There are at a couple of blatant forks in the road, mainly at the end. Night School Studio’s Adam Hines, the director and writer of Oxenfree, has already decided this character, which is the job of any storyteller not telling a story about a cypher. That’s not what’s going on when Oxenfree lets you choose among speech bubbles. One playthrough she’s this path, the next she’s that path. How’s that for on the nose? Your character is a path along a branching structure. In Cinders, an icon of a branch - an honest-to-goodness tree branch - lights up when you trigger a consequence. Oxenfree isn’t the usual choice-and-consequence system. Not in the usual way videogames develop characters. Which leaves the dialogue to do what good dialogue should do: establish and develop characters. The plot advances not by exposition, but by events. In fact, most of the dialogue in Oxenfree is absent useful information about the plot. The dialogue is never filler or rote information delivery. Each of those was presented as a puzzle that I immediately wanted to complete. 2) Here are their relationships to each other. Then there’s Oxenfree, which hooked me in its very first moment with three things. These are stories written by people who might know how to make adventure games or write visual novels, but they don’t understand very well how to tell stories.Īfter the jump, the things Oxenfree understands. I had the same issue trying to make progress in Life is Strange, which at least had the presence of mind to include gameplay stuff. I just don’t have it in me to read a novel, visual or otherwise, written by a game designer instead of an author. To see what happens differently this time. Apparently, you’re supposed to play the storyline repeatedly to vary the outcome. I made it three days into a seven-day storyline. I wanted to stick with it, but oh my! That JRPG-esque stream of line-by-line dialogue, finely chopped and rolled out one thin slice at a time, a slo-mo machinegun patter of staccato verbal filler. I just tried to play Cinders, a visual novel with intricate artwork, distinct characters, and moderately intriguing worldbuilding based on self-aware fairy tale tropes.
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