and each other, may change their lives.
Or it might just be another day; Oxenfree permits an imposing degree of player agency behind Alex’s words and actions. When Oxenfree concludes, friendships could be ruined, restored, or simply maintained, and all by the sword of Alex’s decisions. The validity and demand of consequence isn’t necessarily new, a post-Walking Dead Telltale has left a respected blueprint for narrative-heavy games, but now arrangement has plenty of room to evolve and change.
Dynamic authenticity is Oxenfree’s finest identity badge. Ren is seemingly consumed by useless knowledge and always ready to dispense any contextually appropriate piece. Jonas’ status as a newcomer shakes away his veneer of confidence, Clarissa is absolutely insufferable, and Nora is a consummate enigma. Archetypes are essential to characters and Oxenfree doesn’t shy away from them, but rather it indulges in the dialogue and decisions that Alex uses to define its characters. It’s a model gleaned from the The Breakfast Club, where it takes assumed roles of all of its players and proceeds to turn them all on their heels. Oxenfree pushes it further by making you feel like you have control of what sort of information your friends are willing to surrender.
A third party is also conspiring to change the lives of Oxenfree’s characters. Edwards Island, in its disheveled state, is home to a winding connivance of otherworldly secrets. These instances manifest as sequences of repeated time loops, distortions of reality, and vaguely analog citations of audio interference. Elements of the supernatural are a major part of Oxenfree’s narrative, and surviving them is as important of a challenge for Alex as coping with her marooned friends. Here is where Oxenfree most closely conforms to Joss Whedon’s endeavors in television, where extraordinary circumstances are treated with the right amounts of jest and sincerity. The stakes in Oxenfree are occasionally huge and sometimes unbelievable, but it doesn’t allow its characters to get wrapped up in plodding minutia. This removes some of its contemplative potential, but provides some requisite oomph when its pacing starts to falter.
At the onset, of course, our characters do not know this. Instead they’re primarily focused on getting fucked up next to a campfire. Jonas immediately lays down some indistinct form of high school street cred by brandishing a pack of cigarettes (to which Alex can elect to participate), then a bit later Clarissa breaks out the booze and Ren consumes some very special brownies. This is what kids in high school do. They sneak into places and commit mostly inoffensive acts of questionable judgement. It just so happens that these kids rip time open and impose all sorts ill-fitting predicaments upon their situation.
The magic key to all of this is Alex’s chintzy radio. At any time, the player can use it to tune into a small ranges of frequencies. Objectively it’s there because each location on Edward Island is accompanied by a pre-recorded broadcast detailing the history of the island’s landmarks, but shifting around the dial a bit opens up new lines of communication. Sometimes this will affect the conditions of Alex’s surroundings, other times it allows direct correspondence with a presumably villainous entity. In either case the radio is both a means of secret access and an essential mechanic to push Oxenfree forward. You could just stick to the main path, I suppose, but you might as well push it as far as it can. There’s quite a bit of Edwards Island to stumble upon.
Dialogue is the other half of Oxenfree’s mechanics. Choices are expected and Oxenfree presents them in a traditional multiple-choice formal. Alex can by sympathetic, callous, or cautious, and going down a road too often—or maybe just at indeterminate times, I could never tell—might fundamentally alter the state of its narrative. Oxenfree makes a considerable amount of room to let the player play around inside of its space, although the beginning and end are generally recognized as being the same place. Most of this is only evident on a second play-through, which at five or so hours isn’t asking much, but a singular experience could still stand as a complete one.
I did have problems with the presentation of Alex’s dialogue. It starts to fade as soon as it’s presented, and not saying anything, while a valid choice, felt like it put a bullet in the conversation. It was content, darn it, and I felt trained in my need to experience it. Most times, when I did elect to speak, I cut-off whoever was talking. I felt like I didn’t get experience what they had to say. Maybe this is a deliberate decision on the part of the development team, but, later I found out that holding the dialogue button in sometimes allowed Alex a perfectly timed response in proper sequence. So, I have no idea.
While I could feel the game propelling me to the correct space of Edwards Island, Oxenfree’s pacing can cause problems. You’re granted immediate access to almost every part of the island, and navigation isn’t too difficult with an in-game map. “Stuff” usually only occurs where you’re supposed to go, save the optional and questionably placed fetch-quest toward the back half of the last act. I don’t know why all of this wasn’t available from the beginning, other than to have the characters retrace their steps so some additional party tricks can be inflicted upon them in the process. It’s fine, mostly, Edwards Island isn’t that big, but it does stand out in a game so rigidly concerned with rapid-fire dialogue and a story that doesn’t repeat itself.
Oxenfree’s presentation is in sync with its style. It’s lodged somewhere between Kentucky Route Zero’s subconscious celebration of existentialism and the watercolor deluge of a low-fi SaGa Frontier 2, onlycontorted to two dimensions. I may have gotten lost in my own references a bit there, but Oxenfree’s invariable style is half of its most arresting qualities. The part belongs to scntfc’s lush electronic soundtrack, which strikes a balance between collected, contemplative, and (occasionally) unnerving.
Most importantly, I don’t think Oxenfree is specifically interested in pushing any sort of genre forward. It does, of course, or at least it takes curious strides in dialogue and consequence, but without the usual pretentiousness that you can feel bleeding through some of its companions in the same space. Oxenfree is here to tell a story, and it doesn’t lose sight of what contributes to making that story feel relatable and consequential. Alex and her friends are in a space when every move is called into examination from a jury of ruthless peers. Oxenfree responds not by accepting or escaping from resolution, but accurately relating the tension of a time when every answer is on one side of zero. Whether the context is supernatural or merely personal, Oxenfree makes it feel powerful.
