However, the answer to said mysteries is, relatively to the sci-fi horror genre, relatively pedestrian. As a standalone episode, it has the benefit of all it questions having answers there are no mysteries like the Numbers in which the writers were just as much in the dark as the viewers for seasons on end. Oxenfree single-handedly changed my opinion on the Adventure genre, and nearly lives up to its pedigree with respect to Lost, even surpassing it in some ways.
#Oxenfree game theories series#
Lost (still my favorite television series of all time) was cited as among the major influences, at which point my purchasing decision was made, despite swearing off adventure games following repeated disappointment with The Walking Dead, Wolf Among Us, Broken Age, and Life is Strange. I followed virtually none of the preview coverage of Oxenfree. Most impressive, however, are the surreal and seemingly supernatural phenomena encountered throughout the game, whose geometric design and neon palette produce in such a truly otherworldly flair. Additionally, analogue technology informs much of the game’s aesthetics, from the various visual distortions to the synthesized sounds. It’s cool palette, watercolor textures, and disparate scale between characters and environments are all reminiscent of the upcoming roguelike Below, perhaps by way of last year’s underrated platformer Gravity Ghost. Moreover, Oxenfree is arguably the most aesthetically impressive game since Child of Light. Oxenfree combines the magic of analogue and the magic of adolescence sublimely, both working in conjunction with one another to unify its theme of juxtaposing past and future, at points in the narrative quite literally. For both those too young to know and those too old to remember, high school takes on exotic qualities of its own. It is for that reason regarded as a “magical” time in one’s life, eagerly anticipated by naïve prepubescents and fondly (if falsely) recollected by nostalgic elders. Likewise, adolescence itself is a strange juxtaposition of past and future, of childhood and adulthood. Such numinous qualities led to a strange coupling of the esoteric and the technological in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, such as spirit photography and electronic voice phenomena, a coupling which Oxenfree excels at. It’s utterly outdated in a digital age, and yet because analogue technology is advanced enough to be beyond the intuitive understanding of an untrained individual, but primitive enough to seem exotic, these seemingly contradictory attributes imbibe it with an air of magic. Standing outside a decommissioned military outpost, unable to enter one of the facilities because the doors are locked via a mechanism employing radio waves, requiring a specific frequency to be tuned in order to gain access, one of the teen protagonists of Oxenfree notes the technology to be a strange juxtaposition of archaic and futuristic.
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