You can even just leave the radio on whenever you want, listening to the static or the occasional bits of jazz, country, ragtime and other types of music that can be found on the dial. Most of your interactions with the island will come through the radio dial-when Alex encounters strange lights or unexplainable phenomenon, you can pull out her radio and scan the FM band for a frequency that will react with the weirdness. Early on Alex unlocks some sort of eldritch evil with her portable transistor radio, and in trying to contain it you learn about both the island’s and Alex’s history. Yes, bad things will happen to Alex and her friends. Quippy but rarely clever, and occasionally inarticulate in a particularly teenaged way, they feel like real people, even when they’re hovering several feet off the ground with glowing red eyes and voices that stack and reverberate like a Space Echo pedal. They’re mostly idle suburbanites, white and well-heeled despite their indie affectations. They talk in naturalistic dialogue that only occasionally seems to try too hard, in voices that largely sound like real people and not slick, professional voice actors. We meet a best friend, a new step-brother awkwardly fitting into this new town, and a mean girl who once dated Alex’s brother-a brother you quickly learn is now gone, drowned a year before. You play as Alex, a girl who, depending on our dialogue choices, can be snarky, kind, enthusiastic or sullen. It’s a horror story set on a shuttered island military base turned into a tourist beach where rising seniors from the local high school go to party before the new school year starts. YA, of course, stands for young adult, and that is who Oxenfree is for and about.
Like the first book in a YA fiction series, it creates a world but only colors in a small corner of it, leaving questions and mysteries for the future. Oxenfree arrives with its own internal mythology, a history that is slowly rediscovered as you play, with well-defined characters and a strong sense of place. It makes sense that somebody would want to extend this story out past this one single videogame. The less you know about Oxenfree before playing the better. Hopefully whatever attempts are made to turn Oxenfree into a tiny empire don’t distract or diminish from the game that comes out today-it deserves to be found and played on its own terms, without the weight of expectations from tie-ins from more prominent forms of media. A few days after I started playing Oxenfree a press release showed up in my inbox to announce that the creator of The Walking Dead was going to turn this “IP” into “multiplatform entertainment.” So Oxenfree books, comics, TV shows, perhaps even movies are a possibility, all under the aegis of a guy who knows about his multiplatform entertainment.
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