Category: reviews

Last Train Home

~ Kathryn ~ Leave a comment

Last Train Home
https://hby.itch.io/last-train-home

Last Train Home is a short and spooky creepypasta story game. It’s free to play in your browser, and it takes about five minutes to complete. You play as a salaryman who finds himself on a near-deserted commuter train in the dead of night.

The first half of the game is set in three train cars and the two walkways between them, each of which is occupied. With the doors at either end locked, you move between the three cars and talk with their occupants, befriending them by completing small tasks.

This is all well and good until the lights go off, at which point you’re left to fend for yourself in the darkness with nothing more than a cigarette lighter and the eerie flashes from outside the windows to illuminate your path forward. Where is this train going, and how do you get off?

Just as the United States is home to countless urban legends surrounding cars, from vanishing hitchhikers to cursed highway rest areas, there are all sorts of urban legends about commuter trains in Japan and South Korea. “The last train” is a common motif in cautionary tales warning midnight passengers against accidentally boarding the wrong train or even, heaven forbid, falling asleep and missing your stop as the train continues hurtling into the night.

In contrast to the pristine coziness of trains in East Asia, there’s a New York style grunginess to the cars in Last Train Home that renders the environment unsettling and uncanny. The lighting and sound design are nicely creepy as well. There’s not a lot of text, but each line manages to be subtly unpleasant. There are no jumpscares, just a pervasive atmosphere of creeping dread. The catharsis at the end of the story is lovely, but you’ll definitely have second thoughts about running to catch the last train after playing this game. 

A Man Outside

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A Man Outside
https://litrouke.itch.io/a-man-outside

A Man Outside is a short vocabulary quiz game. This twist is that, while you play, a creepy shadow man watches you from outside your bedroom window. You’re tasked with doing three sets of ten vocab cards as spooky ambient sounds play in the background, and you can look out of the window at any time to see if the man has gotten closer. Between quiz sets, you can text a friend to update them on the situation.

I hope it doesn’t spoil this game to say that there are no jumpscares. The vocabulary gets progressively creepier, though, and there are fun distortions in the quiz interface. The vocab game itself is quite good, even without the added attraction of the creepy man. Necrophagy is my new favorite word.

Based on what I’ve seen in YouTube playthroughs, your vocab score doesn’t matter, and the choices you make in the text conversations simply add a bit of extra flavor. In order to get the true ending of the game, you have to play it from start to finish three times. There are three different vocab difficulty levels, so I suppose that adds a bit of replay value. Each run only takes about seven or eight minutes, but I don’t think the second or third ending is anything special. The alternate endings are nice bonuses for vocab flash card enthusiasts who want to try every difficulty level, but the first ending is perfect.

As an aside, as someone with ADHD, I often have to pretend that someone is watching me in order to get past executive dysfunction. I used to “have someone watch me” by going to coffee shops, but that only worked in Tokyo and Washington DC, which are beautiful and walkable and filled with cafés. Philadelphia has many charms, but it’s not that sort of city. Now, if I’m having trouble sending emails or whatever, I have to conjure an amorphous imaginary person who’s sitting in the room with me just out of eyesight like some sort of sleep paralysis demon.

So, for me, playing A Man Outside was kind of comforting. Cozy, even. Honestly, this might actually be a decent way to study vocab.

One Hell of a Maid

~ Kathryn ~ Leave a comment

One Hell of a Maid
https://bun-tired.itch.io/one-hell-of-a-maid

One Hell of a Maid is a free, ten-minute RPG Maker horror game about a young man who has been dispatched on his first assignment for an at-home maid service. Unfortunately, the apartment he’s been contracted to clean belongs to a group of cultists. Using a handy set of cleaning tools, you follow the handsome maid as he cleanses the apartment of blood on the floor, eldritch horrors in the bathtub, and coffee stains on the couch.

