Style: Video game music
Primary Emotions/Themes: Don't fuck with what you don't understand, changing the past may come with unintended consequences
Thoughts: Oxenfree has been around for nearly a decade at this point, yet I only got to play it earlier this month. It tells an incredibly engaging story of a young woman named Alex and her soon to be brother in law as well as some of her closest friends... and enemies.
The entire story takes place on an island where it's forbidden to be there past nightfall. The kids end up opening a gateway to another dimension and all hell breaks loose for the five young adults. What happens after is a direct result of the choices done during the game, and conversations had between characters.
I had been wanting the soundtrack of this game on vinyl for years, even before I had played the game. For years though the soundtrack was too expensive to even consider buying. That changed after the repress though. Whoever said that patience does not pay off is lying, in this particular instance it saved me over two hundred dollars.
The music in Oxenfree is a combination of curiosity, danger, fear, anger, hope, and tension all rolled into audio form. The music I suppose has it's roots in synthwave, but that's like saying that a wedding cake and a cake made by a five year old are the same thing. Similar? Yes. The same? Absolutely not.
The music will often have this "wavy" feeling to it, something that you would hear on a tape as it starts to get older. Or an old VHS, when the playback isn't quite right. It fits the mood of the game nicely, as reality if often distorted during the course of the game.
When the music really starts going though it has a strong eighty's synth pop feel to it. Like something you would hear on the radio driving down the highway in 1985. Happy, bubbly, simple, yet somehow fulfilling. The soundtrack takes this foundation and slowly morphs it into other emotions that are less wholesome as it continues.
By the end of the journey, we the listener have gone through deep recesses of fear. Fear of the unknown, fear of losing ourselves, fear of being lost to time itself. We've seen hope and hopelessness from the consequences of our actions. We've seen life, death, and rebirth. All of these emotions are captured by the soundtrack, and they are captured well.
Oxenfree is a game that I enjoyed greatly over the five hours or so that I played it. There are many endings to the game, and while I don't intend to get them all - I am tempted to get a couple more before I put the game down. I'm really curious to see what else could happen if different choices were made, or no choice at all.
Written March 31st 2024
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