Oxenfree

I often barely manage to click on time on the speech bubble and only in one out of four cases the click actually goes through. The performance is bad on a Macbook Pro. So yeah, that's the first minutes of the game my motivation to continue playing it goes down the drain rather quickly.

I just finished this. It was sitting in my library for a long time until i watched one of my favorite content creators play the second game so i decided to give it a go. It's just amazing the art style the music etc. Very unique game. I finished this in 2 sittings and now i want to play the second game and support this studio any way possible. Give it a go if you like mysteries and good movie/novel-like stories.

Much as I wanted to like this much-applauded game, I couldn't get past the opening scene. The game has a WASD control scheme for QWERTY keyboards, while I live in a country with AZERTY keyboards. The game doesn't allow for key rebinding, so I'm stuck with awkward, illogical and unfamiliard keys for movement. No thanks. Luckily I got the game for free, but otherwise I'd surely have asked for a refund. Sorry if you expected a review of the game, I just wanted to warn those of us who do not have a QWERTY keyboard.

Tedious thriller starring a bunch of teenage jerks who won't stop spouting banal "teen" dialogue overloaded with ironic tone, vulgarity, and naturalistic tics. The teens seem incapable of ending a sentence without an "uh", "like", "or", "um," or "thing", even during moments of crisis. You'll be lucky to get a minute of silence. When you aren't sitting through witless conversations, then clicking responses in the mere seconds you're provided, you're made to trudge across giant screens, occasionally jumping a ledge or (slowly) rock climbing. Who thought this game was a good idea? "Um, so, I don't know, like, or..."

Oxenfree is rather misbilled as an adventure game. There are no puzzles and you have little agency in the way you explore the plot in the way a detective game like Sherlock Holmes allows you. As you move through the game, your companions chatter in the background and in the foreground both among themselves and directly to you. Word bubbles appear over your head--not necessarily in direct response to a question. These give you input and allow you to steer the course of the conversation, but if you don't feel particularly strongly about something, you don't have to say anything at all. You may say that this sounds similar to Telltale Games like A Wolf Among Us. And it is the next evolution of that system. But in those you were very much the star of the conversation as everything was directed at you. Here you aren't necessary. The conversation is part of the atmosphere and it makes everything so much realer. It also helps that the dialogue is very well written and the characters fully realized. Whatever inadequacies there are in the plot do not extend to the script. This script changes and is molded by your responses and the designers really want you to play through this game multiple times, with at least one ending not possible on your first playthrough. I'm not sure if I will play through it again however. Before the finale, I knew I could wander around collecting a few things I missed, but I couldn't bring myself to traipse all the way back across the island again. It's so punishingly slow and convulted. And that thought, augmented by the knowledge I'll have to fiddle with the radio, keep me from exploring every nook and cranny. Besides I'm happy with the ending I got and perhaps seeing every possiblity would reveal just how the game works and just where its limitations lie. It's possible the conversations aren't as dynamic as I imagine, and I don't wouldn't want to break the spell.