Oxenfree II: Lost Signals stumbles through complex questions on its way to narrative closure.
Title: Oxenfree II: Lost Signals
Developer: Night School Studio
Publisher: Netflix Games
Release Date: 7/12/2023 (all platforms)
Spoilers for Oxenfree II ahead.
I hate to be this pretentious this early in the morning, but in this review we’re going to have to talk hauntology. See, Oxenfree II: Lost Signals, the sequel to 2016’s Oxenfree, is haunted. Its past, present and future interact with each other in strange ways. It is a game constructed by forces of nostalgia that simply did not act upon its predecessor in the same fashion. It is trying to tell the story of specters of the past refusing to fade while also wanting to express Opinions™ about legacy and tradition. It posits that we are all trapped in cycles of repetition, whether we perceive them or not.
Oxenfree II tells the story of Riley Poverly, a woman in her mid-30s who returns to her hometown of Camena, Oregon in order to take a gig as an environmental researcher for a local university. It is hinted early on that Riley has had a rough life since leaving the coastal town, and that returning home is in part a way to reconcile her past with an uncertain future. She is partnered up with Jacob Summers, a local handyman and artist with his own baggage, and as we begin this ghost story, the pair trek up the side of a very large hill to place a radio transmitter facing Edwards Island, the setting of Oxenfree.
The tools Riley uses are upgraded from the ad-hoc exploration and mystery-solving equipment we had in the first game. We have a multi-channel walkie-talkie, a portable radio (which later gets updated to a military-grade wideband radio receiver), and some climbing gear. We’re told that Riley spent some time in the Army, which is meant to at least partially explain her endurance and aptitude for scaling walls, rope-climbing and jumping across big gaps. These skills will prove vital to her ability to survive the cosmic forces at work later, but the jaunt to place the first of four transmitters is both easy and relatively uneventful.
There are a few things to note in this first section of the game. The university is conducting a study into rising electromagnetic interference in the area, a phenomenon which is said to have been increasing over the past few years. (Oxenfree II takes place five years after its predecessor.) We also must note the presence of a cult-like nondenominational moon-worshiping church called “Parentage,” and the prevalence of missing children posters on the bulletin boards around town – some of which have been there for decades.
Riley and Jacob make it up the hill, plant the transmitter, and immediately begin witnessing strange phenomena, like time loops and spectral forms in the distance. Their liaison at the university, Evelyn, notes some weird readings coming from the transmitter over Edwards Island, and when we turn to look at it we see a massive triangular portal in the sky above it. This is when all the spooky-scary stuff, and the longest night of the pair’s lives, begins.
It’s necessary to understand what the hauntological forces are that are at play both in Camena and with regard to the game itself. We can start with the coterie of literal ghosts, the Sunken, a psychic amalgam of the 85-person crew of the USS Kanaloa, which sank near Edwards Island in the middle of World War II after its experimental nuclear reactor failed and caused the sub to implode. The Sunken operates as a hive mind with a single desire: escape the state of limbo they’ve been stuck in for decades. Then we have the original group of kids at the heart of Oxenfree: Alex, Ren, Jonas, Clarissa, and Nona. They were pulled into the dimensional limbo along with the Sunken despite seemingly “defeating” the island and its spectral inhabitants at the end of the last game. Finally, we have Edwards Island itself, the mystery of which is never actually solved to anyone’s satisfaction. Why is the fabric between dimensions so thin here? Why has the island been the site of mass death going back centuries? Is something darker and more primordial controlling the Sunken? The game provides no answers, but the island nevertheless makes its presence felt at all times.
Outside of the fiction, Oxenfree II has more to draw off in the kind of space it’s operating in, from Kentucky Route Zero‘s completed narrative about the past, present and future colliding in a single place like a tornado – or a flood; to Firewatch, with its intimate examination of fraught relationships, death and reconciliation; to Life is Strange and Tell Me Why, with their focus on teens dealing with strange situations in relatable ways; and even to movies like It Follows and Arrival and shows like Stranger Things, whose production company, Netflix, also published Oxenfree II. Night School Studio was even tapped to work on a Stranger Things game with Telltale until the latter studio went belly-up in 2017, so it’s not hard to speculate that they were at least thinking about the Duffer Brothers’ franchise during Oxenfree II‘s development. Despite taking place in the 2000s – we see evidence of cell phones – the game is suffused with aesthetics of the 80s and 90s. On the soundtrack, music producer Andrew Rohrmann, aka Scntfc, does exactly the kind of creepy synth-driven ambient music a game like this is almost required to have by law. The ghosts of this game’s influences and reference points are thick all around us.
