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Teens get 'The Twilight Zone' Treatment in 'Oxenfree'

Fiddling with a shortwave radio becomes a creepy conundrum in one of 2016’s first best thrillers.
Teens these days and their shortwave radios. Credit: Night School Studio

I'm standing on a cliffside bearded by trees, by a mound of stacked rocks. Earlier in the game, right before he loaded up on pot brownies, my friend Ren told me that these rocks were markers left by others, and that radios could pick up rogue signals at these points. I tuned into the anomaly. Usually they're splatters of audio, or conversations with cryptic meanings. This one was a history lesson, telling me about the island's lineage of violence and genocide. The long night so far had been filled with grotesque illusions and living shadows, but the last words of the transmission coiled me up more than anything else and made me want to kick over the stone stack, even if the game doesn't allow it. The voice said that I, Alex, an aqua-haired teen trying to get off this island, would carry on these gruesome traditions.

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Oxenfree takes on certain The Twilight Zone traditions, turning normal pedestrian objects into conduits for supernatural dread. But where The Twilight Zone tested the hapless and the heartless, Oxenfree tests five unsuspecting teens, walking on a 2D illustrated plane like bugs in an ant farm, all hoping to see dawn.

So imagine if you will, teens taking selfies wild and free, riding a ferry across the water, anticipating an evening of debauchery. Instead, they land in a place where the seams between what we know and what we don't tear like the hearts of young romance.

Oxenfree's fictional but familiar Edwards Island is, for the most part, a normal place. Families have spent weekends there and teens have thrown bonfires largely without incident, but there is a quirk: the weird noises that can be heard over the radio at certain locations, groans from an invisible world. On the night the events of the game, Alex and her newly implanted step-brother Jonas hit the basin of a cave to see what odd receptions they can pick up. In the process, they awake a cruel force that scatters the group around the island, constantly manipulating the thresholds of space and time in menacing ways.

Spoilers: This watch tower is named Major Hardon. Credit: Night School Studio

Dumbfounded and panicked, you need to try to keep everyone alive and together while unshrouding truth of this seemingly sleepy island. Without giving these ominous ghosts the satisfaction of resolution, you might not be able to escape. The radio can tune into roaming white noises, dabs of radio dramas, but you'll be constantly maintaining conversations throughout your travels, if only to keep you grounded.

It's an even split between negotiating with the damned and your normal mortal peers. Even if you aren't suffering from puberty, it's hard to keep the conversation cool and collected. Dialogue can move on without your input and one squad member, Clarissa, constantly drags everyone into an unstoppable whirlpool of bickering. Aside from a fixation on ledges and climbing walls, the game doesn't present many obstacles. No puzzles either, merely the greatest riddle of all: maintaining reasonable teenage dialogue at 3 am.

The looming terror rarely takes a swipe. You might see a shape in the darkness, you may see eyes where there is no face, but the horror is mostly shadow puppets. The ghosts choose to toy with you, sometimes playing literal games—in an abandoned military academy the disembodied voices challenge you to an unnerving round of hangman. It's a game light on challenge, but charms its way through those failings with smarmy teenage kicks.

It is not a capital-H horror game, but a conversation-based adventure game trapped in an eerie state. Sins of the past and weird science have shredded up a wound in reality, and it's taking out its frustration on five dopey kids with all their own young baggage to deal with. With delicately crafted environments and the sharp, grounded writing, Oxenfree is easily one of the best science-fiction-horror-whatever games of 2016.