Video games are all about “the power fantasy.”
We love to find the answers to questions that storytellers put in our path. We love to control the outcomes of various situations. We want to win and feel rewarded for the ingenuity that it took to do so. And when there’s the potential for a bad ending, we want to be the ones to save characters from those terrible fates.
Through that lens, Oxenfree delivered one of the most memorable endings that I have ever played.
MASSIVE SPOILERS FOR OXENFREE AND ITS SEQUEL, OXENFREE II: LOST SIGNALS THROUGHOUT
The setup to Oxenfree isn’t complicated. A group of teenagers go to an island to get drunk and party. Good times, bad decisions. A testament to their cinematic youth.
You control a teal-haired girl named Alex — a high schooler that has a lot on her mind due to life-shattering events, such as her brother’s sudden passing, her mom’s new husband, and the new step-brother that she has to learn how to deal with.
But in this game, a “power fantasy” is not the point. In the place of the traditional action found in a game, your thoughts are the control that you have over the narrative, interpreting Alex’s own and becoming one with the character. Roleplaying through conversation is the central mechanic. And thanks to the believable writing, it’s one that provides a unique and immersive storytelling experience.
The writing quality on display is presented alongside scntfc’s expertly crafted soundtrack and stunning environments to create a grippingly melancholic experience.
After all, interjecting those thoughts only matters if we’re engaged. The desire for power comes from wanting to save these characters. We want to save them because of the bonds we create throughout the narrative, connecting with them when they’re at their most vulnerable emotionally.
We see them get possessed by ghosts, get thrown off of ledges, trapped in an impromptu quiz show, and experience just about everything that could possibly happen in between — all while they attempt to find a boat and get back across the lake.
After following this collection of misfit teens around a ghost-infested island over the course of one night, it’s clear that the worst is yet to come. Everyone steels themselves for the final confrontation, looking into the depths of an old war bunker as they begin their final descent into the unknown.
Everyone except for Clarissa.
Clarissa, the girlfriend of Alex’s deceased brother, has been a bit of a jerk the whole night, truth be told. Everyone’s emotions have run high, and depending on your choices as Alex, the pair is thoroughly tired of each other after a night of arguments that ranged from simple bickering to heartbreaking matters of the soul.
But in the belly of the beast, it’s revealed that Clarissa has been possessed by the ghosts once again, and what’s worse — she can be offered up as a sacrifice for the rest of the party to go free.
For many of the game’s players, this difficult choice was anything but. As awful as her attitude can be towards Alex, she has a right to feel how she wants about her lover being ripped from her grasp by a kid who just wanted to go to the lake with him one more time. It’s understandable. Our empathy as players makes it difficult to feel so negatively about Clarissa that we’d “throw her into the pits of hell”, as Alex describes it. The ghosts assure you that even though she’ll never be able to leave this place, you can save yourself.
Upon making her choice, in most endings, Alex tunes her radio into the source of the portal and closes it for good. Depending on the choices you made, various outcomes can change, like if you’re friends with certain characters, or if a pair of them become close enough (see: totally trauma-bonded) throughout the night that they choose to date after its paranormal events. That’s it.
But as the credits roll, confusion sets in.
Static begins to build. Tapes scratch. The screen becomes distorted and the lines between the past and present are blurred. Alex, who once spoke endearingly about the importance that the night had for the group, instead becomes nervous as she realizes she’ll be late for the ferry heading for the island, missing their party entirely. She openly hopes that her new step-brother won’t be weird.
But she just met Jonas. She spent the whole night with him. They got over their differences in most playthroughs and now they’re friends! Why wouldn’t she know who he is? She’s already been on the ferry before. We saved the day. There’s no reason why —
It’s all too clear now.
There is no escape.
These children are damned. Condemned to an existence worse than death.
