To be honest, I thought I did a post about this game a while ago. When I went to write a post about the sequel to it, and looked for the old post so I could put in a link to it, I was a little surprised to find it wasn’t there. So, that means I either somehow convinced myself that I did write it, even though I didn’t, or that Jetpack’s search bar didn’t find it for some reason. Since I don’t have the time to go back through all my posts and look for it, I’m going to assume that I’m at fault and write this post as if I didn’t post about this before. After all, I’ve been on this blog for 14 years now, and sometimes it’s hard to remember what I’ve written about and what I haven’t.

Back when Xbox Live was still giving away free games every month, one of those games was called Oxenfree. I watched the trailer for it, and while the graphics didn’t look great, the story looked like it might be interesting. The premise of the story is: a group of teenagers go to an island because they heard rumors that if you tune a radio to certain frequencies at certain places on the island, strange things happen. The rumors were true.

So, I gave it a try.

Oxenfree is unlike any other game I’ve ever played before. Pretty much every game I’ve played are sports, fighting, or RPG games. There’s generally a lot of button pushing involved. That’s not the case with Oxenfree. There’s not much gameplay involved. It’s almost all story and character interaction. You control where the main character goes, interact with the radio (and other various objects), and pick what, if anything, she says. Compared to other games that I’ve played, the story gets done fairly quickly, but when you beat it, you’re not done. You find yourself right back at the beginning of the story.

You play through it again, only it’s different this time. There’s spots where the dialog is changed. You’re even told by the story’s antagonist that you’ve been through it before. There are also a few spots in the story where you can give yourself some advice. On your first playthrough, if any of your friends played it, it will show what dialog they chose. On subsequent playthroughs, it will show what you chose the last time.

When I first started playing it, I didn’t think I was going to like it, but I really did. The story was indeed interesting, even through multiple playthroughs. I think I went through it three or four times.

Then, not too long ago, I saw that they released a sequel. Once I beat all the Final Fantasy games I needed to catch up on, I started Oxenfree 2 immediately. It, too, had an interesting storyline. The events of the first game bled over onto a neighboring island, and you have to walk a new main character through it. The island is bigger in this game, with more areas to explore. They added a few new minigame type things to go along with the radio, but the gameplay was mostly the same.

The biggest difference was the ending. Unlike the original, Oxenfree 2 had one. They even had some dialog where two of the characters talk about a book where the story ends where it began and how much they hated that (which I found amusing). Judging by the options at the final decision you make, I’m thinking there’s at least two other endings, so I’m going to play through it again to try to see them all.

If you like story driven games, I recommend these two. I played the first one on Xbox, but the sequel wasn’t available on it. I had to buy Oxenfree 2 for the Playstation.