Oxenfree review
So Christmas has passed and with the season came the steam sales in which I decided to buy a game I would normally avoid, a small indie adventure game that claims to be a supernatural thriller and boy does it deliver.
Oxenfree is set on an abandoned island where a group of 5 kids went to party the night away which quickly falls into chaos when supernatural events start to happen. The game itself is gorgeous and the music fits the game and setting perfectly with a synth-pop soundtrack which really helps to set the scene.
I shall try to avoid spoilers but I will spoil the first 10 mins or so to give a general overview.
You play as Alex a 17-year-old teenage girl who is going to meet her friends on a beach and has brought her step brother Jonas along for the trip.
You start out on a ferry to the island with the aforementioned step brother and another of your friends and when you arrive your friend Ren quickly reminds you why you have brought your radio along even though no signal can be reached from the island, something about receiving strange signals is mentioned and then dropped as you go to meet the other characters waiting on the beach.
You find a signal and get thrown into a story full of intrigue and horror, but not cheap horror that relies on jumpscares, a strong sinister horror is instead used along with tension so thick I'm sure a knife wouldn't cut it.
The setting gets itself in your head better than any horror game I've played to date, you both want to learn more and are also afraid to do so at the same time.
The game has multiple choices and multiple endings and at the time of writing this I have only gone through it once but will be going through it again a couple more times and if you enjoy any type of story based games I can give no stronger a recommendation than Oxenfree and considering its fair full price of £14.99 i see no reason to not buy the game.
Unfortunately as with all games there are downsides and thats the fact that no skill is involved in playing the game the puzzles are just scrolling through radio frequencies and because of this the game is forced to lean on its story and beauty to make up for this which it does well but its something to keep in mind.
Another issue I had was that walking in the game is extremely slow and stopped me from going and grabbing any extra information or collectibles which are scattered all over the games map which i did really want to get but the speed of walking just killed the idea of fetching things for me. Dialogue also had issues where characters would cut each other off rarely but with subtitles on I didn't really mind.
The story was incredible strong in my opinion but it did have on of those open to perception endings which didn't annoy me but might make others wanting to know exactly what went down a bit annoyed.
There is honestly not much to say without spoiling the ending I received which had a grand total of 15% or so of other players choosing the choices i made it leading me to believe I got the "bad" ending which in all fairness, I did.
To summarize I wholly recommend this game and due to this game alone i'm going to keep my eye on games like this for the future and there is an edition of the game which comes with the soundtrack for only a few pounds more which again I recommend, the soundtrack is nothing short of a masterpiece, with the rest of the game.
The game is currently available on Steam, Playstation 4, Xbox one, GoG.com, humble bundle and the windows store, there is also a collectors edition which was only made in limited stock.
The game is priced at £15.99 and unless on sale anywhere else get it off GoG for the drm free version, it's always nice to have.
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