They’re smart, funny, and surprisingly sensible (they mostly just want to get the hell away from the island rather than work out its mysterious history). With an excellent script behind some amazing voice-over performances, the teens never wear out their welcome. Thankfully, the teens of Oxenfree are refreshingly likable. If the characters were tiresome, boring, or two-dimensional, a game all about talking to them would be a painful experience. Same goes for conversations interrupted by spooky transmissions, or sudden, jarring hallucinations. Jump across a chasm between two cliffs while idly chatting and your friends won’t just keep talking about the weather, they’ll stop to recognize how badass/insane what you did just was. You chat while walking to the beach, cutting through the woods, while exploring an abandoned military base, and the conversation follows naturally. These conversations are not done in cutscenes or discrete “talking moments,” they’re the life blood flowing through the entire game. She jokes with her friends, gets freaked out, and argues over pointless trivia, like a real person who suddenly found themselves in an unreal situation would. She’s a teenaged girl who had a lot on her shoulders before the whole spooky-possibly-haunted-island thing started happening and she carries herself like one.

Unlike the galaxy-saving Shepard however, Alex’s (the playable protagonist) dialogue isn’t laced with heroic speeches or badass threats. The tone of the response is hinted at by the phrase in the word balloon similar to the system used in Mass Effect (and done noticeably better than in Fallout 4, I might add). The single most mechanically meaningful thing you do in the game is respond to dialogue options in Aaron Sorkin-style “walk-and-talk” conversations that alternate seamlessly between sarcastic teen bonding, stick-a-knife-in-it awkward stand-offs, and genuinely touching moments.Įach conversation option is represented by word balloons you pick with a touch of a button. There are no real puzzles to solve, no panicky QTEs to click on, no last-minute boss fight to clumsily fumble through. Let me say it plainly, Oxenfree is very light on gameplay.

Oxenfree all endings and choices