Oxenfree was a game that was both desperate to reinvent its own genre and keen to pay homage to its tropes. As a choice based narrative adventure, it moved the key decisions away from big cliffhangers and gave every choice, every single line of dialogue, a consequence. Some of these choices were instant and minor, dict🔜ating only the immediate direction of the conversation. Others had far reaching ramifications that slowly built up throughout the story. Oxenfree 2: Lost Signals, recently shown off in hands-off preview, seems to understand exactly what the first game did right - and what it did wrong - to construct a new story with a similarly sombre tone.
Time travel, and the concept of time, was at the heart of Oxenfree, and it makes a return with Lost Signals in more complex ways. There are several time portals you can interact with, some that will reverse time and let you manipulate the past in ways that you may not intend. In the preview, our two protagonists were in a mine shaft, one that had previously collapsed. By going back in time, they gain entry to the shaft, but also appear to cause the collapse themselves.🦋 Was the time portal set to ‘just pre- collapse’ because that was a key moment in history, or did the time travel itself cause it? The game will not provide answers to these questions, and in a genre too full of handholding, Oxenfree’s sequel looks set to continue the trust the first game gave to its audience.
To add more depth to the time travel themes, there are two separate mechanics for experimenting with time - time portals and time tears. “Portals take you to a different place almost altogether and are a method for the supernatural to communicate with the living or the people of our time,” the developers told us at the preview. “The time tears are more like a tear between the same location but different timelines. And so what you saw here [in the mine shaft] was an instance of a puzzle that related to only a single other timeline. There will be some instances where there are time tears that cause moments of danger. But more often than not, it's about thinking of these time tears as little holes poking through to other timelines.”
With time acting as such a huge theme this is reflected not just by the actual mechanics, but by the nar🐽rative itself. Riley and Jacob, the heroes of Oxenfree 2, are much older than the characters൩ of the first game, and as a result, more contemplative. It seemed from the 20 minute playthrough I saw, that we get to dictate Riley’s backstory to an extent - she’s asked about her school days, and the answers differ wildly. Whether our choices are canon or are merely dictating how Riley chooses to respond is unclear, but in more ways than one, this is a game about the past.
This all give꧟s it a creepier tone than the first entry. The bulk of the preview was spent inside dark caves or wandering through shadowy mountains. Oxenfree was great at creeping under your skin, but Lost Signals taps into why this works so effectively in building our connections to these characters. You have a walkie talkie to communicate with other people nearby, some of whom are strangers that just happen to be o💧n the same frequency. As a result, things are even more isolated this time around.
I can judge how well this eerie feeling will last from a 20-minute preview watching the developer stream a pre-selected portion of the game, but if Oxenfree 2: Lost Signals can maintain this feeling of emptiness, it will ascend its predecessor. Too often, video games feel the need to pepper you with side characters and quests and juicy, juicy content. Either that, or they go for the Breath of the Wild, Sable approach to game design, telling you to do whatever you want and providing no instructions on how to go about it. Oxenfree 2 seems to strike the balancওe, letting you sit in the moment witho🔥ut ever making you feel helpless.
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After the preview, the developers explained why they opted for older protagonists when the first Oxenfree had worked so well with high schoolers - just as several other big hits in the genre, like Life is Strange, have done. “I think it’s mostly to tell a new sort of coming of age story, but at a different point in the actual age of the characters in the game,” they say. “In the first game, it was high schoolers who were about to leave school and become adults and had the anxiety and the concerns about what that would mean. And then in particular, Alex trying to both get over accepting this new stepbrother coming into her life. Whereas now, these characters [in Oxenfree 2] are much older, but they also have their own life changes that they're going through. And being able to filter that through this very strange, frightening, supernatural world is this much bigger looming problem that they have to solve. There's just a great opportunity to tell a similar story and tone but touch on many different themes too. They're looking back on the choices that they've made and wondering if those were the right choices, to get them the life that they want. A big part of the game is looking backwards.”