Oxenfree Review
Recommended
A great adventure with huge dialog choice, great atmosphere and plausibility, superb visuals and audio design, and story.
A must-play.
+ Great visuals - 2D drawn backgrounds, 3D characters (integration of the latter is pretty good), great effects
+ Superb sound design
+ Great music
+ Great writing and voice acting
+ Great narration
+ Great pace
+ Great atmosphere (as a result of the prior)
* Slow movement; as its upside resulting in plausibility and slowing the players mind to get into the atmosphere and story
- Default mouse pointer; bare white sticks out a lot from the otherwise darker tone of the game. If I had known about this and the gamepad support before-hand, I would have definitely used my gamepad. A custom cursor, which is reasonably simple to implement, would make it so much better. Also, loading cursor for no (gameplay) reason.
- Main menu: Why do I press start to exit? I can only see photos and other discoverables in the current timeline, not the ones I had on my first/last play through?
- Sadly, loading times are unnecessarily long (not too bad). This is probably a technical limitation, with unknown effort to improve. The loading screen itself is good. Shorter loading times would greatly add to the games and storys flow. They were long enough for my mind to wander elsewhere, which was unfortunate.
If you can see yourself enjoying an interactive story and dialog choice, definitely play this.
Preferably, take the (less than) full 4 hours and settle down to play. It’s such great narration and immersion, it would be a shame to be pulled out of it.
If you have a gamepad, use it (to not see the white cursor).
A must-play.
+ Great visuals - 2D drawn backgrounds, 3D characters (integration of the latter is pretty good), great effects
+ Superb sound design
+ Great music
+ Great writing and voice acting
+ Great narration
+ Great pace
+ Great atmosphere (as a result of the prior)
* Slow movement; as its upside resulting in plausibility and slowing the players mind to get into the atmosphere and story
- Default mouse pointer; bare white sticks out a lot from the otherwise darker tone of the game. If I had known about this and the gamepad support before-hand, I would have definitely used my gamepad. A custom cursor, which is reasonably simple to implement, would make it so much better. Also, loading cursor for no (gameplay) reason.
- Main menu: Why do I press start to exit? I can only see photos and other discoverables in the current timeline, not the ones I had on my first/last play through?
- Sadly, loading times are unnecessarily long (not too bad). This is probably a technical limitation, with unknown effort to improve. The loading screen itself is good. Shorter loading times would greatly add to the games and storys flow. They were long enough for my mind to wander elsewhere, which was unfortunate.
If you can see yourself enjoying an interactive story and dialog choice, definitely play this.
Preferably, take the (less than) full 4 hours and settle down to play. It’s such great narration and immersion, it would be a shame to be pulled out of it.
If you have a gamepad, use it (to not see the white cursor).