Oxenfree

Riding the 80s nostalgia, yes but still a very very fun game.

I wish Sam & Max were here with a good punchline about that game. 2 stars is for the linux port and because it was free. 2 minutes was unfortunatly the maximum attention span I could get during the superficial teenager conversations. Good efforts for the graphic design though.

At first I thought it's just gonna be an average interactive story game except its in 2D, then in the very first hour I got amazed by how well they did the characterization, voice acting is surprisingly fantastic for all characters, you can feel that they have their own emotion. The dialogue system is very good, in certain situation you got a super limited time to react to something, in other situation you got many time to react to those things. In other interactive story game, when you need to choose a reaction, the time is like stopping for a while until you chose a reaction. In this game, when you need to choose a reaction the time keeps on flowing, which is immersive. And there's one more thing, when there are 3 dialogue box appearing and you can't decide which one to pick, your character will not react to something. And I'll tell you something, when your character doesn't react, it will count as a reaction. Like when I have to choose between three character and I can't decide, one of the character just come up and said "Okay, she doesn't want to hurt anybody". And then, I got hooked in to the game more and more. The graphics is very beautiful. I found that the story is very good and well written. It is very immersive. THIS IS THE VERY FIRST 2D GAME THAT SPOOKED ME OUT!!!, which proves how immersive this game is. Sadly, there's a problem if you trying to play this game on 4:3 aspect ratio. In some mission it will trigger a bug where you can't proceed to the next area. And some weird situation where your character react on something that doesn't even on the screen yet because of the narrow aspect ratio. Which kinda ruined the immersiveness of the game. Really enjoyed it. 9/10

I really enjoyed playing this because of its mood and voice acting, not so much because of its gameplay or because I thought the story or puzzles made any sense (as they didn't). So let's start with the things I didn't like (but keep in mind that they couldn't keep me from enjoying it): First of all, the story doesn't make much sense. I hoped it would to some degree, but it just didn't. Also most of the (few) puzzles don't make sense or show a complete lack of common sense. Things like 85 officers (!) in a submarine or tuning radio receivers (!) to open doors and mystic gateways or, well, almost anything else. Then there's time pressure (specifically for the idiotic "find three objects" puzzle but also for dialogues) now and then - which is bad idea in a slow paced exploration game to say the least. Also while the graphics are supposed to be stylized in an artsy way, they sometimes just look a bit amateurish and the 3D rendered characters don't fit 100% perfectly. The controls are somewhat awkward resulting in the character getting stuck, plus the walking speed is very slow and there's no running control (remember that in the context of that stupid time pressure puzzle: very bad idea!). Even worse, mouse/keyboard control will only work if you remove all joysticks. Surprisingly, it worked the 1st time after installation, but not when started again - which made root causing this issue even harder. Then there's absolutely no save game handling. Not even the chapter savepoints are really working (e.g. puzzle solved, map displayed, scene left and game still doesn't remember). So all that sounds pretty bad, but again, it's about the mood. Even if the graphics aren't really great, the lighting surely is. And last, but most importantly, the voice acting is absolutely great and the dialogues are witty. So yeah, it's far from a perfect game, rather short and nonsensical and still a fun experience.

Even though I really enjoy a good adventure and love a well-told story, this game for some reason remained almost completely under my gaming radar until a few days ago. Sure, I've heard the title, but that was it. When I started playing this game I practically knew nothing about the gameplay or story, and my expectations weren't all that big. To say I was in for a massive surprise would still be an understatement. Oxenfree tells its story in just the right way; there is a lot of dialogue - all of it superbly voiced - and even the letters you can find scattered around the island are (while not narrated) commented on by the main character. The overall tone of the game is one of mystery and discovery, which is perfectly strengthened by its amazing soundtrack. Retaining such a relatively positive atmosphere is quite a feat given some of the darker themes in this game. As for the characters you could argue that they are a bit on the clichéd side, but for me that didn't get in the way of enjoying their bits of banter. In fact, I grew to like and care about them, something that very few games managed in recent history. So far I've played through this game two full times over the course of 11 hours, with maybe one or two more playthroughs at a later time (to get the remaining three achievements). During my first run of the game I played exclusively using keyboard and mouse, and didn't find much of a fault with the controls. That being said, for the second playthrough I switched to gamepad and found the overall flow of the game a little better (especially since you can usually run instead of walk easily using the analog stick, whereas you need to keep your movement key pressed for several seconds using a keyboard). Conclusion: If you are fine with relatively basic gameplay, but like having meaningful choices and an interesting, well-told story, this is for you. Besides, the gameplay is still more complex than that of Telltale games, so there's that.