Clarissa has it in for Alex from the get go, answering her every question with snark and being critical of Alex's decisions deeper into the story you learn why Clarissa is so mean to Alex, and the answer is more sorrowful and cut and dry than Oxenfree initially leads you to suspect. His polar opposite is Clarissa, bratty, impatient, and rude to Alex at every opportunity. There's also Ren, Alex's best friend, who is impossibly nerdy, talks a little too much, and can't handle his drug-infused baked goods. You control Alex, the group's de facto leader, whose demeanor has a lasting impact on the story's path and the fate of her friends. Oxenfree does an excellent job nailing the awkward dynamic of teenage friendships by providing a cast still largely figuring out what kind of people they want to be playing the game feels like watching the cast of The Breakfast Club act out Poltergeist. The feeling goes beyond the burst of anxiety you get from a jump scare it's a chilly, abrasive feeling that permeates the entire experience, and it left me mentally ragged and raw.

The tension built through sound and sight in these segments makes for genuine discomfort, and adds another layer of emotion to Oxenfree's sad, sinister tale. The sound escalates to an anxious high volume and then suddenly breaks like a wave on shore-and you're left with the consequences of your meddling. As you fiddle with the radio the screen distorts, sometimes revealing something otherworldly lurking nearby, and you hear a cacophony of music and scratchy vocals. Use of the radio and tape players is where Oxenfree's masterful audiovisual work really resonates. The second mechanic involves winding up an old-fashioned tape recorder-also accompanied by mangled audio-and finding the correct speed at which to play the music.

These tuning segments are accompanied by unsettling audiovisual cues a garbled mess of static and satanic voices.

One uses a radio-accompanied by a surge in sound and controller vibrations-in order to communicate with the mysterious entities. There are also two additional mechanics that let you tamper with the island's paranormal aspects. You engage in some light environmental puzzle solving this way in order to open up new areas and acquire useful items. Oxenfree lets you interact with the environment in a similar way to point and click adventure games some objects have a small circle above them, indicating you can examine them or pick them up. Picking apart each knot of narrative threads dragged me back for third and fourth playthroughs in an effort to unearth all of Oxenfree's chilling lore. The information I found was unexpected, and as I found more answers I began assembling a picture of deepest tragedy. In a third, I stumbled upon additional collectibles that painted a haunting picture of what the entities were, spurring me to double back on my trek across the island and dig for more intel. In another, someone in your friends' group doesn't make it with you. In one ending, you barely escape with your skin. There are a handful of different endings and directions the narrative can take, and the experience of exploring Oxenfree's odds captivated me. In order to save themselves from these entities, they must figure out who or what they are and how to exorcise them. They stumble upon something odd in the depths of a cave, and after communicating with it via radio signals, accidentally unleash a paranormal force. It begins with five teenagers visiting an island near their hometown for a raucous high school party. That is the plot of Oxenfree: someone bored and restless teases the unknown, and after poking it too much, enters a downward spiral where everything goes to hell. The exhilaration of going against something, anything different from mundane life, is why we become thrill-seekers. And while the most dangerous thing I ever encountered was asbestos, it illustrated for me why we seek the unknown, even when aware of the danger. I was a dumb teenager, driven by curiosity and a confidence in my immortality. Oxenfree reminds me of those nights in dark, weird places. I trekked through dark rooms in middle-end hotels and strangers' houses, guided by the small green light of an electromagnetic field detector. During my college years, I went on a few ghost hunts.

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