Review for Oxenfree II: Lost Signals
It’s after midnight, and I’m trapped on an island whose daytime workers have all packed up and left for the night. I have a companion who’s keeping me company with snappy dialogue as we explore our spooky surroundings. We have a radio with us, which has proven invaluable in helping us figure out what’s going on with the eerie triangular portals that have popped up in the sky and the unsettling time loops we keep falling into.
If this setup sounds familiar, you probably played Night School Studio’s Oxenfree, released in 2016. Where that game had you following Alex and Jonas through a ghost-filled night and time loop shenanigans, Oxenfree II: Lost Signals has you doing much the same, this time with a new pair of characters named Riley and Jacob. And therein lies my biggest complaint about this sequel: it mostly feels like a rehash of the same things we’ve already been through.
I get what the developers were going for. Oxenfree was well-received and has become much beloved by fans, so I can understand why they would want to recapture some of that magic. Revisiting old tropes is also clever if you look at it on the surface since both games feature themes of time repeating and folding back in on itself. Still, I wish it felt less like déjà vu, both in terms of gameplay and story.
There are a few new aspects. Riley and Jacob, of course, are entirely new characters with unique lives and motivations. It’s nice to get to know them and piece together their pasts from the anecdotes they share with each other as you progress through the game. Night School excels at dialogue, and Oxenfree II is no exception. It’s refreshing to follow two older characters with extensive pasts and regrets instead of a couple of teenagers. Whereas the future seemed wide open for Alex and Jonas, the past constantly haunts Riley and Jacob. Each character is further enhanced by incredible, nuanced voice acting, with Jacob as a particular standout.
Another addition is a walkie-talkie that you can use to communicate with various characters as the night progresses, including a paranormal investigator, a park ranger, and a teen radio DJ. These walkie-talkie conversations are a welcome change and add a bit of freshness to the game. I genuinely loved keeping tabs on the side characters and assisting them when they needed it. The extra story beats help flesh out the island of Camena and make it feel less lonely. There’s even a romance subplot that amusingly plays out quite differently than the romance subplot in the first game.
The puzzles you’re presented with to pull yourself out of time loops are different this time around, but they still lack any sort of challenge. Oxenfree’s mechanics were fairly simple, and it feels like Night School squandered an opportunity to showcase gameplay that’s more in-depth with the sequel. It would have been nice to experience some kind of puzzles or mechanics that required more from me than simply matching shapes or tuning a radio. Radio static is guaranteed to be spooky (just look at Silent Hill), but after so much time spent turning a dial, it loses some of its initial effect.
Accompanying these simple gameplay elements is island exploration. There are letters scattered around Camena, penned by a character named Maggie Adler, a holdover from Oxenfree. While I enjoyed reading the letters and traversing Camena listening to Riley and Jacob’s conversations and the synthy soundtrack by scntfc, it felt like too much of a pain to backtrack throughout the entire island just to find the three letters I was missing by the end. Maybe if there was more to collect or additional side quests to complete, I would have been more interested, but after exhausting all of the dialogue and finishing the side quests, I didn’t feel much desire to retrace my steps.
Once you reach the halfway point, the story opens up and its connections with its predecessor become clearer, but it never quite lands in a truly affecting way. While the individual character bits are engaging, the story’s wider arc involves ground we’ve already tread and thus doesn’t grab me in the way Oxenfree’s uniquely compelling plot did. Oxenfree II adds a cult plotline but never really follows it through, giving the game an unfocused feeling, like there are too many plot threads without enough attention given to any single one. Your choices don’t hold much weight either, leading to a disappointing ending compared with Oxenfree’s bomb drop of a finale.
This is a horror game, so we’ve got to talk about the scares. Unfortunately, they aren’t as effective here as Oxenfree’s staticky ghosts, radio interference, and red-eyed possessions, mainly because, well, they’re exactly the same. There is no new threat in Oxenfree II, nothing to set it apart scare-wise from the first. We’ve seen it all before, and we know what to expect. The spookiest moment for me came from Nick, a character you interact with on the walkie-talkie. I won’t spoil it for you, but I found myself wishing for more moments like it as I played. On top of all that, we’re missing some crucial buildup. Riley experiences her first time loop almost immediately after arriving on the island. It’s a moment that should be awe-inducing and jarring, but being situated so close to the beginning of the game makes it feel almost mundane, like this is just what’s happening now and will continue to happen, and we might as well get used to it.
At the end of it all, I left Camena Island feeling underwhelmed. I enjoyed the first game so much because it felt unlike anything I had ever played. A sequel needs to have enough to elevate it from what came before, and I feel like there just wasn’t much there to do that. While I appreciated the well-written dialogue, some of the story beats, and the walkie-talkie, I was ultimately left disappointed by the lack of meaningful gameplay, the story’s overall flatness, and the rehashed scares. Oxenfree II: Lost Signals shines in its own small ways, but it doesn’t quite reach the standard that its predecessor set.
