January Assassination #3 (Backlog / PoP pick)
Please consider liking my review on Steam - it means a lot to me!
This is my first time playing a text-heavy, choices-matter kind of game, and I loved it. Although I never played a Telltale game in the past, I know Oxenfree devs used to work there, and it makes me very excited to play more games in that vein in the future.
It's not only about choices mattering - it's all about how natural and flow-y the conversations felt. No long videogame silences in the middle of a conversation, just a bunch of teenagers doing what teenagers in the US do and reacting to unexpected events in a hearfelt way. I've seen a lot of people complaining about how sometimes your choice of dialogue interrupts other people - which feels a lot like real life to me. Or how the game gives you very little to choose from and develops from there - again, which feels like what happens in real life. By taking these mechanical quirks (that some people might see as bugs, but I see as features), this feels less like a videogame and more like an interactive novel, which is something very refreshing to me. There are some minor mechanical interactions with your radio, but that's almost always a secondary mechanic to the primary mechanic of conversation as a problem solving tool.
Besides all that, you have incredible hand painted art, superb voice acting, and moody/atmospheric music that fits the vibe incredibly well. It's the full package. Maybe a bit short overall, but any longer and it would start to drag. $10 for this game feels super fair.
Going in blind and playing the game in a compressed timeframe (ideally one sitting, but at 4-5 hours that becomes a little hard) is the ideal way to savor this experience, and I'm very grateful for that.
PS - I've also seen people give thumbs down to this game because "it's tedious to play it four times for all the endings." Let me just remind these people that you don't need all the endings. You don't need all the achievements. It's your life and your time, and you have the option of enjoying a good story once or turning it into a chore four times. But don't blame the game on that, blame your life choices.
I also really liked that you need to interrupt people to make a dialogue choice. As someone who loves to listen to dialogue, my initial reaction was to be upset, so i can understand where the complaints come from, but after considering it a bit more, i think it gives the whole conversation a much more natural feel, as that’s often how they sound in real life.
There is also, the very easy counter to the complaints: “just say nothing then - silence is always an option”, which is advice usually stated by these games, but not often taken by the players, which is curious to me. I guess when a choice presents itself, the impulse to choose something is too great.
Anyway, i enjoyed Oxenfree a lot, and still think about it a lot (i’m even one of those freaks that played it over and over for every ending)
Completely agree - it’s hard to find a game where conversation feels as fluid as this one, and I appreciate it for it.
I ended up using silence as an asnwer many times when talking to Clarissa lol at the beginning she’s such a bitch that I didn’t think she deserved answers lol
I’m definitely watching a lot of explainer videos to make sense of the story. It’s a lot presented in a very compressed timeframe