Oxenfree Review

I freaking love this game.  Mystery games are really making a comeback in recent years after their DOS heyday and this one just nails it.  There is so much mystery in Oxenfree that the game actually spawns into a post game ARG (alternate reality game) which is weird and cool and not as obvious of a marketing gimmick like most ARG's.  The characters and story are fantastic.  The voice acting especially is superb and easily among the best EVER in a video game.  The gameplay is simple but actually complements the story rather than distract from it.  This game is so good I'm actually delaying a ready to go blogpost because I now need to re-write part of it.

I'm going to have to spoil the first 15 minutes of this game a few paragraphs down.  If you want to go in completely blind, stop reading.  

Oxenfree is about a group of teenagers who go to an island for a "generic all night teenage party-debauchery".  The player character, a girl named Alex, brings her radio because creepy broadcast anomalies are rumored to occur on the island.  You do this and shit gets weird.  The rest of the game is about figuring out what the hell is going on.

Blue-ish hair is just a coincidence I promise.

The game is highly story driven so relies heavily on dialogue and player input on that dialogue. Almost no lines are said by Alex without player input (which is pretty incredible if you think about it).  Almost every line Alex says is chosen out of three possible options and flow naturally with conversation.  These conversations typically happen while moving around the environment and exploring, rather than the old RPG standard of standing in one spot to talk.  You can do other things while choosing dialogue tree options and it works really well.  Granted most of those other things is just running around and exploring but hey.

My only real criticism with the game is the dialogue tree has two, for lack of a better word, "types" that the player has no way of knowing about before hand.  Some dialogue options will interrupt another character speaking while others will wait for the other character to finish speaking before Alex will.  A majority of the options seem like the interrupt type, so if you want to hear the other character finish their thought, you have to gamble with a dialogue option that fades away and click on it at the last possible second.  It is too easy to miss an option if you click on it juuuuust too late and just because you wanted to hear what the other character had to say.  This also kind of makes Alex look like an asshole who is always interrupting her friends but conversations happen pretty naturally regardless of these interruptions so it's only a minor criticism.  You have the option to not say anything in any of these interrupt dialogue trees as they fade away but that usually feels less natural. Basically, awkward silence often leaving a conversation hanging.

The options follow Alex like comic book style text bubbles.

The characters are great with solid writing and fantastic voice acting.  It sometimes has a little of Life is Strange syndrome with some of the dialogue being a little too witty for a teenager but only barely.  The writing does age-up the characters a bit but I thought it was pretty average for the age of the characters even if occasional lines seemed more natural to a character in their early 20's.  Their actual ages are ambiguous but dialogue about college suggests they are around 18, or at least high school seniors, which makes the aging up pretty forgivable.  Also, there was no painful eye-roll inducing dialogue except for some of Ren and Jonas' jokes which were purposely bad.  I may have been blinded by the excellent voice acting to notice any egregiously bad lines or the voice acting was so good they elevated any bad lines.  The voice cast is truly excellent and mostly unknown actors.

The characters are developed really well and are given personality and backstory just 15 minutes into the game.  Alex is sort of the leader of the group, somewhat forced into that role, but she plays it well.  Her personality is a little more basic as it can be altered by the player but within the framework of the game.   She is kind of a smart ass and a bit sarcastic at times, but she can take things seriously too. She might be the one most willing to solve the mystery of the island.

The other characters you meet first is Alex's best friend Ren, who is something of a hipster doofus, and Jonas, her JUST met step-brother.  Ren talks a lot, A LOT, and talks quickly.  He also provides levity as he isn't always taking everything as seriously as he probably should.  Jonas' mother died and his father got with Alex's mother and they see the island trip as a good chance to get to know one another.  He is somewhat of a foil since you spend much of the game with him as Alex's "sidekick".  He spends a lot of time initiating conversation for the player to respond too but his back and forth with Alex is well done.  He is a character in his own right.

There is occasional photo taking.  Part of this games weird aesthetic.  