The apartment has three rooms, and each of them has a (very) mild jumpscare. I love the monster design, and I also love the poor maid’s no-nonsense attitude regarding the horrors he encounters. This was the only job he could get, apparently, so he might as well do it. It’s unclear why he has to wear a frilly maid’s outfit, but it’s probably best not to think about that too hard. 

The ending of the game is very sweet. When the cultists finally come home, they are adorable. The gameplay in One Hell of a Maid is minimal, but the art and writing do a lot of heavy lifting. Just like the maid himself, bless his heart.

One Hell of a Maid is not for everyone, but…

Actually who am I kidding. The appeal of this game is universal. What a fun and tasty snack.

Ender Magnolia Early Access Review

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This past weekend, I played an early access version of the dark fantasy 2D action-adventure game Ender Magnolia: Bloom in the Mist, which includes about three and a half hours of content. So far, I really like what I see.

Ender Magnolia is a sequel to Ender Lilies, a Soulslike Metroidvania published by the Japanese developer Binary Haze Interactive in January 2021. In Ender Lilies, you play as a young girl named Lily who wakes up alone in a ruined kingdom built on the edge of a much older kingdom. The blight that plagued the kingdom of the Ancients spread to Lily’s kingdom untold decades ago. As the last of a line of priestesses, Lily’s job is to purify those affected by the blight by laying them to rest. Since Lily is defenseless on her own, she’s aided by the spirits of the blighted whom she’s purified. Each boss and miniboss the player defeats contributes to Lily’s moveset, which is completely customizable.  

Although this isn’t 100% confirmed in the early access version, there’s strong evidence to suggest that Ender Magnolia is a prequel that takes place during the last days of the kingdom of the Ancients. This kingdom has clearly fallen on hard times, but it still boasts a sophisticated fusion of magic and technology that led to the creation of artificial lifeforms called homunculi. Homunculi are able to resist the influence of a magical blight rising from underground, but only to a limited extent.

You play as a young girl named Lilac who is an Attuner, a title that designates someone who possesses the magic necessary to repair homunculi and purge the influence of the blight. Where Lily purified decaying zombies in Ender Lilies, Lilac attunes renegade humanoid robots. While Lily’s purification allowed the blighted to rest by allowing them to die, Lilac’s attunement helps homunculi regain their sanity.

Since they’re still alive after attunement, the defeated robots don’t automatically join Lilac as companions. If I had to guess, I’d say that the relatively limited number of Lilac’s companions in Ender Magnolia is probably Binary Haze’s response to a common criticism of Ender Lilies, namely, that there were too many companion spirits and not enough upgrade resources to experiment or use them all effectively. Thankfully, this excess of choice doesn’t seem to be an issue in Ender Magnolia, in which Lilac’s attacks are still fully customizable but much more focused on a core moveset.

None of the minibosses join Lilac, but they’re still fun to fight, as are the challenging area bosses. Whereas there were major spikes in difficulty in Ender Lilies, Ender Magnolia seems to be more balanced and linear in terms of challenge. According to the developer notes on Steam, the full version of the game will allow the player to customize the difficulty, but the standard setting worked just fine for me. I still died a lot (affectionate) and was grateful for every character stat upgrade.

In Ender Lilies, Lily was the only living person in the entire kingdom, so she didn’t have any need for money. This is not the case in Ender Magnolia, which has a central village hosting a small shop where Lilac can buy bracelets that boost her defense and other upgrades. Money isn’t directly received from defeating enemies, but must be found in the environment or offered as a reward.

The game’s economy is supported by numerous NPCs who can be found in the central hub, as well as scattered across the map.  Some of these NPCs are human, and some are homunculi, and some seem to be visitors from the “upper stratum” of the city, like Lilac herself. The player can still find scraps of text with background lore hidden in the environment, but there are also living people directly sharing their experiences. Some of this text is relevant to Lilac, but I appreciate that most of it isn’t. As in Ender Lilies, Ender Magnolia contains a lot of smaller stories that have very little to do with the player. This world is in decline, but the player gets a sense that there’s still something for Lilac to save. She’s a very sweet girl, as is her main companion Nola, a stern but elegant sword lesbian. I’m looking forward to all the tears I’m going to cry as their tragedy unfolds.   

