You intrepid heroes tune in, eat brownies, and explore a cave.
Game: Oxenfree
Webzone: Oxenfree
Devel: Night School Studio
Engine: Oxenfree (Unity)
Price: £14.99 / US$19.99 / CA$21.99
Wazzat: Oxenfree is a supernatural thriller about a group of friends who unwittingly open a ghostly rift. You are Alex, and you’ve just brought your new stepbrother Jonas to an overnight island party gone horribly wrong.
Does It Launch
- Launches.
Performance @ 1080
- 60 @ 1080 & 2160.
Graphics
- Windowed and fullscreen work.
Control
- No issues with the Steam Controlla OOTB.
Does It Launch
- ja
Performance @ 1080
- It perform
Graphics
- The art style kind of reminds me of a lot of canadian animation coming out of Quebec and Vancouver in the early aughts
Control
- I grabbed the GOG version cuz I didn’t grab it when it was on sale on humble
- Dualshock has a bunch of buttons mismapped
- Keyboard and mouse works fine
Does It Launch
- Launches both on this box and the SteamBox 360
Performance @ 1080
- There’s a whole lot of not much of anything on screen so even a Ryzen 2400G with its Vega 11 can push this at 1080p60
- GalliumHUD if you’re wondering how to get a FerPS counter on SteamOS/Big Picture.
Graphics
- There are teeny tiny characters on screen for most of it.
Control
- Steam Controlla, 8bitdo SNES Pro and Dual Shock 4 all work.
- Bonus soda for not having actual key prompts.
QA Score:
Fun section:
Fun?:
- Venn:
- I want to preface this by reminding everyone I both dislike children and choose your own adventure book games.
- This (when you boil it down) is an adventure book game.
- Night School Studio did a great job with it.
- It runs well, controller works, looks pretty, has organic conversations.
- However it quickly became apparent I give negative FKS about teenagers going to an island and dealing with spoopy shite.
- I lasted 43 minutes, right up to where the game forced me to do something stupid.
- As far as gaming, the only gaming element I could find was tuning the radio to trigger an event that furthered the story.
- Sorry not sorry but if you don’t dig games like Gone Home you’re Drunk, Life is Strange and the like, Oxenfree will not change your mind.
- P.S. I want to live in this world where THC infused brownies kick in around the 3min mark.
- Jordan
- In have a pretty low tolerance for teenage drama, and this game made the unfortunate misstep of frontloading a lot of it, which made me not really care
- That said, once you power through the introduction, the drama bits are far between, and you get to determine how much of an asshole you are to your step brother
- I was the biggest asshole
- I am, however, a sucker for a good mystery
- Oxenfree has a decent one. Lots of little scraps of information are everywhere and it’s fun for me to try and put it together
- And I gotta say, unlike Gone Home, it does something with the atmosphere and spoopernatural stuff
- The gameplay elements are a wee lacking though. Your walk cycle is painfully slow and exploring takes forever
- The radio bit is a little interesting, but it basically boils down to doing sweeps until your screen starts glowing red
- All and all, if you like FMV games or mysteries, you might get something out of it
- People looking for more traditional games aren’t gonna dig it.
- Pedro
- I mention time and time again that games, in my opinion, should be about the mechanics.
- Oxenfree right off the bat feels like a bare skeleton of game mechanics, which are there just to qualify this is in fact a video game.
- The meat here is in the story and the dialog choices you make as you go along.
- I can see why the first bit of the game wouldn’t punish you for making one choice over another and I do get the sense that, after the little supernatural event, that’s the point where choice starts to matter.
- The core mechanic here is the dialog and how what your character decides changes what other characters say and do.
- I have trouble relating to teenagers in the real world, let alone virtual ones.
- I’m not saying the dialog here is as bad as Life is Strange, because it isn’t!
- It’s actually much better and the characters all feel like they have their own thing going on.
- And your protagonist isn’t just a pair of teenage pants for you to don.
- I play videogames for what they can show me, not for what they call tell me.
- And there’s a lot of telling rather than showing in Oxenfree.
- I care much more about the supernatural and weird elements here than I do over the petty squabbles of teenage 1s and 0s.
- Unfortunately, when the focus is on the teenagers my interest was kinda lost.
Fun Score: