Oxenfree Impressions

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Oxenfree is an interesting adventure game with cool ideas that doesn't quite stick the landing.

You control a teenager in a group of teenagers who sneak onto an island after it closes for the night to drink and hang out.  Slowly you start to run into creepy but interesting things happening and the plot expands out from there.  It's not a horror game, but it does have some creepy atmospheric stuff going on.

Initially I liked it.  But... then some of the execution started to bug me.  Everything is voice acted but it's really easy to accidentally trigger another whole section of dialogue and miss out on the topic that you were in the middle of.  The game never really explains when you're interrupting or when you're just contributing and it ends up making for frustrating and choppy dialogue.

I got over that and got an hour or two into the game but then it hits a point where it opens up and slows way down.  Now instead of it being obvious where to go to propel the narrative you have to hunt around... which would be fine if your characters weren't so agonizingly slow.

So that's where I ended up leaving it.  All the kids are split up and trapped on an island and forever will be in my mind.  But now I at least know that this developer is doing interesting things and I should watch them in the future.

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