And yet I felt goosebumps arise after split-second frames that struck like subliminal messages. Their 2D setup ensures that you’re always at least somewhat divorced from the action. It truly felt as if The Sunken’s hold on Alex was strengthening, pulling her and perhaps her friends deeper into this endless cycle.Ī side-scrolling platformer with spooky inclinations is far from unheard of, but they’re rarely all that terrifying. When stages of the game I’d already completed previously were suddenly strewn with changes, some overt, some small enough to make me doubt myself, I was no longer playing passively, kept on my toes by the sense that nothing was quite as it seemed. Flashes of static, like the stuttering picture on an old video tape, interrupted scenes more so than they did previously key scenes played out with slight variations and the game’s ghostly antagonists seemed to… recognise me? In this case though, my fear did not come from the bizarre sense of recognising something that should feel new, but from frequent surprises during an experience I thought I could predict. It doesn’t matter how often you experience it, it will always hit you like a truck and make you question reality, if only for a brief moment. But there’s a reason déjà vu is so disturbing, not only is it completely inexplicable but it is always a surprise. On a second playthrough, I therefore assumed that I knew what to expect. So, when I went back through on New Game Plus with the intent of unlocking different dialogue outcomes (via the game’s intuitive take on the walk and talk premise), I was surprised to instead find myself engrossed by the mysterious antagonists.įrom gameplay through to story, Oxenfree is not a complex or convoluted experience, and thus after one playthrough I thought I understood it. I was more intrigued by the relationships between the characters and the way the supernatural occurrences were affecting their interactions than I was invested in uncovering the mystery of whatever nefarious presence I’d awoken in the bowels of the island’s underground cave network (turns out this mystery ended up going pretty deep). Alex and her friends are now stuck in a cycle, doomed to repeat this entire night ad infinitum.Īfter an initial playthrough, I wasn’t sure the game would leave much of a lasting impact. In this moment you realise that the time-loops you experience in-game are mere glimpses of the real thing. To conclude the game, player-protagonist Alex narrates what happened next to the characters and to herself, but as she speaks, the familiar static of one of the game’s time-loops appears, and she suddenly and seamlessly transitions into a line of dialogue that introduces the game’s opening. At the end of your first run-through of the game, you find yourself on the boat home having spent a night on an island at the mercy of a legion of spectres known as The Sunken, who were on board The USS Kanaloa when it was mistakenly sunk through friendly fire, transporting those on board to an alternate dimension from which they cannot escape. More specifically, Oxenfree’s New Game Plus mode.Ĭuriously, after completing the game for the first time the menu will urge you to continue the timeline rather than start a new game, and from here the implications of the game’s ending become somewhat clearer. It is this unspoken fear of something being not quite right, of things being different enough to unnerve you but not enough that you can believably articulate those anxieties to anyone who could comfort you, that hit me during Oxenfree. Imagine that the pacing, story beats and dialogue remain the same, but jumpscares occur at slightly different intervals, the ghost appears in scenes it previously didn’t and the antagonist’s motives are somehow even more mysterious. But imagine instead that you find it’s not quite as you remember. You assume that it’ll naturally lose some of its impact simply by virtue of the fact that you know what’s coming, putting a stop to any sense of mystery. Imagine for a moment that you’ve just enjoyed a creepy ghost movie, so much so that you decide to immediately watch it again. It’s a game obsessed with time, place and selfhood, often finding its characters waking up from a haze, possessed by unknown entities or stuck in time-loops they’re not always wholly aware of. Of course, during lockdown every day feels pretty much identical, but the experience was rendered especially unsettling with the themes of Night School Studio’s supernatural mystery still fresh in my mind. The morning after a late night in lockdown spent playing Oxenfree, I was hit by a strangely intense bout of déjà vu during an otherwise painfully ordinary moment of the day.
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