Like Ender Lilies, Ender Magnolia is intensely atmospheric. The primary aesthetic of Ender Lilies was ruin and decay, while Ender Magnolia seems to be more rustpunk (or whatever you’d call what’s going on in the city of Midgar in Final Fantasy VII). There’s a beautiful city above, but you begin the game in the slums, which are filthy and decrepit. When the rusty browns of this aesthetic are interrupted, such as in an abandoned castle overgrown with brilliantly scarlet maple trees, it’s a sight to behold. The sound design and music are also marvelous. To me, the way the game designers use the beauty of the environment to inspire the player to overcome challenges is the hallmark of Soulslike games, and Ender Magnolia nails this perfectly.

I keep comparing Ender Magnolia to Ender Lilies, but it’s not necessary to be familiar with Ender Lilies to enjoy and appreciate what’s going on in Ender Magnolia. In fact, I’d say that Ender Magnolia is much more accessible to newcomers, at least based on what I’ve seen so far.

Meanwhile if you, like me, have done multiple playthroughs of Ender Lilies, Ender Magnolia still feels fresh. It’s significantly different from its predecessor in ways that are fun and interesting and not just new for the sake of change.

I’m really excited about Ender Magnolia. If nothing else, not only can you pet the big fluffy robot zombie dog, but he also serves as your method of fast travel. What a good boy!!

RiME

~ Kathryn ~ Leave a comment

Rime (stylized as RiME) is an atmospheric 3D exploration adventure game released in May 2017. Its aesthetics are heavily influenced by The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, while its nonviolent gameplay is a tribute to Journey. You’d think this game would be made specifically for me, but I didn’t like it. The music and graphics are beautiful, but the gameplay is abysmal, while the larger story is almost laughably trite. What I’d like to do is try to explain why Rime didn’t work for me.

Like Journey, Rime doesn’t tell the player how things work but instead helps you figure out the mechanics for yourself through environmental design. At the beginning of the game, a young boy washes up on a deserted island, and within the first few minutes he’s given the task of activating four statues. Each of these statues is marked by a bright blue beam that serves as an obvious goalpost indicator. One statue is just off the main path from the beach to the interior of the island, one requires the boy to feed fruit to a boar so that it will move out of his way, and one requires the boy to dive and swim through an underwater passage in order to reach a small offshore structure.

Rime gently guides the player through the actions needed to achieve the first of these three goals. When the boy stands next to the first statue, the triangle button appears onscreen, showing the player how to activate it with the “voice” command. When the boy stands close to the fruit bushes next to the second statue, the square button appears onscreen, showing the player how to pick the fruit with the “interact” command. When the boy swims to the small structure in the bay, the cross button appears onscreen, showing the player how to dive using a variation on the “jump” command. No problems here.

The difficulty with the fourth statue is that it’s far away from the point of specialist action needed to reach it. Moreover, this target point is not flagged in any way. What the player is supposed to do is use the circle button (which otherwise makes the boy perform a somersault) to drop down from a cliff so that the boy hangs from it by his fingertips. He then shimmies along its edge until he can jump to another cliff before following a path to the other side of the island.

There are plenty of cliffs on the island, but most players will have learned that they mark boundaries, as jumping off of them will result in death. Climbable ledges are marked by white erosion patterns, but the player can’t see these patterns from above. Since the cliff the boy needs to navigate is so far away from the actual statue, it would stand to reason that the circle button would appear onscreen when the player approaches this particular cliff – but it doesn’t.

I therefore spent a good 45 minutes running around and trying to jump over or climb up or somersault through piles of rocks close to the fourth statue, all to no avail. I finally had to give up and resort to a video walkthrough. This sort of failure in accessible design wouldn’t be a flaw in a game that’s meant to be difficult, perhaps. Unfortunately, it’s definitely a problem in Rime, which consistently feels twitchy and stressful instead of expansive and atmospheric.

Where Rime succeeds are its striking and brightly colored landscapes, but the game forces the player to spend an inordinate amount of time in unlit interiors fooling around with finicky moving block puzzles hindered by awkward camera angles. On top of that, Rime‘s platforming elements are atrocious. The boy’s jumps won’t successfully land unless he’s positioned in exactly the right place and at exactly the right angle. Again, the camera angle often doesn’t help. The character moves so slowly that returning to the jump point is often a tedious process, especially later in the game when chains of jumps must be completed.

The narrative payoff for the platforming and block puzzles is that the player gradually learns the boy’s story. I suspected that, like other indie games in which a child must complete trials in an otherwise empty world, the boy might already be dead. If that was the case, I wasn’t sure that the emotional payoff of the game would be worth the frustration.

It turns out that the boy is in fact dead, having fallen overboard during a storm while on a boat with his father. It’s not clear whether you play as the kid’s soul making the transition from life to death or whether you play as the father imagining the kid’s fantasy adventures as he navigates his grief, but the last bit of the game involves the father walking around the kid’s room and picking up the kid’s toys, each of which played a symbolic role in the game (a stuffed fox is the fox spirit that leads you through the early stages, and so on). I am predisposed to cry at video games, but this revelation came so totally out of left field that I had no reaction at all.

I think I would have preferred a more straightforward story of a kid being shipwrecked on an island and discovering the remains of an ancient civilization. The game is structured so that the boy is able to visit the island in what seems to be different time periods. In one era, it’s lush and green. In another, it’s filled with ghosts and sand-choked ruins. In yet another, there are robots. Many of the game’s puzzles involve circles, orbits, the sun and moon, light and darkness, and other elements that suggest the cyclical nature of time. It would therefore make sense, both in terms of game design and gameplay, to have the game’s theme be the ultimate ephemerality of human achievement within the endless flow of time.

I can imagine a number of interesting endings in line with this theme. It would be cool if the boy gradually realized that he’s the heir to this ancient civilization but then left everything behind on the island so that he can go home, for instance. Or perhaps the boy might inadvertently (or deliberately) destroy everything on the island, but this wouldn’t be a tragedy to him. Or maybe the boy was sent to the island as some sort of trial or pilgrimage in order to become an adult.

At first glance, Rime seems to have a lot of potential, but I was disappointed that it isn’t more thematically cohesive. As it stands, the game feels like a waste of what could have been a gorgeous work of environmental storytelling. I’m not sure that even the most resonant of themes or the most brilliant storytelling could make up for Rime’s endless series of needlessly frustrating puzzles and godawful platforming, though. In the end, all the art and atmosphere in the world can’t compensate for a poorly-designed game that feels bad to play.

Still, I don’t have it in my heart to say that there’s nothing good or interesting about Rime. It’s not a long game, maybe only about seven or eight hours, and parts of it are genuinely beautiful and clever, especially toward the beginning. Since there’s no payoff at the end, my recommendation would be to get Rime when it’s on sale and enjoy it until it stops being fun.

Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture

~ Kathryn ~ Leave a comment

Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture is a first-person walking sim set in the fictional village of Yaughton in the west of England. Yaughton is completely deserted, and the player’s job is to figure out what happened. “What happened” turns out to be a combination of things, none of which is ever properly explained, but what really matters is the human drama at the core of the crisis.

The game is entirely first-person, and the player can only do two things: walk and look around. There’s also an action button that can be used to turn on radios, pick up ringing phones, and enter open doors and gates, but we never see the player character’s hands. The player is thus little more than a moving point of view. This is just fine, because Yaughton is gorgeous.

After climbing down from the hill where the game starts, the player is confronted with a jumble of buildings and several intersections. Since you can go into almost every house, not to mention every house’s backyard and garage and garden shed, it was difficult for me to resist the temptation to do so. I kept encountering radios that can be turned on to get a bit of story, as well as shimmers of light that resolved into stylized representations of people sharing brief conversations.

