3/5 ★ – chickensquasher's review of Oxenfree.

Oxenfree strives to tell a coming of age story with characters that feel real, choices that matter, and story that leaves you wanting for more. In these regards it succeeds, but constantly missed dialog and collectibles that ruined the pacing almost ruined the entire experience for me. The characters do feel real, and that’s due to how well they were written and the casting of the voice actors. To be truthful the characters were very archetypal. You have the weird oddball friend, the prissy “I’m better to than everyone” friend, and even the emotionless friend. But what made them real was they were written there own set of problems. And even though some of them were not pivotal to the story at all, I couldn’t help enjoy getting to known them. Despite how great the characters were the experience of getting to know them was almost completely ruined by how the dialog system worked. You find out that the characters like to talk, even your character if you allow her. But if you leave an area before they finish their sentence or activate a plot continuation, you lose that dialog. It was extremely frustrating because these characters had interesting things to say and I wanted to hear every word. I had to learn to stop before leaving an area making it worse because I couldn’t really do anything other than sit and listen. I might as well have been watching a movie. Another issue was how they let you collect lore pieces. This would have been fine except they didn’t come along until the story was basically almost over. All the dialog was finished by the time I was allowed to get the lore items. Since the lore pieces are scattered all over the island I had to take the long walk to places I have already been to. I kind of get it though as the lore delved a little bit more in to the past so the game wanted the pacing to be slightly different from the main story. But it didn’t work in my opinion. All in all it was an ok game. I do want to play through it again eventually to get a different ending but that might be a while as I’ll want to forget about this experience by that time. My Score: 6/10 Platform: PS4 Time to Beat: 5 hours