Soon you meet the last two of the group.  Nona is probably the least developed as the shy, quiet girl who Ren has a thing for.  She's still solid though and plays that archetype well.  Then....there is Clarissa, or "Goddamnit Clarissa".  Clarissa is a bitch and it's quickly established that she has a history with Alex.  Just 15 minutes in the game, you learn Alex had another brother named Micheal who died.  You can choose to bring this up or not but the dialogue option lets the player know.  Later on in the game, you will learn the meaning of this conflict.

I bring this up because games rarely establish this much backstory in such a small time frame.  Everything we need to know about them and their dynamic with each other is established so the game can focus on A.) figuring out what is going on with this island and B.) attempting to resolve conflicts within the group.  Yes, it is contrived that a lot of this information comes from the group playing "truth or slap" on the beach, but it's a storytelling convention I'm fine with.  RPG's typically have a character mention something vague with a box popping up about "codex/journal entry added" where you can read more.  Here, the backstory is happening in the narrative of the game rather than needing to read about it elsewhere.

Oxenfree is supposedly a "supernatural thriller" which makes the tone generic creepy.  This game isn't scary, at all, but it does have the occasional jumpscare which never got me.  Ok...one got me but the horror level of this game is something akin to Tales From The Crypt, Are You Afraid of the Dark, or even The Twilight Zone.  Oxenfree is more charming than eerie, though it does have its unsettling moments.  It's more of a mystery game than a horror game.

OOOOOO.  They glow red.

The art style is not usually a style I like, the Double Fine game style (sorta), but I love it in Oxenfree.  It's a watercolor painting, Double Fine game, vague expressionism...with Poltergeist influences....if that makes sense.  The game uses TV tracking lines sometimes and glitches as scares or just general creepiness.  (It's not totally unlike Anatomy in this regard although I'd argue Anatomy does a better job with it considering each games intention with it.  Oxenfree's glitches are more to add to the creepy tone, and it's very good, but Anatomy uses glitches to instill dread and it's perfect at it.  Hard to beat perfect).  How much of the glitches and static is for general aesthetic purposes and how much is for "scary game time", I'm not sure.  Rarely, weird images will randomly pop up for a split second during these glitches but I instantly saw a number in one of them and thought, "this is cool" rather than "AHHH OH SHIT".  Not sure if that was the intention but I liked it!

They are so fast screenshots are hard to find.  Here's just regular glitch usage.

While the gameplay is mostly centered on exploring and conversation, there is also the radio that Alex brings with her.  The radio is the primary puzzle solving tool.*  It can also be used as a "walking tour guide" though the island.  It's also useful to bring it up at random because the radio will pick up weird, creepy signals.  This is everything from old timey broadcasts, to random gibberish, to actual morse code.  Luckily, you can bring up the radio at any time, allowing a more free flowing style of exploration.

*Protip: There are piles of rocks that get the main story started at the beginning where Alex brings out the radio for.  Well, the game doesn't outright say this but other piles of rocks can be found throughout the island.  I found this out on complete accident but all those other piles are worthy to bring the radio out for too.

It's not the cleverest mechanic but it's alright.

The gameplay isn't groundbreaking or anything but that isn't really the focus of the game.  The radio mechanic does start to get tiring near the end but luckily the game is only around 7 hours and mostly avoided padding.  Don't be a long game if you don't need to be a long game, ya know what I mean? The mystery story throws in a lot of twists and wrinkles to keep you engaged, as well as the inter-personal stories between characters in the group.  Obviously, a mystery story in a short game means I can't talk much about it due to spoilers, but it's really good.  Despite the answers to the mystery being pretty straight forward, something about the story always feels a little off....and wow that ending.

The game has multiple endings dependent on the player's choices through the game.  This is almost entirely on the groups relationships with each other and how you effect them.  The main story mystery ending is pretty much the same for everyone and it's soooooo cool....but maybe kind of a gimmick?  I swear other games have done this but I can't think of any off the top of my head and this aspect is too abstract to Google a list of others.  I tried.  I guess Undertale kind of, KIND OF did it but not really (I also didn't play that game.  I'm going off what I've read about it).  I know I'm being vague but lets just say the ending has a..."feature" that is absolutely great.  And also a bit sad because it makes you want to look up more, which leads to the ARG* mentioned at the top of the post, but it's over.  There are a lot of archives of it though, which is nice, I guess.

