High Frequency — Oxenfree Review
Title: OXENFREE
Developer: Night School Studio
Publisher: Night School Studio
Release Date: January 15, 2016 (Xbox One, Steam), TBA 2016 (PS4)
Reviewed on: Steam (Windows and Mac)
Though I’m a city girl now, I grew up in what can only be described as the middle of nowhere. My childhood home was a mile down a gravel road, with the only nearby landmarks being the intersection of two numbered highways and a cemetery with only two graves. There was no local store, no coffee shop, nothing resembling a public gathering place anywhere near me. Surrounded by fields, woods, and a winding river and with no real friends, I spent much of my childhood exploring the great outdoors. While I’d have loved companionship on these excursions, I settled on taking my dad’s old radio with me to provide an interlude to the intense quiet of nature (and to keep potentially dangerous and wary-of-human creatures at bay). Whether I was hanging out on the beach by the river, climbing trees, or spotting badgers and deer, the radio was my childhood soundtrack.
Promising radio-propelled teen adventure set amidst dreamy caves, beaches, and wooded hills not unlike those I grew up with, Oxenfree seemed destined to capture my nostalgic heart from the beginning.
While this is the first title from developer Night School Studio, there’s nothing amateur about Oxenfree, which is made by ex-Disney and Telltale talent.
The game tells the story of five teens who visit a secluded island for a weekend of drinking and fun but wind up getting a lot more than they bargained for. Each character initially seems to fit into the horror character tropes of Mean One (Clarissa), Ditzy One (Nona), Stoned One (Ren), Outsider One (Jonas), and Quiet One (Alex). Thankfully, Oxenfree’s characters reveal greater depth in personality as the story progresses, and this led me to continually re-evaluate my opinions of these characters and their motivations, which I enjoyed.
Our main character is Alex, a cerulean-haired teen who’s had a rough few years, and shows it in the overly serious way she approaches the world. She recently lost her brother Michael, whose death also led to the split of her parents. With so much change and trauma in her life, it’s easy to see why Alex faces the world with a distinct unease.
Caught somewhere in the fray between childhood and adulthood, teens can become lost in the shuffle of funerals and the rearranging of lives. While we worry about the impact of a loved one’s death on the most vulnerable members of our family, such as the elderly and young children, it’s common for a teen’s quiet, dispassionate exterior to be mistaken for not feeling deep sadness over the tragedy. This seems to be the case with Alex, who’s been struggling with extreme internal conflict regarding the events surrounding Michael’s passing.
So, with her mother and step-father on their honeymoon, Alex is tasked with entertaining her new step-brother Jonas for the weekend.
The game’s story is delivered through chatter with Alex’s friends, radio broadcasts, and exploration of the island. This is where Night School Studio’s experience reveals itself. With no HUD-like UI, collectibles or long-winded quests, Oxenfree relies solely on its ability to tell an engaging and compelling story, making it a refreshingly focused game.
Similar to other branching narrative titles such as Telltale’s The Walking Dead, the game allows the player to choose from two to three dialogue options when speaking to Alex’s friends. These show up as differently-colored text balloons over Alex’s head. The colors don’t seem to correspond to a recurring dialogue option type such as concern or anger, which seems like a strange, unnecessary design choice. If you don’t see a dialogue choice that suits you, you can simply wait to see the balloons disappear. Your friends will react to this silence in varying ways, from surprise to frustration, which is a nice touch. Precisely how your dialogue input or lack thereof impacts the overall story of Oxenfree is left unclear until the very end of the game. A part of me wished I could have predicted what my dialogue choices would lead to. However, I appreciate that this isn’t how dialogue works in the real world, and that lack of control perhaps tells a more authentic story.
Throughout her navigation of Edward Island, Alex has access to a map and a small radio. In this regard, Night School Studio keeps gameplay simple: Find a tower, decide what to say, and tune to the correct station. The radio is also capable of opening simple locks and gates through clever radio frequency technology employed on the island, while also serving as a tool to uncover the town’s past via a convenient tourist broadcast station. While the idea of travelling to different information broadcast points on the island may sound like a dry history lesson, these areas actually hold important clues to the story.
Despite Edward Island’s outward appearance as a boring tourist trap, there are some truly beautiful and creepy locations that serve as the canvas for Oxenfree’s mysteries. A number of small rock ‘statues’ are located throughout the island that were built by kids claiming spooky things happen with the radios at those locations. This strange phenomenon serves as the crux of Oxenfree’s mysteries. When tuning into special frequencies, we get to watch Alex’s world bend and stretch like footage from a worn out VHS tape.
Even with the lure of potential supernatural occurrences, it didn’t take me long to grow tired of using the radio. I spent much of my time in Oxenfree scrolling back and forth aimlessly across the dial, wondering where the hell the broadcast was that I needed and growing more frustrated every time. Eventually, the dial will glow and a handful of onscreen prompts will indicate that you’ve found the correct broadcast, but it can take a long time to get there. The radio feels exactly like my dad’s old radio, and that’s a bad thing, because Oxenfree is a video game.
This is the inherent danger of incorporating facsimiles of real-world mechanics in a game. The sensation of loading and firing a weapon, for example, has been all but perfected in games thanks to the fact that we’ve been making shooting titles for decades. I’ve never fired a shotgun in real life and I could certainly never tell you how to load one. And yet somehow, I can load and fire a shotgun in a video game and this manages to feel satisfying to me. A seamlessly integrated series of sounds, controller feedback, and animations work together to communicate to the player that the weapon has been successfully loaded. Ammo reloading happens far faster than it would in the real world. It’s designed to be satisfying without impeding the overall pacing of the game.
It’s these supplementary feedback loops and pacing choices that Oxenfree seems to be lacking in the function of its radio. Similar to the VHS-style distortion we see in the game, I wish I could fast-forward the process of correctly locating the required signal.
Mercifully, the game’s stunning art style distracts from the experience of tuning a radio for what feels like an eternity. Oxenfree distinctively casts tiny characters atop giant backdrops. This bold choice allows the beauty of the environment to take centre stage. However, their diminutive size means we’re prevented from reading character’s faces for information. Perhaps intentionally, all we can do is rely on their words for clues about their feelings. In an age of hyper-realistic graphics and improved facial animation, the decision to make the character’s faces so small you can barely see them is a brave one. Night School Studio is making a clear statement here: Listen, interpret, discover. It’s up to the player to participate in understanding the needs and motives of Alex and her friends.
On a grander scale, this points to a quintessential teen experience: Feeling small in such a big world of unknowns. More than spooky radio frequency phenomenon, more than alternate endings, Oxenfree is about friendships and how we help each other understand both ourselves and the world. Night School Studio has woven a surprisingly sophisticated story of friendship and loss into only a few hours of gameplay. So while I wish I could have been immersed in this story a little longer, its surprisingly dark themes and rich character development will stick with me for a long time to come.