Despite the lovely scenery, the first bit of Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture is fairly stagnant. The front end of the game is loaded with tons of disconnected characters whose relationship to each other isn’t immediately apparent. The light shining on the world is totally flat, and there’s no wind moving the leaves in the trees or blowing garbage across the streets.

After almost two hours of wandering around and trying to figure things out, I stopped caring about finding everything and decided to follow the glowing comet of light that’s intended to lead you through the story. What the guiding comet reveals is a series of conversations centered around a priest, Father Jeremy Wheeler, who was trying to come to terms with his faith in relation to what was happening to the town. Following a climactic scene, the game changes in a significant way.

At this point, Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture becomes much more structured. The player now understands that each area of the game is the stage for a narrative focused on one character. After the first major transition, the world of the game also becomes more active, with floating pollen, falling leaves, swaying flowers, billowing air-dried laundry, and the shadows of wind moving through the trees. As the natural world comes to life, the pieces of the story gradually start coming together.    

Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture isn’t perfect. The start of the game is extremely slow, and it’s easy to get lost at first. The guiding comet has a tendency to disappear, requiring you to restart the game to bring it back, and the slow pace of movement makes backtracking feel more annoying than it should be. Still, the graphics and music are beautiful – rapturous, even – and I was moved by the writing. If you’re patient enough to follow the story to its conclusion, your reward is an almost overwhelming sense of joy.

I should mention that I enjoyed Kirk Hamilton’s write-up of the plot (on Kotaku here), which poses many interesting questions and offers some excellent answers. The apocalyptic story seems more grim and horrific when summarized in writing than it does when you’re playing the game itself, though, so I’d recommend going in without spoilers.

Rental

~ Kathryn ~ Leave a comment

Rental
https://smarto-club.itch.io/rental

With the spooky season upon us, Smarto Club decided to take a break from being wholesome and turned spooky with Rental, an eerie game about the risks of renting beach houses.

Rental is a 32-bit game about a family of cute bunnies who rent a vacation house in the woods. This isn’t a horror game, necessarily, but it’s strange and lowkey creepy. It takes about fifteen minutes to finish, although it might take slightly longer for people who are out of practice with PlayStation One style 3D spatial navigation.

As the daughter of the bunny family, your job is to walk through the house and collect objects. The twist is that there are House of Leaves shenanigans going on. The first half of the game takes place aboveground, while the second half is more of an adventure. There’s a shadow monster in the house with you, but its appearance seems to be random. I only saw it once, briefly, during my second playthrough, and it wasn’t a big deal. Rental is much more atmospheric than scary, and most of the atmosphere has to do with the ambient music and the oddness of the scenario.

Rental works well as analog horror. The graphics and gameplay and washed-out colors feel super outdated, as do the Hello Kitty character designs. There’s also the combination of the nostalgic childhood experience of going on vacation with the childhood discomfort of trying to settle into an unknown place. The house you’re exploring has a standard layout and floorplan, and the girl often comments on how normal and unremarkable everything is, which adds to the sense of the uncanny.

The Christian religious icons the girl has to gather are also totally normal. For me, this created an extra layer of resonance in the sense of going to a mundane place with a lot of Christian art and imagery and feeling that everything is slightly weird about the oddly suffering men and oddly beatific women and oddly mature babies. I appreciate the girl’s no-nonsense attitude toward everything in the house, which makes the ending all the more amusing.

There are no jumpscares in this game, and it’s not challenging. Rental is a simple but spooky fifteen-minute treat for connoisseurs of perfectly normal houses that are ever so slightly larger on the inside.

Inside

~ Kathryn ~ Leave a comment

Inside is a 2.5D puzzle platformer originally released for the Xbox One in 2016. The near-future dystopian sci-fi setting contains strong elements of horror, and players should expect to experience numerous violent deaths. The game takes about four hours to finish, although a longer completionist run that involves accessing hidden areas will be rewarded with a secret ending.

