If you are having a discussion and then do something to an object midline, that line or possibly conversation is gone forever. If person A is talking, and Person B is responding and you change screens, the game stops that dialogue and it’s gone forever. In addition, the dialogue system has some minor flaws. I’ve missed a few prompts and had to restart the screen to see what they said because they come up quite quickly. The first big thing is this game demands your focus, you don’t want to miss your chance to say anything, you have to make choices to participate in the story so it’s hard to look away even to get a text message. The dialogue choices allow the game to personalize the story to the player. This is becoming almost common to deliver a natural dialogue in the game, and when it works and your choices are shown early enough, it shines. One interesting design choice is timed dialog. However, the features of the game can be discussed. That’s all I’ll say because this is a story that definitely deserves to be played blind. I absolutely adore the entire story of the game, in fact, I replayed the game a second time to try different things and enjoyed it even more.Īnd while the story takes about four hours, I will highly recommend playing the game a second time because to me the second playthrough is critical. “WTF? This is going to be amazing or horrible.” And the story actually is amazing. Looking at my notes I see that about two hours in I wrote: “Ok this is interesting”. I would advise avoiding any hints of what the story is about because the way this game delivers it over four hours is just mastery of the form.
That’s about all the “interaction” you have with the game other than moving around and looking at stuff, but that’s about all the interaction you need for this story. While that’s not the only control you have here, you have limited other choices like pulling out a radio and tuning it to stations.
It is teaching you the rules and developing the characters and it does that well, which is crucial because as a choose your own adventure you’re going to have to care about these people so you can make choices. The thing is the game is pretty average for about an hour.
It feels odd and simplistic but brings a feeling of a choose your own adventure. The game is played mostly by choosing options through three of the face buttons on a controller (X Y B for steam controllers) and hitting A to select objects in the world. It’s non-traditional in how it does it but it brought me in with a great story and then made it better for a second playthrough. Oxenfree gets me to answer the question with an “Oh god yes”. “Is it worth the money for the experience, whether it’s a game or not?” Oxenfree is another unique experience that I search Steam for, it’s odd how often I find what can be discussed into “what is a game?”īut like many of these games that I have played, such as Edith Finch, Her Story, and Orwell, there’s so much more to the story that simply dismissing it as “not a game” ignores the important question.