Oxenfree

Look it's not really a game ok, but I'm not sure what else you call an interactive choose your own adventure horror time loop mystery novel. Wait I do know, you call it amazing. I'm sure it's not for everyone. I too was initially annoyed at not having time to really consider your response choices and being lost as to what was going on. But the events were so engaging, the acting so spot on to the roles (normally I think game voice acting is on average pretty weak), that I stuck with it a bit. And then stuck with it more. 10 hours over 3 days later I had played through twice, mind blown at the radically different outcomes as I went from lost to trying to shape events across the timeline. Ok to be fair, there are tiny faults in the pathing of your friends and once it caused a point I had to quit and reload because the game was stuck. There were a few missed opportunities to have even more options and depth. There are a couple points the dialogue options don't quite line up. But given how many games are in my libraries that never get more than an hour of play because of their faults, and how I had to then talk about this game for 20 mintues to my partner because it was such an experience, it's a must for those who are in to this general genre. If you're looking for FPS RPG Action shooter strategy and don't like story exploration, maybe not your frequency. Otherwise, tune in.

Game springs a "lets reverse the controls and make you do somthing in a time limit" "puzzle". I mess up and reload. I have to "play" through half an hour of dialog choices and "gameplay" I've already done and I cant speed up, skip or in any way avoid it. It's so boring I can't bare to do it again. Let the user save or drop saves at point that don't make the user of product loos the will to live. Uninstalled.

The style of storytelling and interactions between the characters and the mystery resonated with me really well and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

This is a nice story, an interesting interactive piece of visual novel ... of sorts. Its not a very game game. The constrols feel sluggish, you are literally draging your character around the island and sometimes you feel like they are not even doing that. Well ... there is not much more to say really. Its a nice stroy basically without gameplay.

I have played a lot of indie games in my time. Limbo, Firewatch, Journey, Flower, The Unfinished Swan, What Remains of Edith Finch, Adr1ft, Year Walk, Abzu, The Witness, Rime, Everyone has Gone to the Rapture, etc. Oxenfree is different though. To preface, I love this game. I think Oxenfree is the best story I have been told in an indie game, and that is why I put it on a pedestal. Now that is not to say that the games I listed all had bad plots, some were excellent as well. However, very few ever created characters that I really cared about. Oxenfree is a classic story of teens being teens and stumbling upon a mystery while having a party. We have seen this before, and speaking of Oxenfree being an indie game, the plot itself would translate to being an indie movie as well. While some may be annoyed with teen problems like "I am going away to college" or "I wonder if this person likes me", I loved the authenticity of the relationships all the characters shared. These felt like teens, and they felt like real people instead of caricatures. I will not spoil the mystery of the game, as it is very integral to the plot of the game and will bring about a number of surprising moments. But I will say that this game's antagonist is done extradordinarily well for a 2D stylized narrative-based indie game. They are sympathetic, their motivations make sense, and there are some instances where they genuinely creep you out. By the end of the game I had no idea how I would beat the villian, and throughout the journey I grew to worry for the characters and hoped that they would not die. There are multiple endings to the game and in my first one a relationship with one of the characters and the protagonist ended. I felt genuinely bad for it. With that said, this is not a game for the masses. Only a specific crowd will derive the same amount of enjoyment out of this game as I did. If this review piques your interest, I say give it a whirl.