Oxenfree 2

publish #mediareview

I’m only 90 min in by 2023-07-12 but it feels like the devs are missing what made the first game special. It falls into serious walking simulator territory, with the game asking you to do things that don’t align with what the player wants to do.

In particular, the player (me) often wants to RUN towards something interesting but your only movement option is a leisurely jog when permitted and a slow walk during dialogue. It’s annoying. At one point I was scaling a mountain with my new partner to plant a ghost-detecting beacon at the top. I wanted to see the ghosts! And at the top of a hill right before the next screen transition, the partner asks to sit on a bench and take a breather. I did it anyways because I didn’t want to make enemies with my brand new partner. But bruh I could not wait until his pointless dialogue about how it’s a pretty night out was over.

Also on the topic of the partner character. He sucks. Holy moly the writing sucks. The writers injected so many “umm”s, “likeee”s, and stutters into every character that it loops back to sounding like a line read. That’s how many there are.

Also: the partner character is kind of an unlikeable loser? He eats only pizza, is too afraid to climb rocks, broke his car, inherited a mansion which he forgot the keys to, and has nothing of substance to say (but plenty of “umm”s). I’m actively uninterested in getting to know him.

Contrast this to Oxenfree 1: right off the bat in that name you’re introduced to charming characters whom you’re still defining your relationships with. You instantly get opportunities to tell them uncomfortable truths, white lies, or snub their advances entirely. And those characters react accordingly! While there are some dialogue choices which I know are meaningless in the long run, like telling Jonas the truth about your brother and rejecting his offer of a cigarette in the beginning, at least the game pretends to give you a choice when building your relationships with these characters. In Oxenfree 2 the dialogue options are largely the same bland flavors of stammered “uhh yes” or “uhh no”, always met with the same awkward reaction from the other guy every single time. You can’t say anything that excites or provokes him because he’ll be awkward no matter what. Once you finally get him to discuss Maggie Adler he picks up — but the exposition about her journal ultimately ends in “huh Maggie wrote to set up 3 transmitter beacons… I guess we should do that”, met by “I don’t really understand what that will do but I guess we can try it.” These characters have no passion nor motivation in their dialogue. There’s nothing to care about! And you’re stuck walking with a single guy the whole 90 minutes!

Alright I’m just rambling; specific things that sucked:

• Random jumpscares and nonsensical hallucinations.
  • Jumpscares are cheap. Best case usage: they relieve tension. Worst case (as they are used here): they’re completely unpredictable and just remind you that ghosts exist and follow no logic.
  • The hallucinations are reminiscent of the first game. But in that game, the writing made the hallucinations interesting! There aren’t any characters who are 100% kind and confident all the time — so upon meeting Michael’s ghost, it’s refreshing and alerting for someone to act that way. Same with the glitchy player-time-travel-dialogue hallucinations: nobody talks with you prophetically, so whenever one of those hallucinations showed up I gave it 110% of my attention.
    • In Oxenfree 2, the hallucinations are with characters we know fuck all about and they act just like everyone else: stuttery and dumb. The dad character compares a penny to a copper wire lightning rod, then compares that to channeling your anger into some outlet to ground yourself. At no point during this butchered comparison does he use the words “wire”, “lightning rod”, “ground”, or “outlet.” So Dad is… dumb. And so are all the other hallucinations.
• The game has dialogue that will freeze the environment in place and make you unable to walk where you want to walk. That’s a cardinal sin of game design!!
• At one point a glitch happened: I got a radio call from a random fisherman which I responded to as I walked into a cave — then once in the cave the fisherman asked if I could look for a backpack in a house near the entrance of the cave. I couldn’t exit the cave because presumably the game didn’t expect a player to backtrack. So my attempt to make the game less boring (rushing) caused me to miss an opportunity to make the game less boring! Blah.
• Oxenfree 2 makes the machine puzzles more difficult. They look cooler now but take like 5-10x as long. In a narrative-driven game, why would you make the breaks between the narrative take longer and more brainpower? Why??
• Furthermore: we establish early on in the game that all the interesting time-travel/ghost-summoning/hallucination-inducing/portal-opening is occurring on Edwards Island, the site of the first game. We even see Edwards Island in the distance with a giant evil portal hovering above it several times. Why does the story not take place there?? If that’s where all the interesting shit is happening it’s just salting the wound to show us all the cool shit we’re not involved with.

Jeez I really can’t stop ranting about the game. Bottom line: with only 1 character to exchange meaningful dialogue with, the game fails to engage me. Oxenfree 1 had a fun, awesome, scooby gang of 6 friends each with their personalities. Independent of gameplay, it was just fun to watch them interact. But there is zero snappiness in this sequel because there are exclusively conversations between the player character and their partner or some dude on the radio. And none of the characters are likeable! The protagonist is terse and largely humorless, which would be OK if her dialogue reinforced the image of a strong, silent type — but her dialogue is riddled with so many stutters it’s impossible to find her seriousness charming! Ahhhh. Why is my favorite game being butchered.