You play as a ten-year-old boy, and you begin the game alone in the woods. The boy has presumably escaped from a shadowy research facility, and he’s being chased by dogs and men with guns. The boy will be killed if he’s spotted, so the player’s initial goal is to move to the right side of the screen while evading capture.

After the boy escapes from the woods, he emerges onto a farm littered with the carcasses of parasite-infested pigs. It’s here that the game introduces its central puzzle mechanic, which involves using a headset to control the mindless bodies of adult humans. When the boy makes his way out the farm and into a decaying city, it becomes clear that these mindless bodies were once marketed to the general population before the apparent collapse of human civilization.

Inside eventually finds its stride, but the puzzles at the beginning of the game have the potential to be frustrating for a first-time player. In order to progress through one of the barns on the farm, for example, the player has to backtrack to the left in order to open the barn’s back door. Opening this door allows a gaggle of chirping chicks to enter the barn.

The game has never previously asked the player to move from right to left, and there’s no indication that the chicks exist other than a faint chirping on the other side of the barn’s back door. It’s therefore not immediately apparent that these chicks are a necessary element to solving a puzzle that already has half a dozen moving parts. The game becomes much better about broadcasting puzzle solutions as it progresses, but it might be necessary to consult a walkthrough at the beginning.

The first quarter of the game also features another type of frustrating puzzle that involves crossing long distances to escape from attack dogs. If the boy dies at any point during one of these sequences, the player has to start over at the beginning, thereby losing up to six or seven minutes of progress. Repeatedly playing through one of these sequences only to fail at the end isn’t fun.

Thankfully, Inside becomes much better at managing respawn points after the boy leaves the farm. Many of the game’s later puzzles involve a combination of careful timing and brutal death, but they allow the player adequate space to stand still and assess the situation.

Tiny birds and bloodthirsty canines aside, Inside is visually striking from start to finish. The sound design is brilliant, and the audio works alongside the graphic design to create a palpable sense of danger and menace. Unlike Playdead’s earlier game Limbo (2010), which was more abstract and fantasy-themed, Inside is grittier and more focused on portraying a disturbingly realistic apocalypse.

As I played Inside, I could envision its story evolving in two ways. My first theory was that the boy is a host for the same parasite that killed the pigs on the farm; and, if he escapes into civilization, the infection will spread and the world will be doomed. My second theory was that the boy is being controlled just as he controls the mindless bodies; and, after he accomplishes his mission, he will be unplugged.

The actual endgame story developments are nothing even remotely resembling what I expected. Instead, Inside gradually transforms into a meditation on bioethics and subjectivity that’s all the more striking because of the player’s interaction with the story. I’m still not sure how to interpret the ending, but the path to get there involves one of the biggest ludo-narrative surprises I’ve ever had the pleasure to encounter. I usually don’t have any patience for concerns over spoilers, but I’d recommend going into this game spoiler-free. The ending of Inside genuinely has to be experienced to be believed.

Oxenfree

~ Kathryn ~ Leave a comment

Oxenfree is a horror-themed teenage friendship drama conversation simulator set on a haunted island in the Pacific Northwest. Originally released in 2016, Oxenfree is available on all consoles, and it takes about four and a half hours to finish the story.

You play as a teenage girl named Alex who takes the last ferry out to Edwards Island with her pothead friend Ren and her edgy stepbrother Jonas. They plan to spend the night on the beach, where two girls named Clarissa and Nona are waiting for them with a cooler of beer. There’s an urban legend that old-fashioned transistor radios can pick up strange signals on the island, and Ren leads Alex and Jonas to a sea cave where the signal distortions are rumored to be strong. By tuning into the radio transmissions, Alex ends up opening a portal to a parallel dimension.

