![]() Maria is a high school radio host who’s manning Camena’s late-night broadcast. Ironically, Oxenfree 2’s best moments involve its ancillary characters - one in particular who is literally never seen on screen. After spending roughly eight hours with Riley and Jacob in the first playthrough, I am invested in their journeys purely in a “quality time” sense I’ve engrossed myself in their stories, so how could I not eventually become attached? Still, were I not playing the game for this review, I may not have given it a second go, and I wouldn’t have arrived at the appreciation I’m feeling now. ![]() I do find myself more interested in these characters on my second playthrough, which I haven’t yet finished. Likewise, because of the nature of the branching dialogue system, my choices could have been what stunted the narrative during my first playthrough. This could, perhaps, be the result of Oxenfree 2’s nonlinear world the main premise of the game is to set up four beacons, but save the first one, you can do them in any order. Their own stories unravel, somehow, both too quickly and too slowly after hours of character-building dialogue that I couldn’t connect to, I was frequently caught off guard with a major development that came out of nowhere. Night School has once again captured a realistic pattern of speech in its dialogue, with great voice acting, too - but Oxenfree 2’s main characters don’t have the same appeal as their forebears, and in a game like this, characters are everything.īecause Oxenfree 2 is less of a mystery on the paranormal level - it’s the same phenomena as the first game - a lot of the weight falls on Riley and Jacob, two characters that aren’t captivating enough to carry the load. ![]() It was a mature drama with the light moodiness of high school problems, but it also dug deeper into the teenage psyche to touch on grief, change, and relationships. But this is where the comparison to Oxenfree hinders Oxenfree 2’s success the writing in the original was rightfully lauded for how it captured the spirit of teenagers. Oxenfree 2’s narrative branches mean that you’re able to shape Riley’s personality a bit, while also altering the story with what you choose to say or not say. Possible?” from the first game? - that leave the lasting chill of a good horror story. It’s these moments of unanswered questions, paired with the creepy, chopped-up audio the ghosts use to communicate - remember the iconic “Is. Once across, Riley and Jacob can step back through the rift and back to the present, left with the mindfuck of whether they, after all, were the cause of the crash. One example: In a mining cave with a broken elevator, the duo can use a rift to go back to a time before the elevator crashed, and use it to bridge a gap. When Riley opens a rift using the radio, she and Jacob are able to step back into Camena’s past. Oxenfree 2 once again features time travel, but this time, it’s deployed as a means to solving puzzles. It’s the moments of unanswered questions, paired with the creepy audio, that leave the lasting chill of a good horror story ![]() In Oxenfree 2, the radio and walkie-talkie are storytelling devices that add layers to the world you immediately see on screen, where the two main characters are already wrapped up in an otherworldly plot. Like its predecessor, Oxenfree 2: Lost Signals revolves around walking and tuning a radio to the supernatural world, but now there’s also a decent amount of climbing and a walkie-talkie. Naturally, that’s before the first beacon goes haywire and connects to a static portal above Edwards Island, a gateway to a techno-ghostly world that the two don’t yet know is being summoned by a group of teenagers (separate from the bunch from Oxenfree). She’s paired up with a former high school acquaintance, Jacob, to put up several of these beacons over the course of a few days. (Better get used to that static!) Riley is a military dropout who’s returned to her hometown right at the precipice of major change. Riley is a new hire to a team of environmental researchers interested in radio waves her job is to set up the beacons used to catch the right signals. Riley wakes up on a bus stop in her hometown of Camena, eyes flicked open from the surprise of walkie-talkie static, a chilling hiss that’s now a calling card for developer Night School Studio. ![]()
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