First of all, do NOT play this game without playing the original. You won't have any idea what's going on. It's extremely cheap right now or you may have gotten it in a Bundle somewhere, just play it.
It has to be said that this game has a lot of the same pitfalls as the first one. Moving around is still a little tedious and standing around flicking through frequencies is sadly still present (I hoped that they would add a bit of puzzling to allow me to figure out the frequencies faster but no dice). I don't think they matched the atmosphere of the first game either, I found the horror a lot less compelling since we got a pretty good idea of how it worked in the first game. But even with that, I still loved my time here.
Dialogue is the main highlight of any Night School game, and they've made it so you don't have to be worried about cutting much of it off this time around (in the English version, at least). That problem was rife in Oxenfree 1 and Afterparty, although I will say that the dialogue in this is a lot less witty and a lot more... grounded in the characters' problems than those two games. It's here where they've made their major strides. The main characters of Night School games keep getting older, and the two fully fledged adults at the helm in Oxenfree 2 had character writing that resonated with me a lot as someone also going through that stage of life. The writing is a lot more grown up this time, and I found that it made up for the less scary atmosphere.
Oxenfree 2 certainly treads a lot of the same water as the original, and while it doesn't hit the mark in some aspects, improvements elsewhere made this a worthwhile play for me.
It has to be said that this game has a lot of the same pitfalls as the first one. Moving around is still a little tedious and standing around flicking through frequencies is sadly still present (I hoped that they would add a bit of puzzling to allow me to figure out the frequencies faster but no dice). I don't think they matched the atmosphere of the first game either, I found the horror a lot less compelling since we got a pretty good idea of how it worked in the first game. But even with that, I still loved my time here.
Dialogue is the main highlight of any Night School game, and they've made it so you don't have to be worried about cutting much of it off this time around (in the English version, at least). That problem was rife in Oxenfree 1 and Afterparty, although I will say that the dialogue in this is a lot less witty and a lot more... grounded in the characters' problems than those two games. It's here where they've made their major strides. The main characters of Night School games keep getting older, and the two fully fledged adults at the helm in Oxenfree 2 had character writing that resonated with me a lot as someone also going through that stage of life. The writing is a lot more grown up this time, and I found that it made up for the less scary atmosphere.
Oxenfree 2 certainly treads a lot of the same water as the original, and while it doesn't hit the mark in some aspects, improvements elsewhere made this a worthwhile play for me.
CrystalPixel
10 months ago