You’ll hear interesting snippets as you move through the dial, picking up old cartoons, music, and voices. The radio is activated by RT, and the right stick is moved from side to side to tune in the stations. You’ll also get onscreen prompts for objects to interact with (using the A button), with LT bringing up your map so you see where you need to go. How Alex interacts with the others alters how they feel towards her and in return affects how the game unfolds and ends. The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt - Epic In Every Way You’ll have a choice most times of two or three responses from Alex (I played the game on the Xbox One, so for me the answers were keyed to the X, Y, and B buttons), but you do need to choose quickly or Alex won’t respond at all (which, of course, is another viable option). The game does a nice job of defining each character as things progress through conversations they have with Alex. It helps that the characters are fairly likeable, though some may exasperate some players more than others. It’s a story we’ve seen before but it is well told, unfolding as the teens explore the island and its forests, town, and abandoned military facility. The teens need to solve the mystery and try to escape the island with their lives and sanity intact. Ren has Alex bring a small radio along, as certain areas of the island seem to tune into mysterious transmissions, according to local folklore.Īfter entering a cave, Alex tunes into something, and that something opens a rift in time and space, allowing for some unusual and spooky events to happen. To their dismay they find they are the only five who have shown up, but decide to make the best of it. The five hop a ferry over to Edwards Island for an annual beach party. The game focuses on five friends- Alex, a spunky blue haired girl her friend, Ren her step brother, Jonas the less upbeat Nona and Clarissa, former girlfriend of Alex’s deceased brother, Michael. It’s not a perfect home run, but it’s close and delivers quite effectively.

And what a debut it is, giving us likeable and well voiced characters playing out against stylized painted environments on a 2.5 dimensional plane and an interesting story that has branching dialogue to lead us to multiple endings.

Such is the premise of Oxenfree, the debut game from Night School Studio, a developer made up of alumni from Telltale and Disney. Add some temporal rifts in to mess with the protagonists’ heads and you have the recipe for something quite spooky indeed. Certain things play well in dealing with ghostly tales-teenagers, a deserted island, and a staticky radio all fit nicely into the category.

Oxenfree game freezes