Oxenfree

So the 2019 completion train continues with Oxenfree. The 2018 Ultimate Head to Head Contest brought me within 1 achievement of completing this game but the last achievement required a third complete playthrough so it got put off. That is until February of this year when Oxenfree became True Achievements’ playlist game and that gave me the push I needed to finish it off.

Oxenfree follows the story of Alex, a girl with green hair, who goes to an island with her friends to have a party on a beach. One thing leads to another and they end up exploring a cave and causing lots of weird goings on. I won’t say much about the story because it’s quite good and original. It’s really well constructed. As mentioned above you need three playthroughs to get all the achievements and on the subsequent playthroughs, the characters become subtly aware of the fact they’ve done this all before. In addition to this, there are various moments where you can see other player’s decisions later in the game. On the first playthrough this was incredibly eerie.

Gameplay wise, you need to make your way through a series of set pieces that involve dialogue decisions where you can either be nice, mean or silent. Getting from set piece to set piece involves a lot of walking and I mean a lot of walking. The worst thing about the game is how slow Alex walks. She’s clearly in no rush to go anywhere even when her friends are in peril. Another element of the gameplay is the radio that Alex uses to deal with the supernatural elements of the story. You need to tune it to the correct radio frequency but there are a lot of frequencies to go through and if you move too fast you will miss the correct frequency without realising. This just adds an unnecessary additional timeframe to the game and removes any kind of pace you may have thought was building.

Outside of the this, the artwork of the game has been widely praised but to be honest, it’s very bland and the accompanying strangeness made it very hard to look at, especially when it made you think there was problem with your television. Musically, they’ve tried to create an air of creepy atmosphere, which again is okay for the first playthrough. But by the next two, the music appears very disjointed and grates a little bit.

In addition to the above, I managed to run into a glitch where the game wouldn’t let me progress because… I’m not sure why. It could be because I interrupted a piece of dialogue or it could be because I didn’t take the exact path the game wanted me to take. Either way, this was a mild irritation right at the end of my last playthrough and I could have lived without it.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 13 Achievements

13 achievements, 3 playthroughs and only 1 achievement guaranteed from whatever you do. Initially on the first playthrough it’s advisable to just play the way you want and focus on getting the collectibles. There are two types of collectibles; Adler letters, which you can just pick up, and anomalies which you need to activate using your radio. This really drags out the first playthrough making it the longest – unless you leave the collectibles until later.

While doing all of this, I concentrated on being nice to everyone. When I started the game, it was because I had to get the Matchmaker achievement in the UHH contest which involves getting the characters of Ren and Nona to date and you need to nice to both of them to encourage the relationship. At the same you time, you can be continually nice to Jonas, who is your step brother and accompanies you for most of the game. This will get you the new beginnings achievement for befriending him.

If everything goes according to plan, there will be four achievements left and another three can be earned simply by playing the game again and saying nothing – expect for the last bit where it can’t progress without you making a dialogue decision. All other dialogue choices fade out if you don’t pick them.

Then there is just the third playthrough for getting everyone to hate you. While I don’t enjoy playing out of character, this did produce some laugh out loud moments when Alex is really mean out of nowhere and the other characters start hating on her. A lot of people have complained about this achievement in that it hasn’t unlocked for them but it was pretty easy to see all the opportunities to be nasty. There are a few bits of the game you may have to intentionally do badly though but this is still unconfirmed.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Oxenfree was fun in places despite being slow-paced most of the time. Having to play it three times for the completion was a bit much for me and the differences were really minor and didn’t change much of the game play experience. I’m glad to have played the game but I’m also happy that I’ll never have to play as Alex again.