Oxenfree II: Lost Signals Review (Divorcedmage)
Super disappointed in this. For a game that is essentially a walking and talking simulator, it's a problem when I *hate* the walking and absolutely dread the talking. The walking is horribly slow and there's not very many interesting sights. The only moment of genuine curiosity I had was the rift portal that can send you back to different time periods depending how you set it. Other than that... not much to see. No weird easter eggs to find, no puzzles to solve, it's a barren wasteland out there. The characters are not much better.
It's probably a bad thing that I hope my walking partner (Jacob) doesn't talk to me when I enter a new area. He never has anything interesting to say and every conversation feels like a tedious journey through countless cases of "uhhhhhh" between every three words. No hate to the voice actor, it's more about the script he's given. I can understand this during the first part of the game since he's awkward and navigating the woods with a total stranger. But after spending hours with the main character and talking to her every five minutes and enduring The Horrors, even after directly asking if they can be friends after all this (!), he never stops talking as if he's flopping during a job interview.
Worst of all, you only see the "antagonists" of this game a couple times in the whole goddamn 8 hours I played this and their motivations aren't particularly compelling. They talk a lot about a weird cult that holds a lot of power over the people of the island but it ends up being not very important. Not much would've changed if the cult was written out of the game entirely.
All this, coupled with the fact that the first Oxenfree had far more compelling characters... suspense... drama... spooky stuff... easter eggs... puzzles... that kind of thing. The walking was terribly slow in that one too, but I tolerated it, even though I distinctly recall playing it on my superpotato PC around 2017/2018 where everything was like 1 frame per every three seconds. And yet I still liked it. Play Oxenfree. Don't play Oxenfree 2.
Also wow, it's the first negative review I've ever written for a game after over 9 years of being on Steam... yippee!