I’m thinking about playing it again after this review goes up. I went to bed thinking about it, and I woke up thinking about it, not just because I had to review it but because I had a hard time thinking of anything else. It didn’t occur to me until after I’d finished the game that it binds you to a single save file because I felt compelled to finish the entire adventure in one feverish four-hour stretch. I don’t want to reveal the ways in which the spookiness unfolds, because Oxenfree is a mystery and a thriller and much of the joy is in discovering the many secrets of the island, as well as hanging out with the game’s characters, all of whom are wonderfully three-dimensional. The only tools that Alex and company have for investigating the distressing powers at play on Edwards Island are their wits and a pocket radio. Also, the island is a hotbed of paranormal phenomena. Oxenfree is the first outing from new studio Night School, and it tells the story of teenaged Alex and her friends, who take the last ferry out to an island in the Pacific Northwest for a night of revelry only to discover that nobody has showed up. Sometimes all I would hear would be sounds–big, deep, Hollywood-special-effects-post-production noises, like I’d accidentally dialed into some cosmic frequency and I could hear the colossal sound of the planets grinding away in their orbits. But sometimes, when the theater showed horror double-features in the hottest days of summer, I’d tune into the station and just hear screams. Sometimes I’d get a few moments of swelling, orchestral score. Whenever I drove by the theater at night, I’d always tune my dial in to that frequency to catch snippets of audio from whatever was playing on the screen, which was situated deep in the woods, out of view. It didn’t have car-side speakers–you had to tune your car’s radio to a short-range FM station. When I was growing up in rural Ohio, there was a drive-in movie theater some ten minutes from my house.
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