Oxenfree 2 Preview: Hands-on at Summer Game Fest

Bury me where you can’t see water.

A girl awakens disoriented on a storm-ravaged dock. A man’s staticy voice crackles through a walkie-talkie with ominous warnings. A woman makes a disturbing request through a tear in time.

This is the opening couple of minutes of Oxenfree 2 Lost Signals, and it’s about as far from the breezy and inviting intro featured in its predecessor as a sequel could possibly get.

We are quickly transitioned to a new scene where the same girl is now snoozing at a bus station amidst a few small shops, and it’s here that we’re properly introduced to our protagonist Riley as she’s quickly awakened by the buzzing of a walkie-talkie that’s sitting on the bench next to her. The walkie is a new frequency-cycling gameplay tool that sits in addition to Oxenfree’s radio.

Riley’s a little disoriented, but the welcoming voice of her new boss Evelyn is quick to bring her to focus and attention.

It turns out that today is Riley’s first at a new job working for a government-contracted research lab. She doesn’t seem to fully know what she’s signed up for, but Evelyn is quick to fill her in. All she’s tasked with doing today is meeting up with her new colleague Jacob, and going with him around the small coastal town of Camena planting transmitters so that the lab can better monitor a series of bizarre, disruptive radio transmissions that have been happening in the area of late.

Of course it isn’t going to be that simple. The general store where you’re supposed to collect your hiking and climbing gear is closed, and Jacob is making a futile effort to repair his broken down truck when you come upon him. The terrain outside of town is a mountainous wilderness, and Jacob’s insistence that the two of you went to high school together doesn’t register any clear memories.

As Riley and Jacob steadily ascend to one of the island’s cliffs to plant the first transmitter, the unmistakable landscape of the prior game’s setting of Edwards Island draws into view a relatively short distance away. A strange green stormcloud hangs above it, and as the transmitter is planted and aimed at the cursed place, Riley and Jacob are bombarded by a cacophony of chaotic signals as Evelyn panics at them over the walkie. It’s here where our demo ended.

Oxenfree 2’s gameplay will be instantly familiar to those who played the original. The focus is still firmly on conversations between characters, and the banter is just as naturalistic and wonderfully performed as that of its predecessor. As with the first game too, different responses and interactions with the environment will alter the relationship other characters have to Riley and each other, which will ultimately deliver variations on Oxenfree 2’s ending.

The biggest frustration I had with the original by far was that it was entirely too easy to make multiple conversations occur over the top of one another, and I am very glad to see that the team at Night School Studio seem to have done a good bit of work to address this problem. In my short time with the demo I consciously tried to break the discussion at hand by clicking on environmental objects and such at multiple points, and on most occasions the other character would simply resume what they were saying after the interruption with an ‘as I was saying…’ or the like thrown in. Conversations don’t entirely cease when you leave an area and enter a new one anymore either which is excellent to see too.

The new island environment where the sequel takes places appears to be a good bit larger than that of the original. Obviously, there wasn’t an opportunity to freely explore all of it in the half hour I was given starting from the game’s beginning, but the in-game map does appear notably bigger with more locations on it. The increased density does mean that the map itself is a bit harder to read than the previous one which is unfortunate, and notes directing you to specific locations are often completely unnoticeable without zooming in and panning around in search of them. It’s hard to know for sure without having the full map unlocked, but Camena does appear to be a little more interconnected on the whole than Edwards Island was too.

Fundamentally, it’s more Oxenfree. If you’re one of the many who loved the original then you’ll feel welcomingly right at home here. The visuals are still stunning and the dialogue is just as well written and delivered as before. If you struggled with the originals pacing a little as I did then the fact that Oxenfree 2 lays on the supernatural spookiness and X-Files-esque plot hooks much earlier will likely be an appreciated change. The wheel isn’t being reinvented, nor should it, but the clear addressing of quibbles which prevented me from entirely clicking with the first game has got me more excited for the sequel than I honestly thought I would be.

Night School and its publisher Netflix are saying that the sequel is fully standalone and won’t require players to have experienced Oxenfree, but as reference to central characters from the first game are made before our new protagonist is even introduced, I have no doubt that players with firsthand knowledge of the prior entries story will get a lot extra out of it. Whatever the case, we won’t have to wait long to find out, and I’m quite glad of that fact.

Oxenfree 2 Lost Signals is scheduled to release on 13 July on Windows PC via Steam, Switch, PS4, PS5, and via Netflix.

Oxenfree 2 Lost Signals 13 July 2023 PC PS4 PS5 Switch   Buy on Windows PC via Steam Buy on the Nintendo eShop