Review: Halo Infinite

The crushing weight of continuing a big franchise, be it in TV, film or games sits heavy on the shoulders of the people building it. Time and again we see that weight be too much, and continuations of a popular work simply not being able to live up to the immense hype of such expectations - looking at you The Matrix Revolutions!

Sometimes, however, the end product meets and maybe even exceeds those expectations, and this is the case with 343 Industries and Microsoft Game Studios latest entry into the storied Halo franchise, Halo Infinite. It contains everything you have come to expect from the series, while modernizing and expanding where it needs it to give Halo its most impressive makeover since 343 took over the franchise from Bungie. 

The campaign kicks off with new character Echo 216 finding that quintessential action hero Master Chief floating in space. He picks him up, reactivates his armor and Chief is ready to kick ass and chew bubble gum but as is normally the case, he is all out of gum. You are launched into the first and most deceptive mission of the game from there, and everything is immediately familiar to Halo veterans. 

The weapons are right, the level looks like a Halo level but with more polish, the enemies are what we have come to expect, with grunts, elites, jackals and brutes all present and correct and even the sounds and quips of those enemies hitting you right in the nostalgic feels. If you take Halo Infinite based solely on this opening level, then you would be forgiven for being a little disappointed. The hype told you to expect an open world, which this definitely is not. 

You get tidbits of the changes made, such as ammo stations that refill all your ammo of a given type, such as kinetic or plasma. You get your first taste of the grapple hook, probably the single most important change to the series yet, but it isn’t until you get past this first level and head down into the atmosphere of Zeta Halo itself that you see what Halo has truly become. 

Here you find that the Banished, former Covenant soldiers that formed their own army after ‘The Great Schism’ from the original Bungie games,  have won and they have taken over the ring and any UNSC/human outposts that were created. Humanity's most badass ship, The Infinity, has been destroyed and it is up to Master Chief, Echo 216 and a new AI companion to stop them. 

The temptation with open world games is to fill the map with collectibles and icons and make sure the player always has something to do. Infinite does do this, but it doesn’t fall into the trap something like the later Assassins Creed games do and has so much stuff it just becomes a boring checklist. There is just enough on the map to keep you moving forward and, more importantly, make you feel like you are having an effect in the overall battle for Zeta Halo. 

This is down to the Forward Operating Bases, or FOB’s can you liberate from banished control. These will then unlock things to find on the map, but also provide a stock of human NPC’s you can jump in a warthog with and joyride around the map taking out random patrols and liberating other personnel or more FOB’s. It makes the world feel like you are having an effect on it and changing as you play. Does it fundamentally change the game as you progress? No, not really but its a neat addition none the less. 

The FOB’s also provide access to various vehicles dropped onto them by Echo 216, quite where he gets these from no one knows but they are useful for getting around. Not quite as useful, however, as the two best additions to a Halo game: the spring button and the grappling hook. Running around the map at a pace that befits the genetically enhanced and armor augmented Master Chief gives the game a speed that no previous Halo has managed, and couple that with the ability to fire your grappling hook to almost any surface and make your way up mountains without having to take the scenic route returns that sense of the ‘combat puzzle’ that made the original Combat Evolved so magical. 

When you do get into fights, and you will, often, Halo Infinite excels. It feels exactly how a Halo game should feel when it comes to gun play, and returning players will instantly be at home with its combination of firearms and grenades but also can find ways to integrate the new abilities such as the grappling hook, drop wall, thrusters and threat sensors. Breaking an elite's shields using your gun, watching them roll out of the way of a grenade only to take a hit to the face as you stick them with your grapple and reel yourself in will never get old. 

I played on Heroic, and while a lot of encounters were a breeze, some of the bigger bases and bosses were no joke and took more than a few attempts to get through. I felt this was the right level to play at, with the best combination of ease and difficulty spikes, though legendary still exists for those who want even more of a challenge. What I played on was definitely the best for me though. 