I really enjoyed Oxenfree, both when I first played it and when I revisited it earlier this year. The graphic design is gorgeous, the OST is ambient and chill, and the elements of horror are genuinely creepy. The story of Oxenfree is intriguing, and walking across the island while navigating Alex’s relationships with the other characters is a fun and interesting experience.

Still, as a game, Oxenfree suffers from two major problems.

The first of these problems is that Alex walks very slowly. This makes sense, as a major element of gameplay is choosing Alex’s response in real time during ongoing conversations. The relaxed speed of travel also encourages the player to enjoy the scenery and the ambiance. Unfortunately, backtracking is a slog. The frustration engendered by Alex’s sluggish walking speed is exacerbated by the fact that the load times between screens are obscene, usually exceeding sixty seconds. As a result, I felt strongly discouraged against unguided exploration.

In order to uncover the full story of what’s happening, the player needs to embark on a scavenger hunt to collect a dozen letters scattered across the island. Because of the slow character movement and unbearable loading times, I had to give up on finding the letters myself. I was reduced to searching for spoilers online, which isn’t ideal.

As far as I can tell, a Cold War era submarine somehow managed to get itself caught in a dimensional paradox just offshore, and the Edward Island’s “ghosts” are the manifestations of the sailors trying to free themselves. These ghosts are secondary to the main story of Oxenfree, which is about the relationships between the teenage characters.

Although I think the friendship drama might have been more compelling if I had encountered the game at a younger age, Oxenfree’s second major problem is that its writing feels strange and awkward, at least to me.

I really wanted Alex to spend time with the two other teenage girls on the island. I like Nona and Clarissa a lot. I found them to be interesting characters, and I wanted to know more about them. Unfortunately, Oxenfree doesn’t give Alex many dialogue options to interact with either girl that aren’t petty, condescending, or downright bitchy. This isn’t the way that normal people talk to one another, even if they’re teenagers.

It’s clear that Oxenfree expects Alex to spend the majority of its playtime with Jonas and Ren, both of whom tend to respond poorly if the player chooses conversation options that don’t read as stereotypically “masculine.”

To give an example, after something terrible and upsetting happens, Jonas tells Alex that he’s scared. If she demonstrates sympathy or empathy by responding with “Are you okay?” or “I’m scared too,” Jonas will become annoyed or openly hostile. Meanwhile, the uncomfortably callous response of “You’re fine, let’s keep going” is configured as “correct” and doesn’t result in a string of passive-aggressive insults.

There are several different variations on Alex’s personality that the player can choose to express, but Oxenfree doesn’t give the player many opportunities to be chill, or friendly, or sincere, or emotionally vulnerable, or just curious about what’s going on. Each conversation choice generally has three options, but there’s always an additional option of not saying anything. As I played, I gradually found myself “choosing” not to say anything, especially not to the boys.

In other words, the opportunities for roleplaying the character of Alex are limited. I don’t think Alex is supposed to be unsympathetic, but the writer/director’s understanding of how interpersonal communication works feels very specific to a personality and worldview that I don’t understand. The portrayal of these teenagers – especially the teenage girls – is just so mean. The voice actors all give wonderful performances that help the player better understand the characters, but I wish the writing were as nuanced as the acting.

Granted, Alex ends up being the villain of Oxenfree II, so another interpretation might be that she is in fact a bad and selfish person who doesn’t care if she hurts people. If this is indeed the case, though, I wish that the writing had signposted her personality more clearly, or at least given more concrete hints regarding how the true nature of the situation on Edwards Island has affected her character.

Oxenfree has been universally praised, and I’ve even seen people refer to it as a “cozy game,” meaning that it presumably creates a sense of warmth in the player by being unchallenging to play while focusing on a story with themes of friendship and personal growth. I can understand the affective positivity of this reaction, but I also think it’s important to explain why Oxenfree can be difficult and frustrating, especially to someone playing the game in 2024.

