Sometimes it’s wisest to keep your lips zipped, while at other times you can interrupt the other party and stop their thread of conversation dead. Silence is a valid response to some enquiries. However, the speech bubbles fade over the course of a few seconds, meaning you can fail to or just choose not to say anything at all. When Alex has an opportunity to make a point or reply to someone else’s line, speech bubbles hover around her and you select the one that feels right to you. What’s more, it feels and sounds natural. This choice plays a key part in building the game’s personality, while keeping the narrative moving even when the action is quite mundane. For a start, dialogue isn’t something that happens only at key points but something that happens all the time when you’re playing the game. On the other hand, Oxenfree’s dialogue system is both wonderful and sure to be copied in adventure games to come. If you’re after proper puzzles, head for Double Fine’s Broken Age or Sierra’s King’s Quest revival you’re not going to find them here. Beyond this you’ll find the odd quiz or scavenger hunt, while some eerie, old-fashioned tape players need working manually to play a tune at a certain speed. An awful lot of Oxenfree’s gameplay is based on exploring the island’s buildings, caves and pathways, or on tuning an old-school transistor radio which, at the right frequency, will cause specific effects. In effect, while your primary goal is to solve the island’s mysteries, close dimensional rifts and get your five teens back to the mainland, what you’re really doing is directing Alex’s performance, making a whole series of decisions that will define where she stands and where her friends stand when the game reaches its end.įor some players, this will be frustrating. Like much of Telltale’s recent work it’s more of an interactive drama, where the choices you make and the relationships you prioritise are steering the story in slightly different directions. There are some puzzles in Oxenfree but they’re not really the point. Your protagonist, Alex, can move around and interact with specific elements of the scenery, but Oxenfree has no inventory to speak of and eschews all the usual finding, combining and using objects stuff to focus more on exploration and dialogue. The whole things played from an unusual, zoomed-out 2D viewpoint – the sort of view you’d normally expect from an indie platformer rather than a graphic adventure. Before long they’re not just wrestling with strange forces but with the shadows found in their own pasts. Our teen protagonists are there to drink and party, but fate has another course in mind. All we’ll say is that it involves a small group of five teenagers stuck on an island, once a military base but now a campsite and holiday resort. Oxenfree isn’t quite as powerful or accomplished as The Chinese Room’s opus, but it’s a smart game, full of heart and soul.Īs with most games of its ilk, the less you know about the story going in, the better. Imagine an American version of Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture that owed more to old John Hughes movies than John Wyndham and Radio 4. Yet you’ll also find elements of eighties teen dramas, modern indie sci-fi, experimental narrative-led games, such as Gone Home and Dear Esther, not to mention eighties horror flicks. Built by Night School Studio – a small team of ex-Telltale and Disney bods – it has elements of Telltale’s graphic adventures and the sort of simple, stripped-back 2D style you’d normally associate with low-budget mobile and independent games. While you can’t describe Oxenfree as entirely original, I’d struggle to name another game with the same cocktail of influences. Available on PC (version tested), Mac, Xbox One
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |