Oxenfree 2 finds clever ways to expand the show’s intriguing world

There was something very special about the original Oxenfree. Night School Studio’s walking and talking adventure game allows players to discover the mysteries of Edwards Island, fall in love (or be daring) with its cast of characters, and make many dialogue decisions along the way as things unfold. they get creepier and creepier.

Thanks to a hands-off preview session with Oxenfree 2, the sequel doesn’t seek to break what isn’t broken. Instead, it seems that the developers, almost all of whom have returned from the original, have found clever ways to deepen the foundation of the world of Oxenfree and turn it into surprising new attempts to break our brains a bit and introduce some endearing new characters to. boot.

Oxenfree II is set in the same world as the original, but focuses on an entirely new cast, with players taking on the role of environmental researcher Riley. He returned home to the city of Camena to find out why electronic equipment is affected by strange radio signals. Unsurprisingly, Camena isn’t that far from Edwards Island, and the supernatural events that begin to unfold overnight threaten this charming seaside town.

A new cast doesn’t mean your time with the original Oxenfree is wasted, whether you’ve played it years ago, revisited before the sequel, or are just picking it up now. There will be many accolades to the story of the first game, and in fact, the developers have even been updating the original Oxenfree for PC with new audio clips that help tie the story of the villains from this sequel, Parentage, to the original game.

But the focus seems to be primarily on Riley’s story. His confident tone, which mixes a bit of sarcasm with an undertone of warmth, fits perfectly at home in the talkative world of Night School. The dialogue from the first game mixed West Wing-beat chatter with Veronica Mars-style wit, and while these characters are older, that combination still feels right at home when Riley and her friend Jacob explored Camena in the game section. what I saw.

At the end of the day, a game like Oxenfree will live or die for how charming, or at least interesting, these characters are, particularly since players are constantly making dialogue decisions. Thankfully, Oxenfree II seems to continue to nail down that casual, down-to-earth conversational tone that Night School excelled at in both the original and Afterparty, and Oxenfree II is looking to make player choices matter even more this time around. One small example we saw involved Riley trying to cross a finally impossible to jump gap, well, jumping it, falling to a rock a little further down. Jacob takes a much safer route, going down a rock face to help her back down. Even a small decision like that could lead to new permutations in the conversation, and I’m fascinated to see how the scenes can play out differently, as a moment like this was somewhat emblematic of what the developers put in the effort in the sequel.

“It was definitely one of our initial goals: we wanted more options that were not based on dialogue. We wanted you to make decisions with your physical decisions about what you’re doing and how you want to do it, ”Studio lead writer Adam Hines told IGN. “It also pushed us to design the environments in a way that allowed those kinds of moments to really happen. There are very few occasions when there is only one way up or down. You always have more forks in the road and more micro-choices on how to get to certain places. “

Another particular highlight that demonstrates the identifiable nature of the characters came when Jacob and Riley played a game in which they told a story word for word.

I love moments like that, and I have them in past Night School games, so if the team can continue to deliver those personal, witty scenes like they do here, I can’t wait to see what else we could discuss as we explore. Camena.

That little game, more importantly, comes from the rhythm of a character: Jacob is quite scared by everything that happens, and the game helps calm his nerves. At times like that, it’s key not to feel corny and to be rooted in who these characters are, and that made me appreciate the scene even more. I guess it’s also worth mentioning that Jacob was nervous because, well, he and Riley had broken up in 1899.

I have to go back in time

You see, the tears of time have begun to open around Camena. They will allow Riley and her companions to travel through time to a point that will hopefully offer them some help on their journey. In this case, the duo, as they ventured through the tunnels that spanned all of Camena (a surely useful exploration device for a world that the developers estimate is about 2.5-3 times larger than Edwards Island, although they noted that gamers shouldn’t necessarily wait for a sequel that’s three times as long to play), it discovers a tear in the time that takes them to 1899, before the mines were abandoned after a major collapse. Fortunately, in this period of time, there is an elevator in operation that, through a bit of quick puzzle solving, Riley and Jacob move to help them get to another time and return to their point of origin. There’s just one problem – they’re trying to pull off this bit of platforming and puzzle solving, as the mines are, in fact, crumbling around them.

I’m certainly a fan of interdimensional fissures, and while Oxenfree is using them on a much smaller scale than, say, Ratchet and Clank, it seems no less integral to the Oxenfree II story. Not only does it allow a game so focused on its characters and location to deepen our understanding of those facets in a way that simply couldn’t be done on a standard timeline, it also brings a noticeable gray area to Riley’s actions. Did her and Jacob’s meddling cause the mine to collapse, or were they just in the right place at the wrong time? I hope Oxenfree II doesn’t necessarily answer questions like that – it’s the kind of rabbit hole in time that a story like this allows, and I love the potential this sequence promises.

Tears of time are as exciting a potential route to explore as a player as they apparently were to develop. “In the first game, most of the options and interaction came through dialogue … but these tears of time have turned into something really exciting for us, because it’s the kind of thing where, as that the night degrades and things break. , all those spaces that you are seeing will have some new things that will appear within them that change contextually depending on where on the night the game takes place, “said study leader Sean Krankel.

“It’s conceivable that you can explore most of Camena and then go back to a space that you’re in and things will have changed a bit,” he continued.

This time the tear is placed along the main narrative path, and while the tears will certainly come into play there, players can expect to find some of them, as well as other secondary opportunities in Camena.

“[Time tears] they’re definitely not all directly related to the exact story you’re going through right now, ”Hines explained. “A lot of things come out of the walkie talkie side quest that you can find and choose to do. Those side quests will all be roughly related to the event that is happening at night, but people’s specific problems are unleashed in wild and bizarre ways that you sometimes have to go the beaten path to solve. “

But my introduction to Tears of Time also depicts a scene that comes about an hour after the sequel’s story that feels bigger than most of what the original Oxenfree could pull off. Years later, Night School seems to have learned a lot about bringing these characters and this world to life, not only in terms of the obviously enhanced character model fidelity, but in the complexity of the sequences that also retain the haunting and haunting art style. beautiful from the original.

And it’s not just scale that seems to be a focus for Night School; Camena’s more expansive size not only creates a bigger world, it allows the Night School to fill the city with more interesting objectives, side quests, and more. The demo showed a couple of ways that developers are accomplishing this.

The first is the use of a walkie-talkie that not only allows a wider group of characters to interact with the player anywhere in Camena, but also gives the player agency to initiate conversations, either to remind them of side missions or Learn more about the characters along the way. It’s a nice expansion for Night School’s underlying theme of choice – not only can you choose what to say in conversations, you now have a bit more options when you want to talk to some characters.

“Having the walkie talkie there and allowing the player to initiate conversations with people who are not on the screen, with characters that they have met and with whom they want to join in and see how they are doing or ask for advice or something. It was a big nut that felt great to crack, the ability to start a conversation to drive it the way you want it to, ”Hines said.

Additionally, movement and exploration have been expanded thanks to the inclusion of a rope that players acquire early in the game. Riley, who has a military background, lends some plausibility to his more adventurous bent, and players can rely on that skill and rope to navigate parts of Camena they might not otherwise be able to reach. It doesn’t suddenly transform Oxenfree into a haunting platformer, but it again offers the player more options and, more importantly, more methods to satisfy their curiosity about the secrets Camena keeps.

“There’s absolutely more travel built into the design, but it’s not about heavy platforms, double jumps and swinging through things,” Krankel explained. “It’s more about wanting the player to analyze the map differently and not just feel like they’re pushing left to right and talking.”

The little time I spent watching Oxenfree II certainly indicated that there is much more to it than just walking left to right and talking. As Night School pointed out, Oxenfree isn’t morphing into an unexpected genre, unrecognizable from its predecessor. Instead, its goal is to deepen the promise of player agency and choice within an author’s world and story, and to do so in a way that extends beyond the choice of dialogue options during a conversation. I, of course, still need to play Oxenfree II and see how that sense of choice extends to the entire adventure, but the promise of its expanded potential seemed clear in this short section. I hope the rest of Camena is an equally memorable place to explore.

Jonathon Dornbush is IGN Senior Feature Editor, PlayStation Leader, and Host of Podcast Beyond! He is the proud dog father of a BOY named Loki. Talk to him on Twitter @jmdornbush.