Here’s something. One word stories. One-word stories? One Word Stories! Anyway, Jacob has been walking through the darkness for quite a while and it’s starting to get to him. The mood starts to get to him, the atmosphere, oppressive and enclosing. So he suggests to his friend Riley: let’s play one-word stories? Each of us says a word in turn, and then the words make the story.
Oxenfree 2: Lost SignalsDeveloper:Night School StudioPublisher:MWM InteractiveAvailability: Out in 2022 on PC, PS4, PS5 and Switch.
They play for one round – a silly kind of sentence emerges – and it makes him feel better. And this gets at the heart of Oxenfree 2 for me, I think. On one hand, there’s that dizzying complexity going on behind the scenes, because as Jacob’s friend Riley, you get to choose which word to say, which in turn must impact which word Jacob then chooses as a response. I close my eyes at that and see the decision tree branching out, its bright leaves filling the space above my head. What a thing! A marvel.
And then on the other hand – what a lovely bit of observation. Someone who is self-aware enough to know that a game is what they need to calm them down, to orient them. A game which – I asked – is inevitably plucked from a developer’s own experiences, so the plaiting of life and fiction continues.
I had been waiting for the one-word stories moment or something like it through a half-hour hands-off demo for Oxenfree 2: Lost Signals conducted rather beautifully over Discord last week. I say beautifully, because that itself was a surprise. I can be hands-off with an RPG or a platformer, but there is a delicious torture to being hands off with a narrative game like Oxenfree, because what you do in Oxenfree more than anything is decide what the people you control are going to say at any time, picking between two or three bubblebum choices that often appear with a wonderfully wriggling impertenence while the people around you are still saying things themselves.
Oxenfree II: Lost Signals | Announcement Trailer | MWM Interactive Watch on YouTube
It’s hard to sit that out. But the people demoing the game really know their Oxenfree, which is hardly surprising because they made the first game and are making the sequel. They picked well. The conversation flowed, as they say, and even the stilted moments were eloquent in that Oxenfree way: speaking to the experience of feeling your way around people you don’t know as well as you think you do. A success! But even so, I wanted the moment that took me across the barrier from being impressed by what a clever game this is, to feeling – feeling what an emotionally acute and insightful game it is too. And that was one-word stories.