Without getting spoilery, the story isn’t the best Halo tale ever told, but it works and has one or two twists that were genuinely surprising, though earlier games do far surpass Infinite in this regard. The writing is well done for the most part, but the absolute worst part of the story is Echo 216. Did you find Hudson from Aliens annoying as hell the second the shit hit the fan? Well Echo 216 is worse. To be fair, he does have some legitimate reasons for this, and I have to admit the voice actor had to be very special to be that annoying, but it did get grating after a while. What's weird is that if you order a vehicle through him, he just appears with it and is all professional, there are no fun lines about it and it is a missed opportunity. 

The heart of the story is once again about Master Chief’s relationship with Cortana, though Infinite adds a wrinkle to this with new AI The Weapon. Supremely naff name aside, Weapon replaces Cortana as Chief’s companion and despite him being basically a face plate, you can see he struggles with that sometimes. Weapon is also extremely annoying sometimes, but that's more due to a childlike naivety than anything else, though one section of the game did make me laugh out loud a couple of times with her. 

The game does introduce a new, never before seen enemy in the Skimmers, and a new potential ‘big bad’ in The Harbinger. The skimmers are basically flying grunts, similar to the bug enemies of earlier games but able to use more advanced weapons. The Harbinger is introduced, she does a couple of things that are only vaguely alluded to, then you have a boss fight and that's that. Her arc sets up the future of the series, but it's not exactly something I am chomping at the bit for. 

So the campaign is generally excellent with a few annoying bits, what about multiplayer? The multiplayer is actually separate to the campaign and can be played entirely free. It has all the modern trappings of a free to play game, with a store and a battle pass, plus events that happen on a fairly regular basis. It plays great, the modes are fantastic and even if you have no interest in the campaign, play the multiplayer, it's smooth, fast and feels fantastic. 

It’s the simple things that make it such a joy, like the big red ‘X’ that appears when you kill a spartan and the sound effect that accompanies it. It’s just so satisfying, especially if you get that no scope headshot with new weapon, the skewer, probably my favorite weapon that has ever been in any Halo. 

Modes like Slayer, Team Slayer, Capture the flag and Arena return among others and each retain that classic Halo feel. The maps are generally well designed, allowing for close range fights and the use of snipers at the same time. My favorite mode is Fiesta, new to Infinite, that has no weapon pickups but each respawn you are given a random set of weapons and abilities. Getting a rocket launcher and the skewer as your spawn weapons makes for some fun times and those no scopes and double kills come thick and fast. 

Some of the voice lines that are spouted as you rack up kills, like “You’re a surgeon with that scope” and “There’s nothing more satisfying than a three round burst” just feel good to hear, and add to the fun of any given match. 

Unfortunately it's not all great, I experienced quite a lot of frame rate hitches (not helped by the fact I was streaming while playing it) and I had a couple of hard crashes to the desktop, both during the campaign and multiplayer. Sometimes the matchmaking can take an absolute age as well, and you have to be careful because trying to look at the current set of multiplayer challenges while waiting for it can result in the search being stopped for, as far as I can tell, no reason at all. 

No amount of messing with the setting fixed the frame either, though just before I finished the campaign an update was applied that seemed to stabilize it quite a lot. The worst thing about multiplayer is the cosmetic system. You can’t create a truly original Spartan, at least so far and that's a shame. You have armor cores that you can then change things like the helmet, chest piece and gloves on, but you get only certain additions that apply to that armor core, not a set that will apply to all. 

For example, I had some credits left over after getting the battle pass and so headed into the store and purchased a very cool looking black and turquoise spartan skin. The color scheme looked ace, but once I had purchased it that was that, I couldn’t change any part of the armor, nor could I apply the color scheme to any other armor cores. It was for that core and that core alone. It’s a shame cause it's a real missed opportunity and adherence to something so rigid under the already kinda of ridiculous multiplayer mode just seems off. I do appreciate that making games, and especially 3D models with the level of detail that Infinite’s does is hard, and that is probably why this decision was taken, but seeing something that would look really cool on another armor core only to not be allowed to apply it is just frustrating. 