*That is NOT the only thing it leads too.

Oxenfree is a great game.  If you liked Life is Strange, this game has a lot of similarities.  It's sort of marketed as a horror game but it's not.  I know some of the pictures I used make it look like a platformer, but it's also not that.  It's just a great story driven mystery game with a charming/creepy setting.  Charming and creepy, weird combination I know.

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I will talk about the ending some more in a future post filled with spoilers.

Darkest Dungeon Review

Darkest Dungeon might be the first game I've played that convinced me that most people who reviewed it did not actually finish it or at least played it for a long time.  This is because the game has 2 minor flaws that become major flaws later in the game.  At the risk of sounding like a hypocrite....I also did not finish it but, BUT, I played long enough to actually take on the first stage of the Darkest Dungeon before realizing that I didn't want to subject myself to all this bullshit any longer.

For those of you that don't know, Darkest Dungeon is a dungeon crawler with turn based combat and perma-death.  You recruit from a randomly selected group of heroes to help retake a castle/town from Lovecraftian inspired horrors a relative accidentally unleashed unto the world.  You basically play as the town, "Hamlet", sort of like how you play as the base in Xcom*.  Upgrading your town is imperative as that can lead to upgrades for your heroes.  The early game revolves a lot around grinding for gold and heirlooms rather than XP.  It is sometimes preferential to abandon a poorly going dungeon run as you can keep loot but not XP.  Also, level 0 heroes suck and the start of this game is where most of the dying comes from.  It's not pretty.

*Yeah I know narratively you are the "commander" as a meta off screen character in Xcom.  Don't yell at me.

You will still have heroes die in completely arbitrary and seemingly broken ways later in the game too though.  This is due to the games first flaw....

1.  The Game Relies Too Much on Randomness.

And a lot of menus.  

Maybe I'm just unlucky (absurdly frequently) but enemies seem to like to gang up on one hero.  This is a problem because the game is designed to have heroes and enemies dish out a lot of damage, while also not being able to take much damage, and it is difficult to heal.  You cannot heal between battles in a dungeon unless you eat food for a pathetic amount of HP per food, or use camping abilities but you can only camp so often (and not at all in small dungeons).  I've entered a dungeon and in the very first battle, got surprised, and had all 3 or 4 attacks hit on one character who died. This happens in the early game and late game.  It doesn't matter what level you are.

Light is a mechanic in this game and having high torch light increases the chances that enemies are surprised (giving me the first four shots in the first round), a higher scouting chance (the dungeon map shows what's ahead) and enemies don't hit as hard.  Thing is, it's not impossible for enemies to still surprise you in high light, and for whatever reason, they can still land critical hits with ease.  Three hits plus a crit to even tank characters are enough to kill them.  There is a deathblow mechanic that a character at 0 hp won't die until the next attack and each character has a death resist percentage, but it rarely helped in these situations.  Also, I've read from super fans that to avoid this you should....just take it it happens.

Get killed by flags.  FLAGS.  

This means that there is a part of the game where the outcome is completely random and doesn't rely on player input.  In Xcom, the RNG never made me feel like it was completely unfair if a character died (only a little unfair).  In Darkest Dungeon, many deaths felt like there was nothing I could have done to prevent it and that's broken.  Worse, these one round deaths tend to hit the first or last character in your 4 hero lineup which tends to be a tank or a healer.  If the healer is taken out in one round...just quit.  You're done.*

*Okay.  Earlier small dungeons are completable without a healer and supposedly so are higher level ones but good fucking luck with that.

Speaking of healers, there really are only two, the Vestal and the Occultist.  I found the Vestal to be the only viable one because the Occultist's heal, non-upgraded, is 0-10 hp.  I swore I was consistently getting heals below 5 far more often than 6-10 and yeah.  I was.  I even wrote it down for a couple dungeon runs and complained on Twitter about it.  When you do upgrade the Occultist heal holy shit it can still hit for 0 or 1 or fuck.  Why is 0 hp an option especially when the heal can afflict the hero with bleed damage? I know it's like Blood Magic or whatever but common.

