Oxenfree Review

Oxenfree is Night School Studio’s first release and boy oh boy, was it a good one!  This adventure game kept me in suspense throughout the entire story, with all aspects of the creepy haunted island nailed down to a T!

Adam Hines, the writer & creative director who was the lead writer on Tales from the Borderlands, giving him a great start in ensuring all who embark on their adventure with Oxenfree will be drawn in and itching to find out what is happening.

Oxenfree, derived from the phrase “Olly Olly Oxen free” which was used in such children’s games such as hide and seek brings it’s name to fruition when a group of teenagers explore an island near their home town during the twilight hours and stumble onto a secret hidden for many years.

“Turn up your sound, because you won’t want to miss anything!”

Arriving on the island after dark and conversing with the other members of your group, you are given the option to select how the game will play out and which type of person you wish to portray.  I personally took the kind easy going approach but you were faced with options to be mean to the others as well.  Depending on which choices you made sets out the path of how the adventure will unfold.  

Reminding me of my teenage years when I hung out with a group of friends and talked a lot of non-sense, nostalgia did seem to kick in and gave me a warm fuzzy feeling inside.  The fuzzy feeling didn’t last long, though!  For I was thrown into a world of confusion and angst when using the radio that was brought on to the island to tune into the ether and bring forward beings from another plane.  Opening the rifts of the universe, you lose track of time and space and tumble into the abyss, soon to wake in a completely different location then you started out.

In a daze you brush yourself off and carry on, trying to figure out what just happened.  Discovering points of interest throughout the island, which allow you to tune into the guided tours of the island and also to bring forth ghosts from the past.  Trying to regroup you hear voices over the tannoy, asking for help, telling you where they are.  We must find them!

“Let’s play a game”

Stumbling across a small shack, I tune in my radio once more… This time, I’ve triggered an event.  More beings from the past, this time challenging your knowledge, challenging to see if you know the pain they suffer.  I failed, I wasn’t paying attention to the information I had gathered. I wish I had, though!  The lights go out, I can’t see anything.. Until, a pair of red glowing eyes and my step brother standing, stationary, not moving, not a peep.  He begins speaking in a tone I’ve never heard, someone is speaking through him, threatening our very existence.  By this time, I’m quite taken aback and was not expecting the events that unfolded.

Oxenfree has given me an urge to move forward, to continue the story to delve deeper into what the island’s secret really is.  So much so that I can’t take my eyes off of the screen, glued with wonder, with inquisitiveness I needed to know what was going to happen to them all!  Would they escape the island, would they be swallowed by the other realm or was it all just a silly dream?  The fate of the story is in your hands.