Halo Infinite is a fantastic game, even if you only play the free to play multiplayer. The campaign, while not the best story in the series, is fantastic to play through and modernizes the Halo formula while keeping its classic feel. The Multiplayer is just satisfying to play through and has modes galore, getting hectic in all the right places and just being plain fun. The fact that Halo Infinite is on Game Pass makes it a must have if you subscribe, but even if you don’t want a great shooter, definitely check this out. 

Review: Twelve Minutes

2021 is definitely the year of the time loop. Lots of games, a few films and TV shows all showcase the mechanic this year and one of the ones that I was personally looking forward to was Twelve Minutes, the new game from developer Luis Antonio and publisher AnnaPurna Interactive. I then, unfortunately, played the game. 

Twelve Minutes is a game with a striking look, with a top down perspective set in the smallest apartment known to man and features just three characters, the Protagonist, his wife and a mysterious cop. What starts out as the, quote “best night ever” quickly deteriorates as the cop bursts in, accuses the wife of murder and eventually kills you. 

The loop resets, and its time to figure out why he shows up, why he accuses your wife of murder and exactly what he is wanting. In terms of mechanics, it is a fairly standard point and click style game with objects that can be interacted with and combined with various others and the three characters to create differing results and hopefully get to the truth of the matter. The problem is that there are enough things to interact with and logic to follow that the possibility space becomes way, way larger than what the game actually wants you to do. 

Que many hours of frustration as you constantly bump up against what you think you can do, and what you can actually do. Your brain will say that, logically, doing this with that will result in this, but what actually happens is you just receive the same bit of dialog again over and over until you finally fumble into the right interaction and move the story forward. This game is supposed to be about six hours long, but because of this problem with possibility, it took me ten. 

Some of this is down the UI, that can make it difficult to realise you need to do something else with an object or click a dialog option more times to get different results. I finally beat the game once I realised I had to click on an object I just picked up to trigger some dialog that will grant me a different path of conversation when talking to the wife and it says a lot that at that point I was looking up guides that said just pick up the object, not pick it up and click on it, almost like even they didn’t realise you had to do that. 

Twelve Minutes suffers from something that just about all time loop games suffer from: repeat dialog. Now, it might seem harsh to criticize a game with such a system for having to get the same dialog to the player over and over but with the other issues it out stays its welcome long before you can complete the game. 

It’s not all bad however. The all star cast does a stellar job with a script that isn’t exactly stunning and I honestly, without being told it was, couldn’t tell that the protagonist is played by James McAvoy and his wife by Daisy Ridley. I can tell the cop is Willam Dafoe, cause it's Willam Defoe, hiding that iconic voice is almost impossible! 

The script just doesn’t make sense at times, with reactions and dialog which can instantly throw you out of the game because frankly, people just don’t interact like that. It’s partially the nature of getting dialog recorded in different sessions, sometimes thousands of miles apart, to work together properly, but also the script just does a bad job of those interactions. It does go some places in terms of the plot though, and some are pretty wild, eliciting an out loud “WTF?” from me personally, but it definitely has its problems. 

Twelve Minutes unfortunately isn’t as good a game as its premise might suggest. The issues with the possibility space and a script that could have been so much better bring down what was an arresting idea, one that could have stuck with people for more than just the bad areas. As it stands, if you do remember this game, it will be mainly because of the extreme levels of frustration it provided. Fans of the genre will get the most of it, the rest of us beware. 

Review: Backbone

It’s very easy for games to fall foul of ‘style over substance’. The medium inherently sets developers up for this trap, as so many components make up any given game that leaning too much on one or two aspects sacrifices the substance to enhance the style, and it is a balancing act that all too often fails and leaves the game worse than it could be. 

Backbone, the new game from developers Eggnutt is, unfortunately, a Style over Substance game. It looks great with a cool jazz tinged noir theme that runs throughout, but gives way to a hard pivot into a twist that comes out of the blue with little setup and makes no sense given the world that has been created up to that point. 

