Turn the dial slowly, and there’s often something that’ll stand out, like a lighthouse in the blackest night – except the feeling here is that the beacon is only ever drawing you closer to the rocks, and destruction. There are voices, some acting lines, others just groaning, screaming almost, in the static. Some of these are songs, crackling and creaking as if weighted down by decades of dust. It’s through the use of a handheld radio that Alex – and by extension the friends, family and associates that accompany her to the island – can listen to strange signals. Look, listen and learn carefully enough, and it all might just come together – but probably not on a single playthrough. There are also a number of photographs taken across the course of the night, by different characters, that contain clues and audio anomalies, snatches of conversations from a time before now, that can be tuned into. Greater detail as to the island’s past, and how that’s impacting the night’s events, can be gleaned from discovering letters, scattered around the island during the game’s later stages – they go some way to describing a pertinent disaster that occurred not far from the island’s shores. Ultimately, the divergent plot narrows to a linear path for a high-stakes subterranean climax, at which point your earlier choices are going to have consequences.
Oxenfree alex series#
This takes in a series of branches, directed by an excellent dialogue system that allows for player interruptions and very natural-feeling exchanges (and is made all the better by impressive voice acting), permitting the player’s character, Alex, a pronounced sense of agency in proceedings. The mystery of Edwards Island – home to a decommissioned military installation and, until recently, a sole elderly recluse – can be unpicked to some extent by simply following the main story. To dive into the particulars is to spoil a wealth of surprises, a raft of compelling beats that resonate with genre originality, that keep coming on a second playthrough – and even then, you might meet the credits with unanswered questions. The game’s uncommonly palpable eeriness is filtered through a story of possessed teens and glitches in time, loops in reality that see a group of high-schoolers try to survive a night stranded on an island that isn’t quite as deserted as they believed.
Not that you’ll see the real ending if you go around Oxenfree’s relatively brief running time of about five hours only the once. It’s mesmerising while it plays, and memorable long after it’s finished. But Californian indie studio Night School’s debut production, originally released in 2016, is deserving of investigation by anyone delighting in disquiet. Granted, they’re a rare breed, the genuinely spooky video game, experiences that aren’t so much played as permitted to crawl across your skin, cooling the blood and yet quickening its flow. Oxenfree is one of gaming’s greatest ghost stories.
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