- Tested on PC
- Test configuration: RTX 4090 + i9-9900K
- Game finished in about 5 hours
- Unlike the first Oxenfree, the optionsOxenfree II allow the volume of dialogues to be adjusted independently of that of music: finally!
- The game offers different ends depending on the choices made during adventure...
- 1 nautical mile = 1852 meters
In 2015, it was not only the legislative elections in Azerbaijan, the entry into force of the Eurasian Economic Union, the assassination in Moscow of Boris Nemtsov or the landing of Marty McFly to save his children. No, 2015, it was also the year of the release ofOxenfreedeveloped by Night School Studio. The Californian team, today under Netflix, returns with Oxenfree II: Lost Signals. Is this suite worth it?
Radio, some still loves you
ActionOxenfree II: Lost Signals takes place five years after the events of the previous game. Riley, a field scientist who has just taken up office, has just returned to her hometown of Camena for a research mandate. His mission? Help his colleague Jacob study the radio anomalies detected on the island by installing transmitters along the coast. Barely Riley and Jacob set up the first device that a dimensional portal opens over Edwards Island, where the original title was going, a few miles away! Our heroes are suddenly victims of hallucinations and start wandering through time loops...
As you can see – and without disclosing anything – the pitch is in the continuity of the story ofOxenfree, released seven years ago already, and which proposed an certainly open but rather pessimistic end. So we find ourselves wandering again in sublime forest decors with a pictorial style of the most beautiful effect, radio in hand, juggling between frequencies to communicate with the beyond and unlock our progress.
The conversation system, walking/talking simulator (understand that the dialogues take place in real time and that one answers the fly among three predefined answers without it coming to interrupt our peregrinations) always works perfectly. As for music, they are effective, even though we regret the absence of such striking themes as sibyllin. Beacon Beach of the 2015 game to mention only this cottony piece with felted tones.
The real change that followed was the age of the protagonists, about 30 years. If it seems minor to you, misunderstand, because it changes everything. Yes, finished (in the end, almost) the jeremiades, the mockery and the immature apity of the teen band badly in their skin of the first episode!
In Oxenfree IIRiley and Jacob already have a certain background of life and sufficient setback to express their emotions roughly correctly, rather than concealing each state of soul behind an indigestible layer of jokes intended to mask their discomfort, as did the fairly stereotypical teens of the original.
Trier of chatter
The narrativeOxenfree II Mainly addresses the classic themes of regret, remorse and mourning, but also self-assertion and social determinism. If the game surprises us from time to time by its correct writing at the detour of one or two well-sung replicas, it unfortunately ends up systematically drowning this ephemeral prowess in an excess of dialogues which, in the long run, harm the feeling of empathy that one might nurture towards these little characters, already so far (too?) distant from the camera. This constant stream of words serves the player's immersion and propensity to introspection.
One would indeed have liked to have benefited from longer beaches of silence to meditate on the existential issues raised by the story, as so well did the upsetting What Remains of Edith Finch, a true masterpiece, who told his family stories both through his narrative and through his gameplay. J How We Know Alive, who had been able to move through his treatment of the subject of prejudice, on the background of his return to the country after an expatriation.
Despite these flaws, Oxenfree II Nevertheless, it remains a solid continuation, although paradoxically frustrating, the fault of untimely chatter that hides unsaid and, as a result, all the feelings that, in real life as on the screen, sometimes burst between words.
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