You play as Howard Lotor, a private detective in a Dystopian version of Vancouver. He is also a raccoon, as this version of Vancouver is populated by anthropomorphic animals, ruled over by the apes, who are the higher class. The story sets up an interesting world of class and social issues, gangsters, drugs and all the same rubbish stuff that we humans have to deal with - just with talking animals. 

It starts off with Howard getting a fairly normal P.I case, as such post-noir stories do, with a wife wanting to know if her husband is cheating. From there, it becomes a fairly standard point and click adventure, with a heavy emphasis on talking. The dialog is the game's main thrust, and at first it seems that paying attention to what is happening really does help. Unfortunately, that feeling doesn’t last long, and you soon begin to question if you are actually affecting any conversations as while you might be able to be an arse or be nice and understanding, if at first it does seem like you have messed up it will always loop around and get the result you need. 

This is disappointing, because it makes the conversations you have feel kinda pointless, and you can just button mash through without paying attention as the game will always feed you the right thing. Once you find out there are no multiple endings, it makes it all the worse, as that would allow multiple playthroughs and make the conversations feel meaningful. As it stands, when you complete you game you feel like your time was wasted a little. 

That feeling is compounded by the fact that there is very minimal sound in the game. I appreciate that Eggnutt is a small developer, and that voice acting is expensive and beyond many studios, but Backbone is a game that could have really done with it. The minimalist sound design makes the game more than a little boring, and voice acting could have really helped with it. This is a nit pick that isn’t really the developers fault, but the other issues with the dialog just adds to the idea the game wasn’t respecting your time. 

I will say that the graphics look fantastic, with great animation for the characters when moving around and background art that really invokes the dystopian city feel. It is enough to propel you through the story, though again, those other issues do make the game's completion feel wasted.

The story itself, without getting to spoiler heavy, is weird. As I say it starts off with a standard ‘cheating husband’ case, and spirals out into a deep, conspiracy heavy and potentially world changing mission from there. The problem is that the game invoked in my head one story which would have been really cool to see play out, but that twists into a story that makes absolutely no sense, has no real resolution and the motives in the final act for some of the characters seem completely at odds with the overarching narrative on display. The game would have been so much better had it leaned into it’s early politically motivated ideas and had real, grounded characters that made sense in the world, but that twist just sends it off on an completely unneeded tangent that spoils the rest of the game. 

Had this happened, some of the genre splicing the story does would still work, it would just make a hell of a lot more sense and give a much more satisfying conclusion. It's a shame that it doesn’t because it would have made for a very cool detective story, an in-over-his-head tale in the best traditions of the thriller genre, just with a talking racoon as a protagonist. 

If you plan to pick up Backbone, do so on Xbox Game pass. It makes the sting of how it all ends and lack of multiple endings less painful. It will provide a game that looks great, but is ultimately disappointing and makes little sense. Be warned.

Review: The Medium

Marianne is a Medium. Not the kind that reads Tarot cards and scams tourists, a legit one that can see dead people and help them cross to the other side. She must use her powers to uncover the truth about not just the case she is investigating, but herself as well. This is the setup for Bloober Teams The Medium, and despite technical issues that prevent it from becoming a classic, it's one of the best horror thriller games of the last few years. 

The game’s world is dark, the main character working at her adoptive fathers funeral home and her first act is to get him ready for burial. It’s an effective tutorial of how the game works, which is to say as a modern adventure game, so it's a case of running around rooms and environments to find interactive elements and find what is required to solve a given puzzle. In terms of gameplay, the majority is fairly standard stuff that fans of the genre will have seen a hundred times before. 

It does have some twists however, and various points in the game Marianne shifts so she inhibits the real world and ‘the other side’ at the same time. This literally splits the screen in two, either top and bottom or side by side depending on how that sequence is set to play out. This gives way to the games' take on puzzle solving, as Mariannes medium powers, for the most part, can only be used on the other side. This allows her a defensive ability, an offensive ability and to have an out of body experience which shifts her onto the otherside to move independently of the real world, though this only lasts a finite amount of time. 

