Halloween is literally tomorrow, and if you don’t already have your plans sorted, I’m going to help you out right now. If you aren’t going out, chances are you’re staying in and watching a movie or playing a game. With a bunch of sales going right now on every imaginable storefront, it’s a great time to pick up a great horror game or two, and I think the Oxenfree games are a perfect one-two punch for the season.
As it so happens, the critically acclaimed narrative games from Night School Studio, including the seminal indie title Oxenfree from 2016 and its 2023 sequel, are both heavily discounted on Steam right now. I’ve highlighted a number of shockingly low deals in my time doing this, but I don’t think I’ve ever spotted a deal as good as this one: both Oxenfree and Oxenfree II: Lost Signals will run you just $3 till November 4.
Why is this such a steal? Besides the low low price of approximately three Arizona drinks, the Oxenfree games are just some of the most effective minimalist horror in the medium. At their simplest, they are 2D side-scrolling narrative games featuring branching dialogue options. But Oxenfree distinguishes itself with some exceptionally grounded writing, bringing to life its teenage and later young-adult casts as they unearth ghosts both real and imagined.
In the first game, a crew of teenagers goes to Edwards Island, a tourist trap off the coast of their hometown that’s also a famously “haunted” locale. On the night that Alex, her stepbrother Jonas, and the rest of their friends depart for the island, they start picking up weird radio signals and wavelengths that begin to open what can only be described as a schism between worlds. The angular portals that begin appearing around Edwards Island invite other kinds of beings into Alex’s reality, at which point the crew stops being able to discern reality from the tricks of otherworldly spirits.
I love intimate stories driven by characters rather than larger plot machinations. A good character study is one of the most enjoyable things a story can deliver, and that’s what Oxenfree really is. While both games are set against hauntings, possessions, historical tragedies, and even the goings-on of a cult, they mostly center on the unraveling of the leads, characters so tightly wound that they need ghosts to shake loose traumas that therapy could barely touch. Alex and her friends—as well as Riley and Jacob in the sequel—are each holding onto a lot before their fateful encounters, but they walk away from these experiences fundamentally changed, and as players who learn to love them, we hope, at least, that it’s for the better.
The oft-unspoken highlight of these games, though, is their runtime. The first game can be finished in about five hours, meaning that if you simply sit on your couch tonight and play it straight through to the end, you can be in bed at a completely reasonable time. That then sets the stage for you to enjoy the slightly bigger, and similarly ambitious, sequel (which clocks in at between 6-8 hours) tomorrow on Halloween. Remember when I called this pick-up a one-two punch? That’s what I meant.
For an even sweeter deal, you can pick up both Oxenfree games, the soundtrack to the first game, and even Afterparty, one of Night School’s more underrated titles about drinking your way out of Hell, for about $3. No matter how you slice it, this deal is out of this world.
Even if you don’t specifically enjoy these games just in time for Halloween, the fall is a notoriously spooky season. Make a weekend out of enjoying Oxenfree, that’s what I did when I played the first game! If you ever need a low-key and casual scary time, and you don’t want to watch a movie or show, why not pop on these two games? They’re as good as any season of TV, they’re relatively easy commitments, and they’re both incredibly thoughtful coming-of-age stories set at two completely different stages of life, because we’re always growing, we’re always learning, and more importantly, we’re all haunted by something.
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