Oxenfree is gorgeous to look at and features engaging conversation-based gameplay mechanics, but this is a horror game with slow movement speed and long loading times in which characters are often seriously unpleasant to one another. I maintain that Oxenfree is a unique and interesting game that’s well worth checking out – especially given its relatively short length – but it’s always good to have an accurate understanding of what you’re getting into.

While doing some research about the game’s reception, I learned that Netflix acquired the Oxenfree development team, Night School Studio, in 2021. Netflix produced Oxenfree II, and I read that there’s a live-action series adaptation of Oxenfree in production. This sounds nice, to be honest. Crossmedia adaptations don’t always succeed, but I get the impression that Oxenfree might actually work much better if it weren’t an interactive video game.

Giraffe and Annika

~ Kathryn ~ Leave a comment

Giraffe and Annika is an extremely chill 3D adventure story game with anime-style character designs and panel-by-panel manga cutscenes. The game takes about four hours to finish, and I suppose that whether it’s worth $30 depends on how much you value this type of experience. I played Giraffe and Annika in short stretches during the day to get a bit of emotional sunshine, and it was lovely.

You play as Annika, a ten-year-old catgirl who mysteriously finds herself on a beautiful forested island. There’s a bit of an Alice in Wonderland flavor to the scenario, as Annika doesn’t worry too much about where she is or how she got there, and she begins the story as something of a blank slate. After investigating an empty house belonging to someone named Lisa, Annika goes back outside to find a blue-haired catboy named Giraffe waiting for her. Giraffe tells Annika that she has special powers, and he asks her to visit three dungeons on the island in order to restore starlight to a magical pendant.

The dungeons are themed open-air environments inhabited by roaming ghosts that will drain Annika’s health meter if they get too close. Thankfully, the dungeons are also filled with numerous health-restoring crystals. At the end of each dungeon is a boss battle that takes the form of a simple rhythm game. It’s possible to die from ghost attacks and other environmental hazards in the dungeons; and, in fact, I died a lot. Thankfully, save points and respawn points are so frequent that this isn’t an issue. There is zero stress in this game.

By clearing the dungeons, Annika will unlock exploration abilities such as a floaty space jump and the ability to swim underwater. She’ll also perform small fetch-quest tasks for NPCs who will help her bypass other obstacles. There are various objects that Annika can interact with across the island, but the optional collectibles are just for fun. Objectives are clearly marked, and you’ll never be in danger of getting lost or going off-track from the main quest.

The island is very lush and green and beautiful, and there’s a short day-night cycle that adds a touch of visual flair. I also appreciate the cuteness of the designs of the game’s sizeable cast of NPCs. In order to access the second dungeon, for example, you need to feed carrots to a sea turtle; and, to get the carrots, you have to round up a family of rabbits. The rabbits look like a Studio Ghibli adaptation of Beatrix Potter, and they’re adorable. Meanwhile, the sea turtle is completely photorealistic, which is a good illustration of the game’s gentle sense of humor.

It’s always a pleasure to encounter and interact with new characters, and I really enjoyed the manga-style cutscenes, which play out panel by panel. The character art is comically expressive, and the bright pastel colors are lovely.

It’s difficult to critique Giraffe and Annika, as it’s very sweet and competently constructed. Still, the main 3D playspace of the game can feel a bit textureless, and I also felt that the game wears out its welcome when it starts trying to challenge the player at the very end. I actually appreciate the occasionally amateurish design, as it fills me with a sense of nostalgia for the early 3D adventure games of the PlayStation era. Even though Giraffe and Annika sometimes looks as though it was built with out-of-the-box 3D graphic assets, it’s clear that the creators put a lot of effort into creating unique environments with a distinct sense of character.

Giraffe and Annika probably won’t appeal to someone looking for a deep story or challenging gameplay, but I can imagine that it would be a perfect starter game for its target audience of younger players. As for me, it provided a pleasant and much-needed mood boost during a dismal week in February. Giraffe and Annika is a bright and simple fantasy adventure with cute characters and no unnecessary cooking or crafting elements, and sometimes that’s exactly what you need in your life.