This is how you get past the various obstacles that lie in your path to solve puzzles and move forward, though to be honest the game does a bad job of reminding you this abilities are at your disposal, and I got stuck on a least a couple of levels because I forgot about the out of body experience ability and the game does not make it obvious that is what you need to do to continue. I am not complaining about a hint system here, this is a case of there being an in world hint to what to do, but it’s so vague that it is easy to overlook. 

It’s frustrating, though once you get used to what to look for it's better than it was, you just shouldn’t have so much trial and error to get there. The puzzles themselves are not especially difficult to figure out, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t satisfying to complete. One in particular stands out, and has you switching between the real world and the other side in order to figure out the solution. It's very clever, and is one of the game's strongest sequences. 

The split mechanic when it kicks in I have to admit is very clever and really cool. If you think of the remasters of Halo CE and Halo 2, where you can hit a button to switch to the old graphics from the new ones, it's kind of like that but both are happening at the same time. When this is a cutscene, it's quite freaky because the real world section plays out exactly the same as the otherside, but without the other character Marianne is talking to. She literally talks to, and interacts with, herself. 

Speaking of freaky, the developers' rendition of the other side is one of the freakiest things I have seen in some time. It’s all rotten and decaying versions of the spaces you occupy in the real world, with things like a collapsed wall replaced with burnt corpse’ looking down at the ground or revealing the fate of long dead characters. Walls look like they are made out of bone underneath and doors of stretched skin block your path. It's a great environmental look, but it's the characters you meant that send it all home. These will have relatively normal things like missing arms, and when I say normal here I mean in terms of what your brain understands, but also the outskin on other limbs will be twisted with holes missing to reveal nothing in the middle. Ribcages will be exposed but look grey and brittle, while this strange, almost fungal display spreads out from various parts of the body. 

It is one of the games best looking aspects and marks the talent of the art team at Bloober, though as someone who has had nightmares of freaky skin stuff since watching an old sci-fi movie as a kid, this distracted me a few times as it made my skin crawl. Which I guess is exactly the effect they were going for, and the game is all the better for it. 

At the start the game is slow, not least because someone somewhere confused ‘running’ with ‘fast walk’ which even at the end of the game feels like a brazen attempt to extend the life of the game and it is no less frustrating then than it is at the start. Literally no one on earth would move that slowly. This isn’t helped by the game's biggest design decision, one that is at this point very much out of date: Fixed camera angles. I get that the team was going for an old school adventure game feel, but those games have moved on, and the problems that come with this decision, such as directions being changed because the angle moved are all present and correct, and just as frustrating as ever. 

That said, once the story started to pick up, I was engaged more than I was initially expecting and it helped to set up a universe that I really hope the developers explore more in a sequel, as the lore starts to be developed in some very cool ways. I won’t say more than that to avoid spoilers, but the game does stick its landing excellently, its ending excellently acted and written and leaving you wanting more. 

The last thing to mention are the technical issues. I played on PC, and it recommends a gamepad to play with, and I cannot stress that enough if you intend to play. The keyboard and mouse controls are poor beyond belief, to the point using an item to cut through a skin door on the other side actually hurt my arm it took so long with the mouse. Then there are the frame rate issues. It just dropped to single digit frames for no reason I can tell several times during my play through and I have no idea why. 

I had one issue with my gamepad that wasn’t the game's fault, but when I got it fixed for some reason the look controls became inverted for no reason at all, I certainly hadn’t done it. These little things, and the frustrations around the movement speed and fixed camera angles keep The Medium from becoming a classic, but I do recommend it for fans of both horror thriller games and excellent art direction. 

It is one of the best horror thriller games I have ever played, it just takes a few hours to get there, but I cannot deny the art direction is top notch and makes the game well worth a look on its own. The fact the story gets as good as it does is just the icing on the cake, and I really hope a sequel comes soon. 

Review: Carrion

 As gamers we spend so much time going on a power fantasy where we save the helpless, mow down hundreds of lesser enemies and ultimately defeat the big bad at the end to save the world/planet/galaxy/universe that it can become somewhat rote. It’s rare that a game lets you be that big bad and rarer still where there isn’t some reconciliation at the end. Enter Carrion, where the developers decided to let you play as that big bad. 

