Oxenfree ending steam12/13/2023 ![]() ![]() Matures it, if you will.Įven in a brief demo of the game, it’s clear what Night School is doing with Oxenfree 2: Lost Signals. Some of the ragtag misfits you’ll hear on the walkies you’ll meet in person, some you’ll only hear from their voices, and you can flip channels to choose who you interact with – it takes everything you had with the radio in the first game and evolves it. Night School Studios wanted to layer on more complexities than you found in the first game by loading the title with both friends and frenemies – it helps with the adventure game side of things, after all: one person may help you finish up a quest better than another, so choosing to talk to them makes sense.īut it also rounds the experience out narratively getting to know Riley via her interpersonal relationships, even in our brief session, allowed us to glean so much about her – about her values, her priorities, her neuroses. Just be aware that time moves on, no matter what you do, and someone you ghost early on in the game might just get eaten up by a rift if you freeze them out for long enough. Don’t want to make your way to the seafront to chat with this vague weirdo? Fine. You have, more or less, free reign to choose who you want to interact with: does that guy asking you to hunt down his backpack sound like a creep? Ignore him. Some of them just want to chat, some of them would rather convince you something more nefarious is afoot, and some of them have tasks for you. So, at any given time – as the night progresses, constantly – you have the option to explore or converse with the inhabitants of this eerie world. A network of caves connects a lot of the game’s environment, linking points of interest up like a subterranean nervous system. Much like in life, the developers tell us during a hands-off preview that “there’s no right way to get to your goal”, either. ![]() Though the game takes on a fairly open structure – head up, plant beacons, return to camp – strange places tend to attract strange people, and the waifs and strays of Camena will start contacting you on your walkie-talkie. Your task, as Riley, is to plant beacons at high points in the town to monitor the anomalies. These themes of reflection and introspection are mirrored cleverly by the spacetime rifts that are starting to plague Camena – whatever those kids did five years ago has plucked a hole in reality, and unnaturally occurring electromagnetic waves have been interfering with the electrical and radio equipment throughout the small coastal town. Set at the start of a reluctant homecoming (as protagonist Riley Poverly returns to her childhood home to become a low-level environmental researcher), the game’s cast is older and focuses on people grappling with the decisions they made in their adolescence – people starting to question the fundamentals of who they are, and asking whether they need to rewrite their entire personalities. The original game won over legions of fans with its introspective journey and study of grief, guilt, and – well – ghosts, and the highly-anticipated follow-up is being painstakingly assembled with every crumb of experience the team has picked up from the experience of shipping a game that became such an internet phenomenon. READ MORE: Trivium’s Matt Heafy has finally written music for a game – and this is just the beginningīut we wouldn’t expect any less from the studio that had the confidence to launch Oxenfree: an uneasy supernatural thriller about a group of kids on the brink of adulthood that accidentally tap into a dimensional rift in spacetime.Five years after the game originally launched on consoles and PC, developer Night School Studios has started patching new content into the original game, hinting that the villainous group (known as Parentage) from Oxenfree 2: Lost Signals are so powerful, they can alter time, space and – assumedly – the original game’s source code. They exist, in the game world, occupying the airwaves and broadcasting their sinister messages out to the masses. Oxenfree 2: Lost Signals‘ villains are already here. ![]()
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