Oxenfree

i really wanted to like this game, seeing the praise it got. but c'mon, i couldn't even play this game until this year, despite having bought it a couple years back, due to the game missing volume sliders while the subtitles weren't working! well. the subtitles still ain't working. [b] it's been 10 years. [/b] did i mention other 6 billion game-breaking bugs? yeah. now, i liked the art, the backgrounds did a pretty good job of setting up the atmosphere. the music was good as well. voice acting was decent. and, gotta give the credit where its due: the story of the Sunken is compelling, some of the moments were rather well done and had me interested in what's to come. [i] that of course got nullified with excruciating "gameplay." [/i] the gameplay is just... talking and walking... EXCRUCIATINGLY SLOWLY. i don't really mind "walking simulator" games but this particular one is maddening. can't speed up, nope. no matter how many times you've gone through some area, your walking pace will remain excruciatingly slow with nothing to do during it but listen to (usually) nothingburger dialogue. sometimes not even as much. puzzles? what puzzles? the solutions were always painfully obvious and easy. the filler dialogue rarely ever had any emotional weight to it, considering it's just teenager banter. and i know, usually all dialogue helps build the character - you can see their personality even in meaningless banter. except... that didn't really happen here. i don't get the impression the dialogue was written by actual teens, given how unnatural and clunky it felt at times. really had trouble believing the characters were teens. it all felt rather tropey -- the jokes were really bad at times and i ended up disliking most of the cast. hard to get immersed and connect with anyone. the issue is exacerbated by the AWFUL dialogue mechanic. oh you want to listen to what characters have to say? too bad! you'll run out of time to choose your response. either select your response and interrupt the character, or miss your chance. seriously, what? it made the experience feel even more disjointed. oh, yes, did i mention the developers revoke the access to their paid itch.io release? meaning, no one that purchased it owns it anymore and can't download the game. "you don't own what you buy!" disgusting. an overall boring experience from devs that don't care about their fanbase. i can't recommend it in good faith.

I'm happy I played this game. It's a very slow-paced story game, with a lot of dialogue... which is the absolute opposite of the games I go for. The dialogue system was an interesting take with the timer, the story was darker than I expected, and the characters started out as bland but became more interesting with the voice acting. It was a bit too slow-paced/long for my taste, but aight as an experience. Overall I enjoyed the story. I'd recommend it if you're looking for a light novel book experience of a game. I did run into bugs though. The character tends to get stuck in stairs (which you then have to use arrow keys to break) and one time there was a visual bug of a door being open, which left me wander aimlessly... considering the low pace of the game, it felt like a long time to restart the game and walk back several times to try fix the bugs.

Everyone has their own tastes, but for me, this is easily one of the worst games I've ever played. The pacing is incredibly slow, forcing you down tedious paths. The gameplay loop is also boring and nonsensical—for instance, whenever something strange happens, your only interaction is just opening a radio and scrolling. I cannot recommend avoiding this game enough.

The game is essentially a walking simulator where you just wander around the island from one place to another....very....slowly. The interactions between the cast is weak and uninspiring. The conflicts feel petty and unrealistic. The personal relationships do not match up to games like Life Is Strange or Mixtape. The time travel mechanic is mostly just an event that happens at scripted times and you walk through it. There is no danger, no risks, nothing scary, and little to no mood or atmosphere. I spent almost all of the playthrough just wishing I could run or walk faster since that was most of the 4 hours playthrough.

Oxenfree has some nice artwork, sound design and an engaging premise. The dialogue system and the existential horror elements are noteworthy, but the length, pace and writing leaves something to be desired. A plus for some people will be its dialogue, though as a non-american it feels overly cringy. At times it feels natural to converse with the characters, but other times your character will say something completely different to the prompt, and frequently cuts off people in cases such as inspecting an item. To hear everything and converse properly you'd have to stand around doing nothing, and even then you can miss out because the prompts disappear too fast. I played on controller, and it was a slog walking through the areas. It takes forever to traverse (and yet often there's still dialogue to wait for before moving to another area), and is more tedious than slowly paced. I did see that on mnk you can point and click, but that wouldn't negate it enough to feel relaxing instead of slow. The story elements are intriguing, and I imagine multiple playthroughs could help to figure out more of what's going on. For its length everything works, but the premise yearns for more time and depth. However, despite being an avid completionist I couldn't work up the energy to slog through the map again to collect every anomaly and make sure everything had been checked. The slow movement and constant cringy dialogue was enough once. Oxenfree clearly has had some love put into it. It's a game that I imagine many would enjoy, especially if you relate to the 'midwest teenage american' vibe, and don't mind lots of dialogue and crawling around the map. I'm glad I pushed through and finished, but it's not an experience that I'll endorse if you don't align heavily with what it offers.