Always

I ran with usually a Vestal as my healer hero but due to the Stress mechanic (more on that in a second) I had to keep six of them in my barracks.  If one dies, and due to enemies ganging up on a single hero, happened too often, I can only recruit another one when the game randomly decides to give me one.  This is painful because at one point I only had two Vestals and had to wait roughly 7 dungeon runs before the stagecoach (recruitment center) finally decided to give me one instead of 1,000 Lepers.*  If there are only two healers in the game....sorry, I mean ONE healer class in the game, why aren't they a more frequent recruitment option?

*I can't stand the Leper class.  They are tanks with mediocre HP, low dodge, VERY high attack but very low accuracy.  If I was still playing this game and a Leper missed an attack just one more time I might punt my computer.

Don't be fooled.  This should say, "Miss."

Everything is so random in this game even small stuff bugs me.  Characters also have "quirks" which can be good or bad.  Most are usually specific like having high stress versus some enemies but high critical chance, being good at scouting some areas, being prone to stealing loot for themselves, sometimes eating all the fucking food, and some have slight stat buffs or debuffs.  These can change after every successful dungeon run and they make no sense.  Why did a character I used in the Ruins become good at scouting the Cove when I wasn't there?  I can trounce a dungeon run only for my most badass character to develop a negative qwirk about refusing to visit the brothel to relieve stress.  That makes no sense.

Character stats also make no sense.  How come a character with 125% chance to disarm traps fails occasionally at disarming traps?  200% is the true 100% in the game.  That's not a potential percentage that is a score.  Actually, some stats ARE a score like attack, speed, dodge, etc yet the ones with percentages are treated the same way.  Lots of games do the 200% thing and it bugs me in them too but at least some make sort of sense with anything over 100% being absorption.*  This is just dumb.

*Like, if a character has 125% fire defense, a fire attack at them would lead to healing that character.

This games claim to fame is its stress mechanic but let's be honest here.  It's just another HP bar.  0 is good, 100 is usually very bad*, and 200 is dead.  Stress is accumulated from low torch light, enemies landing crits, some enemies having attacks purely to deal stress damage, triggering a trap, and for no fucking reason whatsoever.  Stress is even harder to heal and usually requires you to pay for a multitude of stress reliving options at the tavern or the church.  Those characters are unavailable while you do this though which leads into the 2nd flaw of this game...

*At 100 stress, a character will get an "affliction" and ruin your day.  Most of these lead to losing control of the character making them choose abilities at random or skipping a turn at random.  All of them greatly increase stress in the rest of the party so you might as well abandon the dungeon if this happens early in the run.  (Late in a run, you can gamble but it will be tough going).  Rarely, at 100 stress a character will get a "virtue" instead which is awesome. They greatly reduce party stress.  This saved my ass a few times.  Always remember them.

It me.

2.  The Grinding is Out of Control.

"But Jason," you say, "it's a dungeon crawler.  They all have grinding."

Yeah but this game went way overboard.  There is very little variation in the dungeon designs, enemies are recycled way too much even though you do see some new ones at higher levels, bosses are recycled, you sometimes have to grind for either gold or XP due to the gear you need to buy instead of both at the same time, and you have a large team with frequent perma-deaths. New recruits are always level 0 (until late when you can buy higher level ones, given at random again, for an obscene amount of money) and they have the worst stress.

The stress mechanic of level 0 characters makes the grinding far worse than other dungeon crawlers because level 0 characters gain stress much faster than even a level 1.  Just starting a dungeon with a level 0 and they immediately have 20 stress.  It's like starting a stage at 4/5th's health for no reason other than to piss me off.  I guess that makes narrative sense but nothing else in this game does so why should this?  It doesn't matter if you bring level 1's and 2's with them to protect them because enemies seem to really gang up on them.  Maybe I'm just unlucky (again) but I swear this is on purpose.  Also, lower level dungeons are capped so that a level 3 character cannot go in them, but for some reason, lower level characters can take on high level dungeons.  Why in the holy hell would I want to do that?  Well...I know WHY, to level up somebody quickly, but this game is far too random for that to be viable.  It's either slow grind, or absurd gamble.