As the game describes across its various interactions with the ghosts, the true horror is not being trapped on the island. It’s the loss of self that comes from reliving the same moments over and over and over again, until all that is left in a sea of what was once human consciousness is nothing but blind rage and malice held for a world that’s no longer able to be inhabited by the souls trapped beyond the gate.
And now our friends are there. Treading water for eons in that cursed sea.
I’ll admit — sometimes I read into stories with the mindset of “what I would have written” instead of what I logically and fully expect a team to commit to when creating that story.
This cuts out the fat of the shareholders, the meetings, multiple writers, their feedback and discussions, and various other degrees of input. I fully understand that it’s somewhat silly to rewrite a finished product in your mind and provide your “obvious conclusion” from a bird’s-eye view when that “clarity” was likely unavailable to the staff for reasons outside of their control, or they discussed the exact plot lines you had in your head and decided that they were stupid or well out of scope. In fact, such clarity can often be the result of misinterpreting the work entirely.
But Oxenfree is a deeply personal game to me. Selfishly, I wanted to steer the story in a direction that it would likely never go. And I never, ever wanted that chilling ending to be changed or affected in any way.
In the second game, it goes without saying that Alex appears again; this time as a ghost. She’s attempting to bridge the gap between the gate that sealed her friends away and the tangible world by manipulating another group of teenagers who have their own problems to deal with.
Throughout Oxenfree II, players see the world through a much different lens than they did in the first game. They are not a child surrounded by children, running around an island with dreams of escaping the small town they call their home for bigger and better things. You are an adult, stuck with another adult, trapped in a job you didn’t want to take in order to come back to a town that you couldn’t escape from in the end.
In many ways, Oxenfree II feels like a bittersweet reflection on what happens when reality doesn’t turn out the way we envisioned it. Not everyone gets an exciting life. They don’t always escape that small town that they swore they’d always leave. Painful experiences color the protagonist’s choices while a central thread focuses on the consequences of generational trauma and individuals’ inability to break that cycle — something that doesn’t feel terribly coincidental, given the loop-filled nature of the original game.
As a result, Oxenfree II doesn’t have a time loop as it’s central mechanic, because Riley is already living it. Both games are centered around the acceptance of loss, but while the original game was about being trapped within loops of grief, trauma, and time, the second is all about finding ways to break them.
Across the sequel, Riley and her coworker Jacob traverse the town of Camena, attempting to resolve paranormal disturbances caused by a group of teenagers that Alex has tricked into assisting her and her friends. It was surprisingly easy for her to get them on board, as she needed someone equally desperate to join her in order to set her plan into motion.
Olivia, a teenager affiliated with the game’s most intriguing addition — the “Parentage” Cult — is willing to do anything to see her parents again. They passed away prior to the game’s events, leaving her lost and alone in a world that she no longer understands. Motivated by the possibility of crossing an unseen boundary and being with them once again on the other side, she’s the perfect target for Alex’s latest attempt to return.
Once this information is revealed to the player, the decision is made to cross the lake and tap into the portal on Edward’s Island once more in an effort to seal the ghosts away for good, while hopefully finding a way to bring the cast of the first game back from their eternal torment.
This is where one of the game’s most impactful moments can happen — if you choose not to bring Jacob along. Alex appears on your boat, and the two of you reminisce on her past and the effect it’s having on the present. As they cross the waves, Alex muses that she never did learn to swim while she was alive, and that her brother had meant to teach her.
It almost feels like she’s talking directly to the player.
In this scenario, three characters wind up together in between the two sides of the portal. In the game’s final, climactic choice, one must enter, while the other two will go free. You’re told that the person who enters will be able to choose the moment they relive, which at least makes the agony of the loops more bearable.
Will you sacrifice Olivia, who has dedicated her life to arriving at this moment? Who wants nothing more than to live in a make-believe world where her parents can still be there for her? She’s given up on life. And to make matters simpler for some players, Alex, who’s gained some degree of omniscience, informs the player that her future is “cloudy”, casting doubt on your actions and implying that going against her wishes could cause her more pain in the long run.
