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That reveal was something I really appreciated about the game. Let me explain. When you break it down, lots of horror films are "about" some primal fear that's been gussied up and disguised. Projection! You could argue that some of the classic slasher films are about fears of sex, or judgement, or coming of age. You know, like it's always the ones who are doing drugs and having sex that get murdered, and the "pure" heroine ends up making it through alive or whatever. Movies like The Human Centipede, which I fully admit I have not seen, seem to be there to make us afraid of the director. And, you know, mission accomplished. I'd get out of a taxi that dude was in. "It Follows" is a SUPER thinly veiled take on the fear of sex and STDs and that kind of thing. And Oxenfree seems to be about, in the end, existential terror. In classic horror films the ghosts would be out for capital R Revenge, or the nuke would have opened a portal to hell, or something like that. Here, there's nothing of the like. They just... exist. Remember what their plan is? They want to inhabit us SO THAT they can be carried through this world and THEN DIE. When they died they met some weird boundary condition, and didn't either dissolve into nothingness OR go anywhere. It's an open possibility that this has happened to other people, and these ones are just better at contacting us and interacting - again, maybe the nuke, maybe the weird research, maybe some island curse? The point is, nobody knows, and everybody is scared. They have this very broad perspective and it drives them nuts. It's kind of Lovecraftian in that way, except instead of a big wiggly squidman when you look Beyond The Veil, you just see... what? Your past? Alternate timelines? It's like looking behind the scenery of life and seeing that it's all predetermined. But maybe not? If the ghosts really saw innumerable timelines, why are we able to talk them down? Did they not expect that? Are they caught up in a greater loop still? What the heck is GOING ON? The game is short on answers, and frankly, I think it's spookier that way. One of the big twists in most horror films is the change from fear to anger. Fear implies lack of knowledge, and assessment of the abilities of The Other as infinite. In a slasher film, the characters are scared of Jason or Freddy or whoever, but they aren't really ANGRY at them. Anger doesn't come until it's time to fight back, and then it's cathartic. When they're angry, they can win. There's nothing to be angry at here, besides the ghosts a bit. And once you fight back, you find they're just as afraid as you are, and possibly more. One of my earliest fears (that I can remember) was kind of like that - I remember being a kid and staying awake really late worrying about heaven. Which sounds weird, yeah? I mean, heaven's supposed to be pretty good. But I was wrapping my mind around the concept of "eternity" for the first time, and realized in my childish way KIND of what Oxenfree is saying - given infinite time, eventually things will repeat. And if there's infinite time, there's infinite repetition. And it would get boring eventually, right? But there was just more time. There was never an end, not ever, because eternity is eternity, and isn't eternity a kind of torture, when you think about it? I guess what I'm saying is that existential terror beats a dude with a knife any day. Bacter fucked around with this message at 21:24 on Mar 21, 2016 |
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Mar 21, 2016 21:07
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Bacter posted:I guess what I'm saying is that existential terror beats a dude with a knife any day.  I mentioned it in passing earlier in the thread, but anyone who appreciates this kind of horror should watch Kairo. Very scary, very clever. (Fair warning; I tend to recommend this movie at the drop of a hat.) Fake edit: NOT the American remake. I know it's passé to say that remakes are worse than the originals, but in this case at least... christ what a disaster. 
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Mar 22, 2016 00:04
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Bacter posted:I guess what I'm saying is that existential terror beats a dude with a knife any day.
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Mar 22, 2016 00:20
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I can't help but feel that because we followed the reflection's advice, and also gave the same answers when it was our time on the far side of the mirror, that we're perpetuating Alex's time loop. Bacter even commented that we were closing the loop while giving the same answers. Given that we've had to break out of time loops several times over the course of the game, and the ghosts kept going on about seeing infinite timelines, maybe it would've been a better idea to try to break that loop instead of closing it? Now that we've seen Alex stuck in a bigger time loop, it might be worth risking paradox if it means escape.
