What kind of game is it? This horror game isn’t really scary at all, perfect for those who don’t like horror but love going to Halloween parties. This is our Oxenfree II: Lost Signals PC review.
After more than seven years, the beloved Oxenfree by Night School Studio received a sequel – with new heroes traveling around the island from the first part. About what the sequel is good for and whether it brings something new to the series compared to the first part.
Released in 2016, Oxenfree hasn’t won many prestigious awards, but it’s been talked about in gaming circles for quite some time. The debut project of the Night School Studio team, founded by people from Disney and Telltale, told an interesting and memorable story about teenagers who encountered supernatural phenomena on a small island. The game certainly didn’t need a sequel, but fans would love to see it – and now, seven years later, it came out. He tells a different story about other heroes, and the events of the second part unfold five years after the end of the first.
The protagonist of Oxenfree 2, Riley, returns to Kamen’s hometown hoping to get out of a difficult life and takes up a job studying mysterious electromagnetic signals. At first glance, the task is simple: you need to climb to the highest points of the coast and put transmitters there to analyze this strange anomaly. A researcher named Evelyn maintains communication with the heroine on the radio. She is also pleased with the news that you can put only one transmitter today and deal with everything else tomorrow. To help, Riley is given the necessary equipment and partner Jacob, a slightly clumsy guy who has lived all his life in Kamen.
For knowledgeable people, the word “tomorrow” in Oxenfree should cause at least bewilderment (especially since the game literally starts with a familiar noise). But don’t worry. It’s a little trick. And the first half of the game isn’t really Oxenfree 2: Lost Signals.
So, Riley and Jacob get to the right place, adjust the transmitter and witness the appearance of a triangular portal in the sky, from which time and space begin to fall. Now they will be periodically moved from the present to the future, then to the past, teleported from place to place, and ghosts will now and then speak through those around Riley. Riley’s task in this story is to close the portal. Jacob’s task is to summarize the events of the first game in thirty seconds, somehow expand the storyline of one of the key characters and, of course, talk, talk, talk – about everything, about nothing, it doesn’t matter.
Constant communication between characters is the hallmark of Night School Studio. The characters communicate vividly and almost always interestingly, and the player is offered several options for answers – immersing yourself in the dialogue is often a great pleasure. So it was in Oxenfree and Afterparty. But in Lost Signals, this is not the case. In the sequel, the chemistry between the characters is built with great difficulty: sometimes, you get the feeling that you are hearing the same story for the third time, and in other words, some lines seem superfluous and added for the sake of the number of conversations.
It’s time to clarify: Oxenfree 2: Lost Signals is two almost identical games in one. The first looks like an impossibly boring demo, and the second directly continues Oxenfree.
Conversation Simulator
The dialogue system was Oxenfree’s most notable feature, mimicking the way kids yell at each other in similar movies or TV shows from the 80s and 90s. No one stopped chatting so you could decide which of the three answers to pick, and you never knew if Alex’s character would wait for her friend to finish her speech or immediately interrupt him to say something of her own. Combined with the fact that the answers quickly disappeared if one was not chosen in time, the conversation turned into a minefield of tense decisions.
This is how you feel as a teenager. Even though I didn’t care about the humans in Oxenfree as much as I would any alien in Mass Effect, I was interested in my own clumsy attempts to impress them.
In Oxenfree 2: Lost Signals, the mature, if not always so mature, protagonist Riley has more time to consider her options. She also interrupts people less frequently. In Oxenfree 2, you can talk even when you’re alone because you have a walkie-talkie, and you have to wait for people to say “end of conversation” before it’s your turn because that’s how they work.
The walkie-talkie is an ingenious way to fill in the gaps in silence. If you need to hear a friendly voice while climbing the cliff, you pull out your walkie-talkie and contact one of those who are handling the latest mysterious anomalies in the area. I mainly interacted with a park ranger, a sailor, and a fellow environmental researcher of mine, all of whom had their own storylines, which reinforced the feeling that there was a whole world of the paranormal, and we could all help each other deal with our part of that world.