As a sequel, Oxenfree II is also haunted by itself – that is, by Oxenfree. The game’s dialogue system is a vestigial phantom of the original choice-heavy dialogue system. It lacks the original game’s depth and weight, with choices made seeming to have negligible, if any, effect on the way characters are portrayed or how they interact with each other. Oxenfree II‘s entire narrative stakes fall onto the shoulders of a single, final choice made at the very end of the game—and no matter what choice the player makes, the cycle established in the first game is broken. The result is a much more linear, directed experience where we only ever really make changes at the margins. In a similar vein, the two different radios we get, which held so much ghostbusting utility in the original? Here they mostly just unlock radio locks and only occasionally open dimensional rifts or snap a possessed teenager out of their stupors. Gone too are most of the pieces of weird electronic equipment that would show up in the middle of time loops, compelling us to tune into special 3D radio frequencies to break out of them. These moments made the original a truly special kind of adventure game, even as they were messy and awkward and maybe carried on for too long. Through their notable near-absence maybe we can catch a glimpse of the studio’s worries surrounding the sequel.
Back in the land of the living, Riley and Jacob find out that the strange disturbance above Edwards Island wasn’t caused by their transmitter, but by a group of kids – Olivia, Violet, and Charlie – under the banner of the moon cult, Parentage, trying to set up some kind of dimension-crossing ritual at the behest of the ghastly forces on the other side. Olivia is the clear leader, and Violent and Charlie are her reluctant assistants. They believe they’ve been empowered by the Sunken to carry this ritual out, and they mostly only show up to lightly interfere with or be saved by Riley and Jacob. Only Olivia is truly driven to do this, however, and as you can probably imagine, the reason why is tragic.
More ghosts. Hauntology as a concept is essentially just “ontology, but scary.” We are all haunted – by things we left unsaid, by tasks and projects we meant to get to but never finished, by relationships that could have panned out differently had we only just made the right choices. And like, part of the point of Oxenfree was that you can’t game relationships like that, and in fact getting to see every permutation of every relationship we might have is actual hell. As adults, we might accept – or simply be resigned to – this fact, but kids may have a much harder time grasping this. Riley is plagued by visions of both her past and future throughout the game, being forced to relive her poor relationship with her father and watch herself repeat many of those same mistakes with her own son, Rex. One particularly striking scene involves Riley watching helplessly as her son tried to grasp death, and – as many do at first – failed in a heartbreaking way. Olivia’s own actions mirror Rex’s inability to understand, only the consequences here are more dire – and less personal.
If we consider hauntology to be an examination of the stages of life as they pass into memory and recede from the living world then another angle we can examine Oxenfree II from the perspective of the adult world – our current world – interfacing with the world of childhood or adolescence and finding that they are in some ways unable to meet. Our childhoods are dead and inaccessible, while the teens view our world similarly. Only Alex, who has actually become removed from life, is able to bridge the gap and help bring the cycle to a final close. Leave is possible, finally, but only for her and her friends – and a sacrifice must be made to keep the boundaries between worlds secure.
There are other characters and other stories, less “important” ones, that all attempt to tackle the same themes of anxiety around aging, of grappling with responsibilities and reckoning with the mundane. Hank the sailor, Maria the DJ, Shelley the park ranger, Nick the paranormal investigator – all there to ground our story in the now, to prove to someone that what is happening in Camena is happening to other people, that for at least one night the ghosts of the world became visible and started to trade places with us.
Oxenfree II is a haunted video game, but it imagines it can unhaunt itself. The ending it provides us with – supposedly a result of the many myriad choices we made but in reality only the result of the last choice in the game – leaves us with no ambiguity as to Riley’s fate, one way or another. Alex and her friends exit the loop; people forget, or never really remembered it in the first place. If this ending satisfies Night School Studio, then this will be the last time we see Camena or Edwards Island.
If it gets a sequel, then I guess we know where the ghosts are.