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Mar 22, 2016 00:37
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So this has nothing to do with the ending, but one of the anomalies caught my interest- the one on the cliffs by the bench, Dog -Niner. It's just four words - [something], Thresher, Peterhoff, Arizona- and the last one, Arizona, makes sense as the USS Arizona, which was sunk during the Pearl Harbour bombing, taking over a thousand souls down with it. It was never salvaged completely- it's considered a war grave, as the bodies are still down there. So I did some googling to find the others- the USS Thresher was a nuclear submarine that went down during diving tests, taking 129 people with it and marking the first loss of a nuclear submarine at sea. The USS Peterhoff was a British ship captured by the Union during the American civil war, it was rammed and sunk by a Union ship after being mistaken for a blockade runner, although everyone survived. As for the first word, I can't make it out- I had a poke around the Steam forums and it seems like people reckon it was Baychimo, which... Yeah. Anyway I thought that was interesting.
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Mar 22, 2016 06:29
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biosterous posted:I can't help but feel that because we followed the reflection's advice, and also gave the same answers when it was our time on the far side of the mirror, that we're perpetuating Alex's time loop. Bacter even commented that we were closing the loop while giving the same answers. The issue with that idea is the implications of the ending. We agreed to stay with the ghosts, insomuch as we said it was fine if we stayed to protect the others. Then we woke up on the boat. Nothing about the scene with Mike suggested that we were freed. In fact, we know from the ending that Alex is going to relive the night again. Who's to say we aren't trapped reliving this night for the rest of eternity, having our memories wiped only to begin again? The moment with Alex and the trip on the boat could be something given to us by the ghosts so we can "keep our nature" of optimism. Also having the loop continue provides a reason to play again
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Mar 22, 2016 18:48
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What sort of bugs me about this game, which I quite enjoyed regardless, is that it never does quite explain the time loops. For the ghosts, that doesn't bother me too much, since they're ghosts and it can just be spooky. But what is it that has you, the character, getting into these random time loops and then getting out by twisting an ancient reel-to-reel tape player? It feels like it should be important somehow, but there aren't enough clues provided to even begin to get a feel for why it's happening. And then there's the big overall what-a-twist ending with the big loop that you've been stuck in all along. This, at least, has some justification in that if you choose to stay with the ghosts and save your friends, they did say that you would be trapped with them. The ending is still somewhat unfulfilling, for me at least. Although it's not like 'doomed from the start' is an unexpected result in a horror story. After my playthrough, I felt inclined to play it again and see if there was some way to groundhog's day my way out of the loop by some sort of perfect play. But the main thing dissuading me from trying is the glacial walking speed. Wasting what probably adds up to a few hours of game time just going from one point to another with no real promise of a different result was too much to bother with. And after looking at other playthroughs and discussion, it's probably a pretty safe bet that there's no hidden secret happily-ever-after ending no matter how hard you try. 
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Mar 22, 2016 22:24
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You can't really give a satisfying explanation for the time loops. At least the big one. The small ones can be explained away as little wrinkles of the big one. It's also interesting that the ghosts explicitly say that Alex makes them. The reason we can't really know what caused this loop is that we aren't in the first cycle, if such a thing is even well defined. During our playthrough there was already that Mirror Alex. That person is the one from the previous cycle, which probably ended just slightly differently. In order to find out how any of this started, we'd have to go back an arbitary large number of cycles until we find the first one. The game implies that originally Alex chose to stay, which just sort of messed with time for some reason. Things like that just happen. Now she is reliving that night (maybe in her head, who knows) over and over again thinking that she could have done something differently, in order to get another result. While the dialouge is written quite well, in the end the choices are meaningless and a lot of outcomes are predetermined. As Bacter said, the theme is existential terror. But also it's regret over what might have been. This is also shown quite strongly with her brother. She blames herself for his dead (and Clarissa certainly agrees) and keeps on wondering what could have happened differently. In that way I think it wasn't thematically fitting to repeat the same advices you've been given. Imagine if you had the chance to send one message to your past self. Would you just tell them to repeat everything exactly as you did? No! You are supposed to do something like let Jonas talk to his dead mom, realise that this was a terrible idea and tell yourself not to do that. Of course in that case your past self would probably rebel as well, making your advice pointless. But that's also an important factor about advice. The fear of making life altering decisions and regretting them for the rest of your life is probably one of the biggest fears I could have and this game stimulates that quite perfectly.