Damn, what do I even say about this game? I guess I can start by saying this is less so a game and more so a 3rd person walking simulator with a Stranger Things-type mystery narrative. Even though I had my initial gripes with the dialogue coming on too forced or cringe, I think they laid off it by the second half of the story. In Oxenfree you have your staple high school archetypes: The quirky skater girl (Alex), The meathead (Jonas) the quiet one (Nona) the mean girl (Clarissa) and the dork (Ren). High key, I thought this game would do more with these characters because it felt as if they were trying to. For example, there is a reason why Clarissa is mean and we quickly understand why, but the game doesn't provide any opportunity to expand on her character, much less any other character because it feels like 90% of the time, we or these other characters are getting spirited away by the ghosts of dead marines. The game markets itself as a choices matter game--I'm not sure why it's so difficult for games to get this right. Clearly, we're meant to influence character relationships through the dialogue options we choose, but never at any time do you understand how characters truly feel about each other. There's just no way to gauge it. A picture will appear in a thought bubble after you select some dialogue options, but it's not always obvious what exactly that's indicating. Games like The Dark Pictures Anthology/The Quarry/Until Dawn do this right where you can pause the game and look at literal bars about how relationships are changing positively or negatively. By the end of the game, I learned that I made Clarissa hate me, but I don't think the game gave me enough of an opportunity to change that. [spoiler]In fact, I searched for her first instead of going after Ren--why was that not a big relationship buff? She was otherwise possessed and or being fake dead a majority of the time, so when was I supposed to influence this?[/spoiler] The choices matter element felt frustrating to me because so much of the dialogue options felt like they DIDN'T matter. The narrative was interesting. That Ren ask Alex to bring a radio to try and tap into spooky ghost stuff, that was neat. It was also neat that eventually, we got to understand who or what these ghosts were. [Spoiler]At least in my game, they turned out to be the big bad who wanted to possess me and my friends because they don't think it's very fair they died in war, so they want another lease at life.[/spoiler] I thought that was fine, but also I had the feeling that there were some big choices I was supposed to make at the end, like save myself instead of abandoning my friends, for instance, that didn't at all feel in line with the character I made her to be (having not picked any of the mean dialogue options). That meant there was only really one reasonable option for me, which ultimately didn't feel like a choice. I liked the little talks I had with Jonas, the guy who you spend the most time with. It's interesting that you should bring your step-brother to this trip almost immediately after your parents get married, that's definitely a choice, but I liked how they warmed up to each other at the end. Like I was saying, because you don't spend nearly enough time with the other characters, the same can't be said for the rest of them. [spoiler]At one point when Ren and Jonas were pointing fingers at each other for who knows what reason, the game asks you to spend time with either Jonas, Ren, or Nona for just one small trip. I chose Nona because I didn't think I'd otherwise spend ANY time with her in this game. I don't think the chats we had in our time together had any impact on the game whatsoever. I don't think my views of her or her of me were influenced in the slightest as we did our little fetch quest, and this was me CHOOSING to spend time with someone else other than Jonas.[/spoiler] As a result, these characters feel stagnant and remain, for the most part, their surface level archetypes. Some final things to rattle off--I did not enjoy playing marco polo with the radio. It was novel the first few times but quickly got old after having to slowly through every single channel until you hit the correct one for the 20th time. Excruciating work, made worse by the fact that this is really the only game part there was to this "game." I did not enjoy how slow you walk in this game, and how dialogue would often times run on longer than the duration of your walk from A to B, which would then force you to stand in place before moving on to the next area, since doing so would end the current dialogue. I also didn't appreciate the artful but messy layout of the map, where it often wasn't clear which direction you were supposed to go to reach your destination. I wanted to like this game much more than I actually did--maybe because it's dated. Maybe it's because I've played many other games, like the ones mentioned above, including any Tell Tale game and also Detroit: Become Human, that do what this game does but leagues better. I got the feeling that this game was attempting to go for the, "If you could go back in time and change the past, wouldja???" But I don't think that really panned out, and that's the worst. Herein lies my main frustration: By my definition of what a choices matter game should be, you are meant to feel you have some sort of agency and influence as to the outcomes in the game, whether those outcomes are as expected or not is beside the point. I simply do not think a choices matter game in which the player lacks the feeling of agency as a commentary of "one’s lack of control in the real world" is particularly fun--it might as well have been a normal, linear game. In fact, to me, it felt like one. This is an awful combination of ideas and mechanics, and therefore execution. I think games (or shows, or movies) that subvert expectations, while unique, don't always execute them well enough, despite the best of intentions. To sum up my feelings about this whole experience by quoting the game: "I guess that happened." 5/10

