In a way, I wish I could give this a netural Steam rating instead of negative because there ARE many moments of brilliance reminicent of the first game scattered through out - but ultimately, I can't really think of a reason why this sequel exists, besides just wanting more of the same and if that's what you want, good on ya

If you haven't played the first game, there's no point in playing this, because it relies heavily on events from it, while also being a much worse story/game. If you HAVE played the first one and already understand most of the mystery, did you really think an ending that intentionally and powerfully played with themes of purgatory in delicate manner needed further conclusion?

There's also a lot of technical hiccups that made the experience much more frustrating than it needed to be, which absolutely soured my mood and left me harsher than I otherwise would be. Note - there are NEVER autosave points where you'd think they would be. Let's say the protagonists are in a house and have a confrontation with people. You go through a 5-10 minute sequence, there's some gameplay, lots of dialogue etc and it's eventually wrapped up. The other people leave and our protagonists have a moment where they decide where to go next and exclaim that they should start heading over there now. You would think that's a decent place to quit the game - but nope, I had to redo the entire previous sequence :( now imagine this happening again lol

That's also not counting the handful of sequences I had to redo because things bugged out - like characters no longer being able to move. When I restarted after that, a radio conversation I had just had with Olivia never played? I had Jacob get stuck running in place at one point. Radio conversations reset themselves sometimes. Characters would ask questions they'd already asked before or knew the answer to. Certain action prompts like climbing ropes occasionally feel sticky - once I was required to stand in a pixel perfection position to climb a rope and I was like ohhh my god no dont tell me the game has bugged AGAIN (and at least this one time it hadn't)

The story and characters are....kind of a complete mess? Not an entirely bad mess, I'll grant you that. Riley and Jacob can be quite enjoyable - although, the relationship between them isn't super balanced, as Jacob will be the one that speaks/rambles while Riley interjects a lot less. It makes a lot more sense if you think of Jacob as having ADHD, which he's quite hard coded as imo. But anyway, I noticed this has already been pretty decisive in the other reviews. There are other characters scattered about on the radio who range from enjoyable and interesting (Nick!) to not really anything to uhhh well I completely missed one of them apparently lol

The story unfortunately didn't click with me, mostly because the antagonists are either 1. just stuff from the first game, which I'll admit is still really cool but also nothing new and 2. these really really boring and dull hollow teenagers. I'm not surprised that 80% of players let Olivia stay behind because why the fuck wouldn't you lol? She's a nothing character and WANTS it. We really don't interact with her much over the course of the game and the moments she is nice are so shallow and quickly over that they leave no impact, meaning it's a disappointingly easy choice. When I realized where things were going, I stopped picking dialogue choices and just let Riley be silent to avoid Olivia changing her mind lol

I just sorta feel like I was being pulled along for the ride with the plot, probably not helped by the main structure being "okay we need you to go to these 3 places to put down things and doing that will probably fix everything!". I just would have liked a bit more motivation and personal investment in things, I guess

So at one point, Alex and characters from the first game show up and fair play, it's initially really cool!! but then Alex just kinda immediately cowards out of her initial menacing demenor and is suddenly on our side? And it's just really whiplashy and undermines the point of her being here, basically relegating her to fanservice support piece imo

I realize this is a Me Being Dumb thing but I also found navigating the island so fucking tedious. I got lost a few times and having to backtrack with mildly slow characters with mildly finnicky button prompts really took it out of me. Listen, Jacob spending 10 minutes talking about his favourite yoghurt or whatever might be boring as shit, but it beats the long stretches of empty silence I got while backtracking across the map lol

The thing with a game like this, I ended up googling "oxenfree 1 plot summary" about a quarter of the way in to refresh my memory on some things and upon reading it, I was like "oh man, the first game did have a really fucking cool mystery....I wish this game had that". When you, as a sequel, rely so heavy on the first product, you're inviting the audience to make comparisons, which is a dangerous game because it's very easy for them to end up wishing they were playing that instead. In fact, I think this might've ended up stronger with less ties to the original game, where it could stand more on its own merit

I did really wanted to enjoy this - the beginning is really strong!!! the spooky moments are awesome!!! the visuals/audio are generally great!! but in terms of cohersion, "mess" is the only word I have to describe it