Carrion puts you in control of a blood drenched tentacle monster with a taste for human flesh, and sets you lose in a facility full of said walking food. It is a joy to play up to a point and doesn’t out stay its welcome with a relatively short run time, but I have never encountered a game that screams for one of the most used video game mechanics in history and never gets it. 

Simply moving the monster around the map is an absolute joy, it just feels amazing to get around and the only times you can’t get to a particular spot is because you haven’t found the required upgrade yet. Yes, this is a metroidvania style game so upgrades come at a decent pace and allow you to get around easier or survive combat encounters better. 

Speaking of, the combat is slightly weird. The majority of the NPC’s are fodder, literally, and are used to replenish biomass which serves as your health. There is a morbid satisfaction to entering a room full of unarmed scientists and ripping them all apart, sometimes rolling over the scene and covering it in blood. It harks of those horror movie scenes where the monster annihilates an supposedly ‘elite’ squad of soldiers and provides some of the games coolest moments. 

As you progress, however, those NPC’s get guns. This starts with some obviously overly ambitious security guards and office workers grabbing weapons and thinking they are brave and they don’t pose too much of a threat, but eventually you get the actual soldiers and without considered use of the environment and a deft hand on the controller can prove a problem due to the forward shields they carry. These guys upgrade to flame throwing wielding annoyances and the ultimate enemy, the mech. Again though, through ability use, knowledge of the room/level and agile thumbs they don’t pose a huge problem. 

It means the game is, for the most part, a breeze to play through. As I said at the beginning it is a joy to control and it’s at its best when it goes all in on the overpowered monster loose in an underground facility trope that is the games main selling point. Unfortunately, it isn’t without its problems which is a shame because with just a bit of tweaking Carrion could be one of the year's best games. 

I said it’s great to control which is true, however, as the creature gets bigger it can get in its own way and make it difficult to move vertically. I am not exactly sure how this can be rectified, and it is a relatively small issue but it can be frustrating. Same goes for moving around in water as it can be hard to track which bit is the ‘front’ so you can end up moving in circles to get through a section. 

This size issue can cause problems with a certain type of defense system the facility has as well. This is a mine, i guess, that sticks to the biomass and is an instant kill when it goes off after a couple of seconds. They appear at set locations and while there is an upgrade that stops them killing you, it is possible to accidentally drift into their reaction zone and get killed when you don’t have the energy needed to stop it. Again, like all but one issue in Carrion, it's an annoyance more than anything. 

The main issue, and one that I don’t think any long time gamer would be able to understand why it isn’t included, is that this game needs a map. Desperately. It is ridiculous that it isn’t included given the lack of any other on screen direction other than your ability and health indicators, and given that the game is a metroidvania style game which inherently means a lot of backtracking and returning to old areas for upgrades, it is a glaring omission.

It is insane that one of the most used, and some would argue, basic video game mechanics is completely not in the game. Moreover, this was a deliberate design decision by the developers and speaks to an age old problem of “Well I can finish it without one so so can they.” I mean, to be fair you can, but not without an immense amount of moving through areas multiple times for no reason whatsoever. 

The lack of a map is Carrion’s most frustrating and disappointing aspects and I hope the developers learn from this mistake and have more respect for their audience's time in the future as the despite that one massive issue and a few niggles, it is a great playing and fun game that genuinely offers something different to the usual power fantasy. I do recommend Carrion, just be aware that it will hugely frustrate you by the end.

Review: Oxenfree

*this was originally posted on thisismyjoystick

You know how it is: Your best friend lets you know about an all night drinking sesh on a remote island, you agree, bring along some friends and a new step-brother, and of course think it will be a barrel of laughs. Then you get to the island and realize not all is what it seems, and those spooky caves feel spooky for a reason…

This is the basic setup of Oxenfree, the first game from developer Night School. It’s a heavily scripted side-scrolling adventure, with some decision-making thrown in and a good dose of artistic expression and atmosphere. It doesn’t always get it right, but as a first game for Night School, Oxenfree is a great start.

