Grief is a prism that reflects ourselves, reflects the ones we’ve lost, and looks different in different lights. Think of Let the Right One In, Get Out, or James Whale's Frankenstein. The best horror stories, modern or old, are at their most scary when they work with implications, suggestions, and the emotional burdens they confer. It wasn't necessary: the pared-down, innocuous use of the radio lets the story feel as weighted as it needed to be. Krankel said in his 2017 GDC talk that at one point they were looking into the characters having a Ghostbusters-style backpack device. All this is kept to minimum complexity, allowing the story to take centre stage. You can even mousewheel through the frequencies.
#OXENFREE ALEX PC#
The PC controls are as restrained as any you might find on console: walk with WASD, spacebar for all Alex's actions (grabbing a beer, jumping a gap, or pushing a dumpster to get over a fence to the beach, for example), and shift to bring up the radio. Night School's attempt to tackle this question led to some pretty elegant game design solutions. Night School co-founder Sean Krankel said on IGN Unfiltered, “If every other studio’s going, ‘Story is this connective tissue between what the real gameplay is,’ we’re like, ‘How do we just make the gameplay story?’” This setup paves the way for plenty of eerie, radio-based puzzles.īut the heart of Oxenfree is in the emotional gutpunches of the story, conveyed through abundant spoken dialogue options and sinister visual storytelling. Ren, Alex’s friend, has convinced Alex to bring the radio because there are rumours that if you tune to the right frequency in the island’s caves, you can pick up stations that don’t exist. The story begins with the main characters headed to an abandoned island, once a military base, to drink and party and screw around with a radio - an annual event for students at their school.
It comes from how the weirdness that transpires teases and pulls at these complex, bottled feelings. Because while Oxenfree has its supernatural elements, its horror doesn't come from traditional jump scares or big toothy monsters. But there's a lot there - and it's at the heart of the game. Both appear to be dealing with their respective losses as well as can be expected.
It's not just spooky either, but funny, thoughtful, unnerving, and outright terrifying.Įarly on in the story, deep trauma is revealed, relating to grieving and touching most of the central characters: Alex, the protagonist, lost her brother Michael, while her new stepbrother Jonas (who is now occupying Michael's old room) lost his mother. But taking a look back at Oxenfree, the point and click mystery that was the studio's first outing, it's impressive how much it stands up as its own spooky experience. Night School Studio's new game, Afterparty, just came out, and since it involves you drinking your way around literal hell, it would seem every bit the fitting Halloweeny treat. It's Halloween! We've put the Hivemind Of Horror into a spooky jar of bubbling green liquid, and it'll be pumping horror-themed articles onto the site today.
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