Love is such a strong yet strange and unpredictable emotion. Sometimes it can be the hardest thing to try and feel, and other times, all you need to do is listen to your favourite song and then there you are, falling in love all over again in the blink of an eye.
That euphoric feeling that sets your soul ablaze and makes everything else in life seem irrelevant and small is what happened to me when I sat down to play Oxenfree 2.
A great game will leave you feeling tired. Not because you stayed up all night but because of the lives you lived while playing it.
When I played Oxenfree 2, part of me was sitting in front of my pc in my game room. Still, another part of me was lying on the floor of my parent’s house, slightly sticky controller in hand, falling in love with gaming for the very first time.
Oxenfree 2 is the sequel to one of my all-time favourite games, Oxenfree, and as any good sequel should, it doesn’t try to reinvent the wheel; instead, it takes the magic formula that captivated me, mind, body and soul and improves and builds on it.
As anyone who reads my reviews here knows, I love all things that go bump in the night. The original Oxenfree game captivated me with its horror themes and story about a group of teenagers (which everyone knows is the most frightening age to be) teetering on the cusp of adulthood while finding themselves trapped somewhere between space and time.
It was just a game that worked exceptionally well and called for multiple playthroughs to uncover all the hidden secrets.
Oxenfree 2: Lost Signals takes everything I love about the original and pushes it further. Much like the original, a core part of the game revolves around engaging with multiple dialogues. Your choices in these conversations can and will drastically impact the game’s ending and the relationships you build on the journey.
I’ve always believed that gaming can awaken empathy and foster a desire within you to understand how others act and why, which is something Oxenfree 2 shows great mastery over.
When I played the original game, I was in my early 20s, which everyone knows is just an extension of your teenage years. The characters struggles felt real to me and where I was in my life at the time. This time, the story focuses on Riley and Jacob, two 30-something-year-olds in a town neighbouring the original.
And I don’t know if it’s just because I’m in my 30s now or because I feel like I’ve grown up alongside the game, but the experience of playing Oxenfree 2 felt so drastically different this time.
There was something about the characters being my age again and figuring out how to navigate this next stage of life while still battling the same ghosts of the original that just hit home and felt deeply impactful.
The story revolves around Riley and Jaco, working through the night for an environmental research group. They’ve been tasked with placing transmitters across the coastal town of Camena, which neighbours Edwards Island, the old military and tourist location where the first game takes place.
As anyone who played the original game will know, nothing good happens on Edwards Island, and this isn’t something that Oxenfree 2 spends too much time re-hashing – it’s a game that shows you instead of just telling you.
Riley and Jacob quickly realise that they’re out of their depth, and much of the story hinge on the conversations these two have as they hike around Camena’s winding trails.
It’s worth noting that unlike in many other games, none of the choices you make within your playthrough are inherently good or bad. Instead, they’re just that, choices, and much like in real life, every action will have a consequence, albeit smaller ones that will have a significant impact as the story grows.
As with anything that relies so heavily on the narrative aspect, a player’s enjoyment of the game will depend on how much they can relate to the characters. Thankfully, the phenomenal personality of the characters and voice acting make it easy for them to feel alive and real, making them all that much easier to fall in love with.
A new set of characters and age group isn’t the only changes that the game brings either. There is also a way bigger map to explore, which means more downtime and more conversations to fill the time spent hoking from place to place.
The game isn’t as creepy or unsetting as the original but just as surprising and emotional, with enough emotional baggage to sort through, character growth and twists to keep players engaged.
The game also introduces some new mechanics to freshen things up. Where the first game only had a single radio, this time around, players have a walkie-talkie with nine channels to communicate with other characters throughout the game.
This leads to more conversation paths and allows for another gateway for those weird transmissions at the heart of the Oxenfree franchise.
There are also letters from Maggie Adler to find again. While they don’t impact the story much, they help shape your choices by explaining more of the lore and the strange happenings around you.
Oxenfree 2: Lost Signals feels far more intimate than its predecessor, and once again, the real magic lies in the characters and their stories and how people can come together in the most insignificant way and yet form an unbreakable bond – much like my love for the franchise.
