But more often than not, it's about thinking of these time tears as little holes poking through to other timelines.” There will be some instances where there are time tears that cause moments of danger. And so what you saw here was an instance of a puzzle that related to only a single other timeline.

“The time tears are more like a tear between the same location but different timelines. “Portals take you to a different place almost altogether and are a method for the supernatural to communicate with the living or the people of our time,” the developers told us at the preview. Related: Stranger Of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin Preview - Paradise FoundTo add more depth to the time travel themes, there are two separate mechanics for experimenting with time - time portals and time tears. Was the time portal set to ‘just pre- collapse’ because that was a key moment in history, or did the time travel itself cause it? The game will not provide answers to these questions, and in a genre too full of handholding, Oxenfree’s sequel looks set to continue the trust the first game gave to its audience. By going back in time, they gain entry to the shaft, but also appear to cause the collapse themselves. In the preview, our two protagonists were in a mine shaft, one that had previously collapsed. There are several time portals you can interact with, some that will reverse time and let you manipulate the past in ways that you may not intend. Time travel, and the concept of time, was at the heart of Oxenfree, and it makes a return with Lost Signals in more complex ways. Oxenfree 2: Lost Signals, recently shown off in hands-off preview, seems to understand exactly what the first game did right - and what it did wrong - to construct a new story with a similarly sombre tone. Others had far reaching ramifications that slowly built up throughout the story.

Some of these choices were instant and minor, dictating only the immediate direction of the conversation. As a choice based narrative adventure, it moved the key decisions away from big cliffhangers and gave every choice, every single line of dialogue, a consequence. Oxenfree was a game that was both desperate to reinvent its own genre and keen to pay homage to its tropes.

Oxenfree game genre