However, I did not manage to make friends with the radio DJ, perhaps because I did not listen to her program at the right time. So yes, you can still miss something. I recommend turning on the subtitles so you don’t lose sight of what people are saying when the eerie static starts to interfere with the game or the voices on the loading screen disappear. At some point, I stopped at the edge of the screen instead of entering the cave because I didn’t want to miss the dialogue, and immediately a useful note appeared that the conversation would continue. Later, I confidently crossed the middle of the screen while the sailor was talking about inexplicable marine oddities, but he was interrupted by the ringing of a pay phone, and I never knew what he was going to say. The system is not perfect yet, but definitely better.
Remember your past
In general, the history of Oxenfree 2: Lost Signals turned out to be interesting and sometimes even exciting. Even in the first part, the developers managed to create a slightly oppressive atmosphere, from which it was uncomfortable. This time they also did not lose face. There were no cheap “stuffed animals” – here, negotiations on the walkie-talkie and replicas on radio waves most often cause discomfort. The idea is as old as the world, but it works like clockwork, especially when spooky conversations are paired with interesting paranormal antagonists, as well as less frequent but more effective visual effects.
The Oxenfree 2: Lost Signals plot is especially strong in that we do not see the interlocutors and communicate with them on the radio, but this is not necessary either – at one time, Firewatch clearly showed that heroes can evoke emotions without showing their appearance. The same technique is used here: when some guy with a low bass starts to communicate with the heroine and ask her for something, it is slightly alarming, although you intellectually understand that nothing bad can happen to Riley until the end of the five-hour game.
Another thing is that Kamena is Riley’s hometown, where her family lived, and suspicions at the beginning of the game quickly begin to be confirmed. Time rifts, ghosts, loved ones – everything starts to converge at some point. If the first Oxenfree told about a group of teenagers, then more adult themes were chosen for the sequel – about the relationship between parents and children, the ability to come to terms with the loss of a loved one, and missed opportunities.
This allows the second part to stand out from its predecessor, even if in terms of gameplay (and in some plot decisions) it seems too similar to the last game, where little has changed.
The most disappointing thing is that the gameplay has not received any development, and at times it seems completely superfluous. In the first chapters, the heroine receives a large drawn map on which you can track her location, and as you progress, Riley makes notes on it and circles interesting locations with a pen. The size of the territory of Kamena leads to the fact that here more often than we would like, you have to wander through the same locations first in one direction, then in the other. This seems logical, given the task of Riley and her partner to install transmitters in the city, but it does not make it any more fun – the characters move slowly, and the paths seem to be deliberately made as ornate as possible.
If, at first, there is a desire to carefully study the locations, and only then go further, then you say goodbye to this idea very quickly. There is practically absolutely nothing to study except for one or two objects about which Riley will say a couple of phrases. Collectible items (which do not appear in the world immediately) are not very useful, and you don’t want to rack your brains over how to get to them. Well, dead ends are quite annoying – in one episode, I jumped over stones and climbed rocks for five minutes to get to a closed door and listened to half-hints from the characters that I would need to return here closer to the second half of the game. There are no fast travel or speed buttons, so I had to return the same way.
Sometimes it seems that the creators of Oxenfree II were cramped within the framework of a regular video game, and they wrote the script for a feature film or TV series. Therefore, there are so many walks and conversations, and besides them, there is really no gameplay. What needs to be done is always clear, even if the objects you need to interact with are not marked with a special icon. Puzzles are extremely rare, and you can’t call them puzzles – just simple “puzzles” that try to diversify the gameplay a little. The moments in which the heroine falls into time rifts and is transferred several years ago seem interesting, but this does not introduce any new mechanics. It only diversifies the “visual” a little. And there are no problems with it – everything is perfectly drawn.
Our review was completed thanks to a PC key provided by PR.
