See you in the obits!
American Graffiti is about a group of young people wandering around on a special night.
Oxenfree 2: Lost Signals review
Radio has always seemed the most shadowed and unlikely of technologies.
Where’s Radio 1 gotten to today?
Black bubbles turning on the surface of fresh coffee.
All images conjured because the gaps were mere sound.
Something that whistled and sparked.
Something murky, spooky, irascible, and filled with all that cursed analogue potential.
The Oxenfree games are all about radios, and they’re also very good with the idea of gaps.
It was in between the big events that Oxenfree really spoke, I think.
Someone would reply to an off-hand comment with surprising honesty.
Oxenfree’s radio had lovely staticky oceans between its haunted stations.
Oxenfree 2 has another radio, and it has more of those wonderful gaps.
How small, how domestic and true.
What might the game do then?
What Oxenfree 2 does most of the time is what Oxenfree 1 did.
And the game’s new narrative is eager to intermingle with the old.
And then there’s all that stuff that happened five years ago…?
I don’t think either Stranger Things or Oxenfree are copying each other, though.
And googling around yesterday I learned that the pitch for Stranger Things was originally titled…Montauk.)
What do you do here?
You wander from one antenna point to the next and have conversations and learn about each other.
Will he never be enough?
Riley, by contrast, is back in Camena after a stint elsewhere.
Both main characters are initially awkward around each other, and Riley in particular can be deeply guarded.
Camena is a beautiful place to explore, with the same powdery watercolours of the first game.
As before there’s a small town and woodland and caves and trails.
I am kind of flattened by how good the conversation system is in Oxenfree.
It’s not just the web of personal story you are always piecing together with each dialogue choice.
It’s the way each choice is conjured in the brightly coloured speech balloons you select.
Jacob remembers Riley from school.
Does Riley remember Jacob?
It’s those gaps again - the spaces within interaction that leave us wondering.
While the main cast is smaller, I found Jacob and Riley fascinating.
Jacob is a babbler and a fidgeter.
Riley’s character at first seems slightly sealed off - not least because we play as her.
Action is character, as Fitzgerald wrote.
Never sure if I believed that, but it makes a strange kind of sense here.
This again is rather beautifully handled.
All these new questions!
Who’s staying up all night and why?
Who’s feeding you riddles and assures you that you already know their identity?
By the end of the adventure, Oxenfree 2 has tied up a lot of mysteries.
But there’s this other feeling to everything too, just as there was in the first game.
It makes Oxenfree feel less like a single mystery and more like a great, delicate palimpsest.
There’s space, and there’s that space seen in different time periods.
There’s Jacob and Riley and everything that they are and could be and probably won’t be.
What would Jacob have become had he left?
How would Riley have changed if she had stayed?
Somewhere within the shivering and twitching of all these layers, we get a night.
Wondering what could be, and what is.
