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Characters have goals, they set off to accomplish them, and they respond and react to each circumstance right alongside any activity that you, as the player, need to accomplish.Īlex and her friends are each written beautifully. The plot and the gameplay become one unified, seamless experience.
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Here, instead, the plot is always moving forward, characters are constantly speaking to one another, and, thus, the story never feels interrupted by the needs of the game, nor does the game feel interrupted by the plot. Usually adventure games are stories that include puzzles, occasionally stalling out a plotline as the player attempts to figure out what to do next. While this is an adventure game and you will need to solve simple puzzles to open gateways to progress the plot, it isn’t like any adventure game that I can recall playing. It is the dynamics of a group of very well developed characters and the various parts of human nature that are exposed through these interactions that are really what makes the storytelling compelling. However, once again, much like a Hitchcock film, the central conceit of this drama is not what actually drives the player’s interest. This “main plot” is interesting, and as I said, weird and eerie, and involves unearthing the secret history of this strange, seemingly cursed island. All of this human drama is then framed by the strange events taking place in a single night on Edwards Island, which include encounters with ghosts, time displacement, and other weird and eerie happenings. The interpersonal drama this evokes is the heart of the game, as the way that Alex reacts and responds to these characters and the situations that they get into will effect her own relationship to each one, as well as to one another. Each character has clearly drawn relationships to the others, a clear sense of how they initially feel about one another, and their own personal agenda for joining one another for this final rite of passage to adulthood. Each of the characters is more than merely a typology, though those types are useful in initially getting to know them.
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Most of its beauty as an experience is found in its commitment to authentic characters and their naturalness as human beings, something most video games are not often capable of.įive graduating seniors meet on an island for a final sendoff to their adolescence, a nerd, a mean girl, a Bohemian chick, a new arrival, and the protagonist, Alex, a girl who has recently lost a brother and gained a step brother (the aforementioned “new arrival”). None of this is why Oxenfree is an exceptional game. The game world looks beautiful, the characters look beautiful, the characters animate beautifully, the gameplay is simple and elegant, and it innovates on the adventure genre. To put it simply, Oxenfree is exceptional.