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“ Because of the oddness in the timelines, there are even ways to change your past.

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Ex-Telltale, ex-Disney developers head up Nightschool Studio, whose debut game Oxenfree is a thoughtful, slower-paced adventure game grounded in reality and underscored by the supernatural. Leading lady Alex isn’t a super-powered heroine; she’s a kid with genuine hurt weighing on her shoulders, and her actions and dialogue decisions are not The Walking Dead-level heavy. "Not every choice is about mortality or how bad you f*** somebody over,” Nightschool CEO Sean Krankel told IGN.Sometimes, you just want to walk-and-talk with someone your best bud is crushing on. Maybe you try to calm a friend who’s tripping on a special edible. Other times, you talk to some cave ghosts who may or may not transcend time. That’s unrelated to the edible."It's like Freaks & Geeks set against this super-f***ed-up phenomena,” said Krankel.Yup.Krankel compared Oxenfree’s Alex to Freaks & Geeks’ Lyndsay Weir. “She's super smart but testing her boundaries. She's hanging with some new types of kids. Jonas, her stepbrother, is sort of like River Phoenix in Stand By Me. He's seen some s**t, but he's a good kid at heart, and he gets blamed for stuff.”The way you actually control Alex is interesting in and of itself. Like any classic Aaron Sorkin scene, Oxenfree is built upon the idea of the “walk and talk.” The game doesn’t take control away from you just because you’re choosing which dialogue option to respond with -- in fact, Oxenfree does not have cutscenes. You can explore the environments while still engaging in conversation, sometimes to comedic results. Wander off in the middle of an important conversation, and your friends will react accordingly, asking you what the hell you’re doing.Aside from walking and talking, Alex’s main tool is an old tunable radio. “You can't just strap her up with guns, so we added this radio,” said Krankel, who credited Silent Hill’s brilliant but simple implementation. “There's a lot of weird psychedelic things that can happen to these kids over the course of the night” because of the way the world responds to certain frequencies to which you tune your radio. Lights flare, noises boom, and the fabric of the world shreds to reveal frightening uncertainties.Throughout Oxenfree -- which lasts anywhere from three to six hours -- you’ll solve puzzles with the radio, dig into the past and future, and generally mess with time in ways no high school girl should. "Because of the oddness in the timelines, there are even ways to change your past,” Krankel explained. “There are ways, by the end of the game, to have a whole other set of scenarios...there's some stuff that you never thought could have happened in the beginning."We played Oxenfree for only a short time, but the characters are believable, interesting, and have depth we're eager to explore. We're also excited to see how each play-through or replay compares to another -- what happened to you, where did you go, and who did you try to save?For more on Oxenfree, stay tuned to IGN.