Indeed.

Because characters need to heal their stress, you need to level up many characters because it's extremely unwise to play a character two dungeons in a row.  Also, they won't heal stress idle so you MUST pay for their stress heals, which are expensive when every character needs it, so you may have to grind just to pay for that.  AND, for some reason, they might like the stress heals too much and become unavailable for several dungeon runs in a row.  Maybe I'm still unlucky but this ALWAYS happened to my higher level characters forcing me to grind with the losers for a bit.  What.  The.  Fuck?

Both of these two flaws get amplified by a third flaw only found later in the game...

3.  The Rules in the "Darkest Dungeon" Levels are Beyond Stupid.  

After a while, you learn to minimize the RNG bullshit and get efficient at grinding a bit faster.  Certain strategies let you do this....ie. ONE strategy which is kill everything in one hit.  The game makes it difficult to upgrade speed (for some reason, almost all trinkets that you can equip reduce speed or accuracy or BOTH) but not impossible.  Once you build a team that can always hit first and hit hard, no need to worry about having one character get annihilated in one round....usually.

When you take on the Darkest Dungeon a window pops up warning you that leaving the dungeon early will result in one of your characters randomly dying.  OH OKAY.  What kind of arbitrary bullshit is this?

Indeed.

I bet this was a compromise between developers.  Some wanted this area locked in so that you couldn't run away, but that meant a poorly planned dungeon run might lead to an entire 4 hero team getting wiped out, so they compromised on a punishment.  I'm only guessing at this because I can't think of any other sane reason to have this mechanic.

It didn't matter though because I absolutely recked the dungeon.  I didn't have a single character drop below 50% health and stress levels were fine if you ignore my Hellion hovering around 95 for the last 3 fights.  But then...the game drops a bomb.

After absolutely destroying the first level of 4 of the Darkest Dungeon, (which is rather straight forward and kind of like a boss rush mode for a dungeon), a window pops up saying my heroes are traumatized from the horrors of the Darkest Dungeon and refuse to go back in.  Are.  You.  Fucking.  Kidding.  Me????  I obliterated that dungeon on my first try.  If anything, the dungeon should fear me!   My best team, my A-Team, is now useless.  This means, that I need to fully level 16 characters, max upgrade them, and gear them to the teeth to finish this game.  That is ridiculous.

I already used "Masochistic"

The grinding just increased 4 fold which means I have to deal with the random bullshit much longer than anticipated.  Yes, yes, I learned how to do it efficiently but that still meant at least 20 more hours of JUST grinding to get where I want to be.  I went in thinking my A-Team would be doing every DD level, and if somebody dies, I have a full B-Team where I can promote somebody and so on.  Nope.  Plan is null and void.  EVERY team must be the A-Team now.

...This blogpost is stressing me out.

After my rage subsided, I spend a good 30 minutes just looking through my roster to build my plan.  I would max out my B-Team, then grind my C-Team, and worry about D-Team later.  My plan didn't last long.  I played one more dungeon, in the much hated Cove area....and this is where I rage uninstalled the game.

My B-Team with two level 6's and two level 5's, in the very first battle, got surprised in MAX LIGHT, and all 4 attacks (TWO CRITS) land on my Man-At-Arms and kill him, a level 6.

I didn't even get an action.  He was killed because the game decided it had been too long since I had a death.  There is no strategy to beat that.  That is fucked up.  I didn't even finish the fight.  I stared at my computer for 5 minutes, exited the game, and uninstalled.

No.  NO.  I'm done.  I've been writing this blogpost on and off for 2 damn weeks.  I'm done.  I'm rage quitting this blogpost.  No conclusion paragraph!

I don't even care.  This is my post I'll end it however I want.

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