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Mar 22, 2016 23:30
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Can you go through a number of times in New Game+ mode and eventually get a "you broke out of the loop" ending if you say the right things in the right order in the mirror, and then follow your own advice in the subsequent play through?
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Mar 22, 2016 23:48
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Cathode Raymond posted:Can you go through a number of times in New Game+ mode and eventually get a "you broke out of the loop" ending if you say the right things in the right order in the mirror, and then follow your own advice in the subsequent play through? No. [Random white noise to make the spoilerbox seem a bit longer] [More random white noise to make the spoilerbox seem a bit longer]
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Mar 23, 2016 00:00
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Air is lava! posted:You can't really give a satisfying explanation for the time loops. I agree, maybe not so much that you can't, but that you shouldn't. Horror works best with a heavy dose of the unknown. As long as something is unknown, or even better if it's unknowable (if we want to get Lovecraftian), it's never going to feel safe. If this game falters anywhere, it may be in trying to explain and familiarize things a little too much. The ghosts are a fair bit spookier when they're talking through snippets of radio voice and when possessed people are just mumbling inaudibly. When they're just talking through Clarissa, that's still weird but it's not quite as unnerving. Although this may have more to do with the fact that we don't really get to know Clarissa all that well throughout the game, so it's hard to feel the uncanny result of seeing her nature subverted and controlled. Similarly, the mysterious evil radio monsters felt a lot weirder when you didn't know what the hell they were, or what they wanted, or anything. When you start getting handed bits and pieces of an explanation (ghosts, shipwreck, etc.), that chips away at the terror to an extent. You start to see things as puzzle pieces, and looking for how to fit them all together. Again, not to say that I disliked this game at all. It was fun, but less as a horror game and more as just a character-driven mystery-solving story. I almost wish that they'd have focused less on the horror and more on the characters, in the end. I think that's also part of what makes the twist ending fall a little flat for me. Because that sort of ending fits quite well in a horror story, but by the end of the game I'd almost forgotten that was what I was playing. And while I'm sure there's a way that scenario could be twisted to give you a real good shock at the end, in this case it didn't seem to work. It was less of the creeping 'oh nooooooooooooooooo...' feeling and more of a 'oh... well. That kind of sucks for her.' 
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Mar 23, 2016 00:27
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I really, really enjoyed this game. It felt like it conveyed a theme of dealing with/coming to terms with loss (or at least what has happened before) in a unique and interesting way, the characters and dialogue were well developed, and there were some genuinely creepy moments. The only downside was when the characters were a bit over zealous about telling you what you need to do next; guess they just need to delay the responses a bit more there. Air is lava! posted:No. [Random white noise to make the spoilerbox seem a bit longer] [More random white noise to make the spoilerbox seem a bit longer] This seems both good and bad. Good in that it means the devs stuck to their design decisions, and because it reinforces the thematic connection to regret/loss over what has happened before. However, it's bad because there's definitely a clear way they could have tied the whole thing together by, e.g., having you play through the game in all the various iterations, find three massive tape players, spin the three of them (perhaps one on each major pathway/per play-thru?), and then break the big loop.
