The cast is introduced promptly, with a pretty standard scattering of teen drama archetypes-the quiet one, the prickly one, the chill one, the tough one who’s been through some unspecified rough times-and for a while, at least, the game is happy to let you just slip into the shoes of a young person awkwardly discussing their future with their peers (because I definitely haven’t experienced enough of that already, thanks Oxenfree). You are Alex, an ordinary-ish high school girl teetering on the terrifying brink of graduation, and you’ve taken the ferry to a quiet coastal island with a group of like-minded chums and acquaintances to deal with the impending threat of adulthood in the classical fashion: by drinking yourselves catatonic on an isolated beach by a bonfire.
Oxenfree is a teenage supernatural mystery with its sights focussed squarely on this tone, and while it weaves the eerie secrets of the wireless into its narrative in a compelling and remarkably well-presented way, the same can’t be said for its mechanics.Įverything begins, like many ill-fated adventures, with a trip to an isolated locale. Familiar voices? Music? Or just meaningless garbage? Couple that with their usage in wartime systems-where the metal box on a desk could potentially relay a soldier’s dying screams, or a nonsense message containing cryptic instructions, or a monotone synthesised voice reciting a series of numbers over and over-and it’s easy to see how they might be presented in a chilling light. Tune in to the right frequency in the right place, and out of the pounding waves of white noise, patterns seem to form. Yet there’s something about this analogue technology, capable of revealing the hidden signals that perpetually surround us at all times, that makes it an ideal window in narratives for more outlandish, fantastical elements.
Radios have a funny relationship with the supernatural in fiction, don’t they? It could hardly be said to be ‘fear of the unknown’ that prompts their usage even the smallest child has at least a vague idea of how they work.
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