This was a short narrative game that I played for the second time after playing it back all the way back in 2017 on my Switch. Given that it was almost 10 years ago, I didn’t remember much of the story, but rebought it on Steam like 3 years ago in anticipation for its sequel. It sat in my library until I went back home without my PC, which prompted me to play this on my laptop. The game can be played on Netflix for Christ sakes, it's incredibly easy to run. I like to review everything I play to completion, and while I don’t have a ton to say about this game, I still want to get some thoughts out. If you're looking for any gameplay whatsoever, this game is not for you. It is an even less engaging, 2D CYOA, with some standard variety of choice. There are very minute differences between the endings which isn’t to say they are bad, but your choices aren’t profound in this game. Where this game excels is its characters and conversational writing. All the main characters have their angst and melodrama, but their interactions are strong, particularly between the main character, Alex, and her new stepbrother, Jonas. Jonas is an outsider to the group dynamic, so he relies on Alex for social and moral support. Seeing their clearly new relationship blossom was cute to see. Other characters like Ren and Nona, were serviceable, but I spent most of my time with Jonas. Clarissa, who is absent from most of the game, is confrontational with Alex due to her inadvertently causing the death of her sister and Clarissa’s ex boyfriend, Micheal. That dynamic, while unexplored between the two girls, is also compelling. Then there's the mystery “ghost” element. The 5 main characters go camping on an island haunted by the ghosts of a crashed submarine who are attempting to possess the bodies of the group in order to escape death. It is your goal as Alex to uncover this mystery and sort of sympathize and humanize with the situation of the ghosts. Everything is compelling enough for a short 3-4 hour runtime and there's some interesting themes here about acceptance of the past, particularly when presented with the opportunity to change things. The game asks if it's worth it to reverse the past if it means bringing back loved ones. Overall an easily digestible, albeit not game changing. 5.5/10

总体不推荐。 1.文本和对白缺乏质量，无法在几个小时的短流程内撑起所有角色的塑造及剧本的表达。具体表现为： 1）主角的对话三选一不具有分支意义，不管选什么或者不选，都不会对后续剧情发展产生影响 2）对白密集但缺乏信息密度，相当一部分的对话既没有在刻画角色，也没有在揭露世界观或推进剧情，而真的只是白开水一样的闲聊——比如，当主角和队友经历了一次惊悚事件，他们既没有表现出不安和慌乱，也没有对事情进行任何有效的分析，只是进行“我们以前在学校做了什么”“要不要来我的生日派对”这一类对叙事几乎没有任何价值的对话，这种极低的信息密度很大程度破坏了好不容易通过音画表现出的氛围，也加重了玩家的阅读成本 3）基于以上两点，由于本作故事的推进完全依赖角色对话，使得包括主角在内的所有人都不像有血有肉的正常人。情节的逻辑是有理可循的，具体的演绎是无理取闹的。你在游戏中可以看到：带头闯祸卷入神秘事件却把锅甩给主角的男一，刚从危机中逃脱惊魂未定先磕个药的男二，马上全员团灭还在嘴主角的女一等，整个流程都流露出演员无法入戏的生硬感，剧本没写的地方一概不演，推动剧情和解决矛盾的方式极其生硬，以至于到了结束，作为扮演主角的玩家也无法建立起对其中任何一人的情感链接 4）英文配音播音腔很重，比有感情地朗读课文还要无感情 2.游戏流程设计的解谜流程和故事内容的揭露方式相互矛盾，前者设立了一套循序渐进，逐渐拼凑出全貌的模式（虽然是很常见的设计），后者则在前中期就相当直白地揭露了真相，反而让后面的收集流程从“拼凑故事的真相”变成了单纯的“找到玩家本来不知道”的无关紧要的补充类信息，让游戏过早失去了神秘感和惊悚感 3.收音机调频作为本作链接叙事层和机制层的核心设计，本应有更多的戏份，展现更多的互动可能，但其实际表现只是把单击鼠标进入下一段的操作多加了几个键，虽然是意料之中，难免让人失望 4.剧本本身也不出彩，同题材作品里你可以找到很多在叙事和关键情节设计上更好更出色的 以上

恐怖体验和叙事结合很棒

Alex is one of my favourite MCs of all time - the writing, storytelling, gameplay and voice acting in both Oxenfree installments are top-tier and really pull you in! Word of caution - controller support for this specific game isn't great, I'd stick to a mouse! (they definitely improved this in Oxenfree II) Even though I've replayed it a million times, know exactly what's going to happen and when, have seen every dialogue option and scenario possible - I'd still play it [b]again and again[/b] [spoiler][i]The Knot of Eternal Recurrence - the waves, it's the waves we think[/i][/spoiler]