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Mar 23, 2016 22:16
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Sorry for the delay in finishing up, everybody! I just had some final thoughts to give out. As has been echoed by everybody else, I'm a Night School Studios fan after this. To everybody who purchased the game on account of this LP, well, I'm super glad! The ending is, I agree, kind of a mixed bag. It's viscerally disappointing, on account of it being a big HA HA ALL OF THAT MAYBE DIDN'T MATTER, but hey, it thematically fits really well. My first impulse was to wonder if there was a way to go back and get out of it - and who knows, maybe there is! People haven't unlocked all the secrets yet. The one thing I will say, and this has consistently been my problem with Telltale games, is that their structure and conceit is like... it's 80% great? But 20% super frustrating. The main problem is that the games are too long to make lots of replays fun. The cure for that is to have your decisions WILDLY impact the story, and that's just too much work for a long game. I think Oxenfree was a step in the right direction, because the game is shorter and decisions change more things - you guys really don't want to see Nona if you tell her you decided to leave Clarissa behind - but nothing is TOTALLY different. The ideal game like this would basically be a big nuanced choose-your-own-adventure book, but obviously that means even if every decision was binary, you'd have to write 2^x stories, and that becomes untenable for a game of any length at all. Again, not that this doesn't make the game worth playing, it's just an obstacle that, in my mind, they haven't been able to overcome. The other problem I have, and this is spoiler-tastic for anybody still intending on playing the game (in fact I didn't show it off in the LP because I was hoping that people would get the game and see this for themselves!), so I'm putting this in tags. You can actually save your brother in the flashbacks. If you remember, he was doing one last swim with you before he left town, so if you can convince him to STAY, and not leave and pursue his dreams, he wouldn't have gone on that last swim with you, ergo he wouldn't have drowned. NOW. This is a big emotional crux in the story, because if Michael doesn't die, you don't get to know Jonas, because your parents didn't divorce. And if you've become close with Jonas, you'd be basically sacrificing everything with him for your brother. AND you'd be forcing your brother to give up HIS dreams. It's a REALLY FRIGGIN' NEAT emotional choice. And it's, like, buried. Maybe this is just the way I play? But encouraging Michael to stay seemed really contrary to what I'd want to happen, and there's very, VERY few clues given that you can save him. And the game doesn't even spell out the choice for you - Jonas or Michael. Which, maybe that's the point? They trust we, the gamers, to do all the emotional processing for that choice outside of the game? But it seems a little... I don't know. Rushed? Anyway, in spite of those two points, Oxenfree is easily one of my favorite games of recent memory, so I appreciate you guys joining me on it! If Night School comes out with anything else, or I play a similar game, count me in for the LP, and I'll see you in m'next thread, I hope! P.S. I would be remiss if I didn't mention that there are a ton of secrets still buried in the game, including, apparently A currently ongoing ARG. So who knows what that'll dig up. If you find anything particularly cool in it, feel free to post, and I'll include that in the OP! Thanks again everybody!
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Mar 28, 2016 20:59
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Thanks for showing the game off! I definitely wasn't very interested in it prior, and now I've got a friend to buy it too.
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Mar 29, 2016 04:34
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Been a while, but this might be interesting to some people here. You can ignore most of the reddit wankery, but the ARG section has some updates. Looks like the devs sent a new trailer for the PS4 launch to a youtuber, and they've pretty much confirmed that the upcoming update will include alternate endings.
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May 10, 2016 14:59
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The update will also include some sort of "new game+" mode that unlocks a lot of those endings. So perhaps a loop break will be possible
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May 14, 2016 14:35
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 Coming soon...
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Jun 2, 2016 09:26
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Oxenfree has a deal on PSN, for those that want to play at home
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Jun 2, 2016 11:35
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One thing I thought was pretty interesting was how that ending played out normally until you picked a choice for what Alex did afterwards. You can hear her voice pitch changing there and the time-loop effects begin from there, so I wonder if this is meant to imply that the player is involved into what is going on somehow. Also I wonder what happens if you try to wait out the choice, if that is even possible.
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Jun 2, 2016 12:38
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I have to say that I had a lot of fun playing this game together with my wife, especially with the new ending in place. I really hope that the developers sold enough to keep making games, since I felt that they really hit the sweetspot between teendrama and horror.
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Jul 4, 2016 18:56
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