![]() ![]() If you don't pick any options, however, they eventually but quickly vanish and leave her silence as the "player-intended" response. The player is given multiple choices whenever it is their turn to speak, with remaining silent being an ever-present bonus option, but it's never quite clear if Alex will wait for a lull in the conversation to inject her thoughts (if the player indeed chose one of her thoughts to say aloud) but will just as often lead to cases where she's talking over another character. I don't quite recall which other game I played recently had a similar problem, but it's all in the character animations: a character will gesture or emote during each statement, and the statement is completed long before the animation is, which leaves these long pauses between sentences. The game moves at a glacial pace at times, but I think I can blame that one on this PC once again. I've been enjoying Oxenfree for the most part. It's not really the type of adventure game with a whole lot of backtracking. I don't think I found a way to quick travel. The world map seems to be entirely for orientation. To say more would be spoiling the game's many surprises and attempts to mess with the player's mind, along with those of its young cast. ![]() something attempts to contact the protagonist Alex, her fish-out-of-water new step-brother Jonas and her friends the dorky Ren, the brusque Clarissa and the quiet Nona in a highly unconventional manner. An event occurs, the handful of teenagers with baggage we've spent a few minutes being introduced do are suddenly deposited all over the island, and the game becomes a contemplative journey to reconstitute the group while. It's a prime spot for a horror movie scenario, which is what Oxenfree begins to feel like from its first foreboding ferry ride across the foggy waters separating the island from civilization. The island was once home to a US army base, and before that a mining outpost, giving the player a bit of variance as they cross over decades-old gondolas and elevators and pass through campgrounds and beaches and radio towers. Most of the time, they're hopping over small gaps, climbing up lips or walls and navigating around winding passages on Edward's Island: a popular spot for tourists and teenage no-goodnik rabble-rousers depending on the time of day. The player can walk around each of its locations and interact with a handful of objects in the environment. Oxenfree's not so much an action-adventure game than an adventure game with some mildly action bits in it. In fact, those two properties I mentioned perhaps best adroitly fit what Oxenfree is going for here: quiet small-town life in a rustic, forested cul-de-sac of an American berg, juxtaposed with a sudden and unwanted influx of supernatural weirdness. Rather, it's nostalgic in the way it presents itself, in a manner similar to Stranger Things or Gravity Falls in that it recreates a specific sense of the 80s and 90s that speaks more to me as an avid TV watcher (and impressionable child) of that time. Not so much in the sense of recalling memories of my salad days either, because while Oxenfree tends to focus on teenagers being teenagers and accidentally awakening some primal force of terror while carousing in a drunken beach gathering, I can't say there was anything going on in my own misbegotten youth that draws many parallels. Playing Night School Studio's Oxenfree has been a nostalgic experience, but not in the way Indie video games usually are.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |