But if you like smart, well-written adventure games with rich characters, well-realised settings, and beautiful art direction, it’s worth playing. It's a difficult game to review, because revealing so much of what makes it great would ruin the story. You start out thinking it’s going to be the typical story of a group of feckless teens being picked off one by one by some evil force, but it subverts that trope.

Oxenfree uses its setting and atmosphere as a means to tell an intriguing, heartfelt story, rather than for cheap scares. I was so entranced by the story and characters that I didn’t really care. One moment made me lean back in my chair and wince, but otherwise it’s fairly tame. It’s funny and occasionally touching, but not scary, despite being, essentially, a horror game. The story is short-you’ll finish it in about six hours, maybe more if you decide to look for optional letters scattered around the island-but it’s superbly paced and written, and you’ll immediately want to play it a second time to see what other paths you can take and the different directions your relationships can go in. Alex’s journey is an emotional one, and she’s forced to confront difficult things in her life. Your predicament has close ties to the island, and also your own past. It’s mostly a game about exploration and story. It has adventure game stylings, but there are no real puzzles to speak of. Outside of the character relationships, there isn’t much to Oxenfree. It’s not a massive space, but makes up for its limited scale with rich world-building. On the island you'll find, among other things, an abandoned military base, a campsite, a forest, and a small, uninhabited town. When you see a sign with a certain icon, you can tune your radio into a frequency that reveals the island’s history-including a story about a tragedy involving a World War II submarine. It has a storied past which you learn as you wander. The group becomes separated, and Alex takes it upon herself to find her friends on the eerily quiet, empty island. I won’t say what happens next, because this is a story-driven game and unraveling its mysteries is key to the experience, but their evening suddenly takes a dark turn.

A local myth is that if you tune a radio into certain frequencies on the island you’ll hear ghostly messages-an urban legend Alex and her friends decide to investigate. You play as Alex, a blue-haired teenager who comes to Edwards Island with a group of friends, and her new step brother, to hang out, drink beer, and explore.

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