You could sacrifice yourself, and “do the right thing”, if there is such an outcome. It’s certainly difficult to choose Riley, as she reveals late in the plot that she has a child on the way. You’re not just choosing to remove one life from this world — another is going with you, as well. Though, similarly to the last choice, Alex has gained some insight through her many eternities of existence, and tells Riley that she will impart the same generational trauma on her son that she has been cursed with by her father. The whole night, she’s been reliving moments of her past, hung up on the fractured relationship that the two shared. Can she knowingly choose to put another human being through that same pain?
And in what feels like an absolute betrayal, Alex stands next to the portal as well. The girl who’s been trapped in this void for an unknowable period of time. Her sanity isn’t fully gone yet, but it very may well be soon. In a stunning reversal of fate, she isn’t doomed as the player once thought. The chilling realization of the first game’s ending can be smoothed over if you can just make a choice between either of the other two options available.
She has been condemned to relive a night of hell on earth for an incalculable amount of time, becoming possessed against her will and eventually losing her sense of self after centuries of suffering on the other side of existence.
There’s an argument to be made that Alex, as awful as it is to acknowledge, had her chance and lost it. The original game centered around her inability to move on and the cycles of grief that trap us emotionally. Her inability find peace with what had happened in her life, despite her young age. Yes, her demise was horribly unfair, but that’s the world that these characters live in. None of them asked for this. And neither did Riley.
The words that the ghosts tell Alex as she attempts to escape for the first time came back to my mind. “You’re so spoiled. You don’t even know the cost of things.”
With all of this laid out, the conclusion is quite different from the original game’s ending. It makes sense why players would choose Olivia, because she didn’t just ask for this outcome, she pleads you to allow it. For your own honor, choosing Riley makes sense, as well. But the right one, the one that hurts the most, is to select Alex.
It’s a telltale choice.
One that the game never allows you to make.
Unfortunately, there is no option to tell Alex that she’s stuck. That she made her choice unknowingly and must now live with it. That even though we’ve bonded with her and hold her dearly in our hearts, this isn’t right. There is no coming back.
If this is goodbye to Oxenfree as a series, I’m glad that it had the chance to tell a story on both sides of a generational gap. That it took a chance by moving away from high school protagonists and dealt with its heavier subject matters from multiple perspectives. Perspectives that I’ve seen relate to two entirely different groups of people. It always felt so human to me.
I played Oxenfree when I was in high school. I was the kid who wanted to move away from their hometown. Who felt a little bored by what they were surrounded by. I didn’t have her traumatic sibling troubles, but I could relate to Alex. She’s a character that I connected to deeply, to the point where she became my profile picture of choice, no matter the platform (as well as one of the reasons that my icon on here and elsewhere has a teal overlay). Meanwhile, one of my friends related to Riley, and didn’t see themselves in Alex much at all. I respect the series for attempting to bridge those gaps between the two dynamics.
The series’ title is derived from the childhood catchphrase, “olly olly oxen free.” Put another way: “all outs in free.” And maybe that was always the point. When this story was first written years ago, it’s possible that Alex and her friends were always coming back from the beginning. That would align with the rules of a game that follows that phrase, after all.
So there I sat, deciding between Riley and Olivia. I truly agonized over the choice, spending the time I had remaining in pure silence. The gang we all know and love is still holding on beyond the gate, patiently waiting to return to the lives stolen from them so many years ago. Losing their grip? Absolutely. But unlike the first game’s ghosts, they still retain a fraction of themselves. Despite the warning from the first game that they’ll “never be the same again”, their lives are worth saving… if you can choose the right person to pay the ultimate price.
But in a series that’s all about choices, the one that I felt the most compelled to make never existed. In an ironic turn of events, now that I had the power to save her, I no longer wanted it.
So Alex, please forgive me. I just wanted to tell you the truth.