Choices echo through time in this game

Oxenfree is a narrative choice game where you play as Alex, a highschooler from a small town, going to an island with some friends for an overnight beach party. The setup has a sort of Spielberg/Hughes vibe, with a bunch of unsupervised, underage slackers getting up to some hijinks. REST ASSURED…

…that’s exactly what happens.

Alex has along a radio, and in doing a little exploring of the island, stumbles across a strange signal. In doing so, she wiggles loose the nail holding an old secret boarded up. Edwards Island, the locale in question, used to be a military base. Plenty of creepy old equipment and facilities lie outside the touristy part of the island, and Alex’s inadvertent radio contact drags her and her companions (calling them friends is an overgeneralization) into a mystery involving illicit experiments, government coverups, alternate dimensions, and the long-lasting consequences of choices.

Throughout the game, Alex and her friends’ banter is a delight. They snark and tease and flirt amongst themselves, and you get great dialogue options to join in. There’s a lot of interpersonal baggage that calls into question the wisdom of whoever gathered this particular assortment of teens on the same trip, but it’s great from a narrative perspective. And it sets up for one of the game’s main features and main strengths: CHOICES.

The entire narrative storytelling genre of games comes down to figuring out a line between the story the developers are telling and the one the players control. Obviously, the more options and more meaningful options a player is given, the more daunting the storytelling task and the more work for the coders making it all happen. Oxenfree definitely erred on the side of putting in the work and giving players loads of consequential choices the whole way through.

Your companions include: Your best friend, his kinda-sorta girlfriend, your stepbrother (whom you just met), and your dead brother’s girlfriend (the most awkward inclusion). You can look at this as a recipe for disaster or a do-to list of relationships to fix.

From a worldbuilding and narrative perspective, Oxenfree is a time loop game. SPOILERS ahead.

You have the options to fix or break most of the relationships in your friend group. You can bring your brother back from the dead (more accurately, go back and save him from ever having died). You can resolve the mystery of Edwards Island in different ways. But most importantly, when you get to the very end, you can go back and try again.

Because Oxenfree doesn’t end. It’s a time loop. And you can’t close it; all you can do is get to the ending you hoped you’d have and stop playing.

Every time travel story needs some kind of “take” on the mechanics involved. Oxenfree opts for a loop system that implies you’ll be stuck in Groundhog Day-style purgatory without ever implying that there’s a happy ending to escape into. It’s a dark take, but you can also interpret it as parallel timelines where maybe a version of Alex sacrificed herself so that a copy of her and her friends could make it out.

If you take Goonies and swap the pirate ship for a sunken nuclear submarine, Breakfast Club and strand the students on a beach instead of in school, and Groundhog Day with an analog radio instead of a radio alarm clock, you get Oxenfree.