What to Take, and What to Leave Behind: A “Short” Review of Oxenfree
I just finished my playthrough of Oxenfree. It’s a game about… A lot of things. No, really, what you take away from the game is based in your experience. It is, to understate, quite possibly the best 5 dollars I have ever spent (sale). I’m the kinda guy who really loves games like Kentucky Route Zero and The Witcher 3. I love toying with perception, morality, themes of pain, conflict and resolution. Now, to not sound like a sadist loner, I love games that take you on adventures beyond the scope of what is propsed. I love games that are designed to work around the player’s mind. Oxenfree is a game that hits home with all of these, which is why I like so much.
Oxenfree is a 2-D thriller, adventure, “choose wisely” game. It deals with emotionality, the supernatural and history — of character and of setting. It deals with raw feelings, with organicity and with trauma. So, if you play games that want your full attention, this one’s for you. I finished the game in 2 sittings when I should have finished it in 1. I hated that it took me 2 sittings because I would’ve liked to experience it fully as a reader and not a writer. To elaborate, when I sat down to play the game, I was done with a rough day of deadlines and I just wanted to chill. I made the mistake of starting the game and then choosing to go to bed 6 hours later because I had meetings in the morning. I came back to the game 4 days later, still as intrigued, but with more of an analyst mindset. Don’t get me wrong, I learnt so much from the experience, but I just think it would’ve been nice to finish the game as the guy with the popcorn than as the guy with the notebook. If I get the time, I will probably play through the game again; this time without the notebook.
The way Oxenfree enhances player agency is through the fluid conversation system. This is a mechanic that I’ve always found interesting — a game that never takes away player agency. Player agency is such a crucial part of gaming. We take it away when we want to convey narrative through cutscenes, we take it away when we want to restrict the player, we do it all the time. Oxenfree is a game that dares to defy convention in the sense that it tries so hard via mechanic to keep you on your toes by making sure you never have the chance to put the controller down. It inspires me to think that a fundamental design challenge can be approached from a perspective of, “why is it a challenge in the first place?”
Movement in Oxenfree is realistic. The developers want the player to experience all of the beautifully hand drawn world, it’s history and its quirks. However, with the intention comes restriction to movement, the lack of faster travel methods does make the game frustrating to navigate at times. I suppose the return for it is worth it. The use of a radio to stumble across recordings from 80’s cartoons and World War 2 kept me intrigued. The use of it to interact with the world while progressing gripped me for good. I loved the use of a radio in Kentucky Route Zero, and I love the radio in this game. Radios and morally ambiguous thrillers go hand-in-hand. This is my thesis.
I mentioned earlier how Oxenfree is built around the player’s mind. Allow me to elaborate. Weird screen effects to indicate disturbances, the use of stutter to break and create suspense, the use of layered music to build tension, employment of organic voices, positioning of characters to imply subconscious meaning, use of camera zoom and panning to stress areas and moments, modification to art and contrast to indicate depth of field, gestures in motion to create effects of realism, the list goes on. Kudos to the lead designers for creating an experience that really digs into perception. Much can be taken away from the design of Oxenfree; my notebook is full of scribbles and I hope that someday I will implement my learnings from the design choices of this game.
One of the core aspects of a game like Oxenfree has to be its characters. With moral dilemmas and ambiguity, there must come characters that face those choices as and for the player. Alex, the lead of the game is such a beautifully crafted host for the player. She has a backstory, a personality that the player can be inconsistent with and get away with it. She has a voice that is exactly how I’d imagine someone in a similar situation and setting to sound like. She is the kind of dork I see myself in, and that’s important for me as a player. Having to choose in dilemmas of life and relationships become a lot more personal when you’re the one playing, and not the one role-playing. It’s also one of the reasons why I don’t see Oxenfree as an RPG in the literal sense. Back to the topic at hand, Oxenfree has characters that are real. There are no knights in shining armour, there are no mages with hearts of rot. There are just people, stuck in the grey area just like we are. Some are damaged and depressed, some are recovering, some are searching, and some are stagnant. Thing is, we as players have potentially seen all those faces, we have potentially been all those faces. Therefore, we find it natural to associate, to cling onto the characters that resonate the most, to hope that in the end it’ll be all right for them. This is where, in my humble opinion, Oxenfree shines the brightest.
I try not to get too spoiler-y in this part. Oxenfree has many endings. This is nothing revolutionary. In a game where the mechanic is decisions, having multiple endings is a great way to have the player reflect upon their journey. A lot of games do it poorly, a lot of games do it well, but none do it quite like the way Oxenfree does it. Time travel is a thing in this game. Yes, I should have brought it up in the mechanics segment, but I wanted to avoid mentioning it as much as possible. It exists in a form that allows the player to enjoy the game for a good while, and that is where I’ll leave it to avoid spoilers. You can probably imagine the shitstorm of decisions that can be brewed thanks to this mechanic. The choices you make are yours and the price of your choices are yours. The discoveries you make about yourself and others are yours too. When all this stuff is yours, how could it possibly be a problem? Too much of a good thing could be bad, eh? Oxenfree accentuates this philosophy. It gives you so much agency and it makes most things in the game yours. Your hands are always going to be dirty, how do you deal with that? How does one deal with the problem of having paw prints all over cute, cuddly humans and broken pots? Oxenfree’s core message lies at the heart of this problem. Its ending is built into its message and vice versa. At this point, I’ve played the game twice (yes, this review is not as stream of consciousness as it reads). I’ve taken away a lot of messages from the game but one of them will stick with me for a while to come.
Oxenfree is a game that only really ends when you put the controller down and quit the game. We’re always looking for that perfect ending in everything. One of the reasons we play games, read stories and watch films is because we like resolved endings. We like conclusions. What we don’t realize is that in life there are no perfect endings, there are just the ones that we create. And we have to live with that.
Buy and play the shit out of this game.