You play as Alex, a teenage girl led to Edward’s Island by her best friend Ren. Along for the ride are Jonas, Nona and Clarissa. They are all young and just want to party the night away. Unfortunately, heading into some caves creates a supernatural problem the kids have to solve.

I am trying to be vague here because discovering exactly what is going on is the entire point of the game, and I want to let you make that discovery on your own. Needless to say, things get very strange for the group very quickly, and keep getting stranger.

The interactions of Alex with the rest of group form much of the narrative, and unfortunately it’s here that Oxenfree breaks down. The writing is good enough that you know each person had a life before the events depicted in the game, each had events happen that form the person they are at the start of the game and it feels like each one has always existed, you have just happened to stumble upon their story

Where Oxenfree fails is that it gives you dialog choices for Alex based on what the other characters are saying, but each gives a slightly different tone to her voice and ultimately gives her a somewhat disjointed personality. Sure, you can get around this problem by always picking the same option (three pop at a time, left, middle, right), but that might not feel right for the question, and you are thrown out of the roleplay that Oxenfree is trying to setup.

This is compounded by the fact that characters remember certain choices you make, Telltale’s The Walking Dead style. You might be nice one time and horrible the next, but the characters don’t seem to react particularly naturally, apart from Ren in one case, but you only see the results of that at the end of the game.

It’s a strange combination of good writing and poor editing. It doesn’t completely cripple the game, as Oxenfree is still good, but I can’t help but feel keeping Alex’s story straight and removing these choices would have made for a better narrative. Still, the voice acting is so top notch that you can be drawn into the world regardless.

Oxenfree isn’t super long, I beat it in just over five hours, and this is both good and bad. It’s good because it doesn’t overstay its welcome and pad itself with irritating missions or a ton of collectibles/map markers, but bad because the pacing feels slightly off; all of a sudden you’re at the end with what feels like no real solution to the supernatural problem at hand. The last hour just feels super rushed, but I couldn’t work out if a little bit more storytelling was required or slightly better editing.

I do know that I didn’t feel totally satisfied by the ending, and though there are multiple ones, I felt like the designers were torn between wanting to offer something more and having players simply go through multiple times.

Had a new game+ option been available, I would have been more inclined to start over and play longer, but as it stands, it likely won’t be launched again.

I had only two other issues. The controls and the walk speed. The controls are set so that the cursor keys move Alex, Space is the contextual action button, Ctrl brings up the map and Shift brings up a radio tuner. This is a perfectly fine, but in order to select a dialog option when theyappear, you have to move your hand to the mouse to select one and click. When you are climbing down a hill or doing something else this can be annoying. It’s a little thing, and your feelings on it might be different, but I found it vexing.

As for the walk speed, even when running (only when the game deems that it’s okay), Alex moves extremely slow. I feel like this was a deliberate move to add tension, but it only makes the act of playing laborious. It’s not so slow that doing anything becomes a chore, but in the situation presented, it would seem like teenagers would be moving with a touch more haste.

To be fair, Oxenfree doesn’t feel scary at all, and is more a thriller than a horror. There are a couple of moments where I noticed something out of the corner of my eye, but no jump scares or any atmosphere of dread is created, so you just end up wanting to see what happens.

Visually the game does a lot with little, and again presents a island that has been there for years and will continue to be there for years after. It is simply present, and while some textures get reused a little too often, it’s not so bad that each area feels exactly the same, and with some tricks to infuse that supernatural element, Oxenfree can be a visual treat.

BUT STILL NOT SCARY?

It’s not scary at all. I would be hard pushed to find anyone who would think it’s scary, even pre-teen kids would have seen scarier stuff on TV.

It is however, a good game. The writing is really great and the voice acting enhances it to present you with a group of people who lead natural lives but are thrust into a supernatural situation. The branching story stuff might fall flat, but if you have a few hours to kill then Oxenfree is certainly worth your time.