This is my first time playing a text-heavy, choices-matter kind of game, and I loved it. Although I never played a Telltale game in the past, I know Oxenfree devs used to work there, and it makes me very excited to play more games in that vein in the future.

It's not only about choices mattering - it's all about how natural and flow-y the conversations felt. No long videogame silences in the middle of a conversation, just a bunch of teenagers doing what teenagers in the US do and reacting to unexpected events in a hearfelt way. I've seen a lot of people complaining about how sometimes your choice of dialogue interrupts other people - which feels a lot like real life to me. Or how the game gives you very little to choose from and develops from there - again, which feels like what happens in real life. By taking these mechanical quirks (that some people might see as bugs, but I see as features), this feels less like a videogame and more like an interactive novel, which is something very refreshing to me. There are some minor mechanical interactions with your radio, but that's almost always a secondary mechanic to the primary mechanic of conversation as a problem solving tool.

Besides all that, you have incredible hand painted art, superb voice acting, and moody/atmospheric music that fits the vibe incredibly well. It's the full package. Maybe a bit short overall, but any longer and it would start to drag. $10 for this game feels super fair.

Going in blind and playing the game in a compressed timeframe (ideally one sitting, but at 4-5 hours that becomes a little hard) is the ideal way to savor this experience, and I'm very grateful for that.

PS - I've also seen people give thumbs down to this game because "it's tedious to play it four times for all the endings." Let me just remind these people that you don't need all the endings. You don't need all the achievements. It's your life and your time, and you have the option of enjoying a good story once or turning it into a chore four times. But don't blame the game on that, blame your life choices.

I know it’s an older title but was so annoyed I couldn’t pass leaving a bad review here.
Yes I understand characters are stereotypical American teenagers and those aren’t supposed to be brightest and nicest people on earth but good god. I couldn’t stand the writing and dialogues and ragequit on campfire scene 15 odd minutes into the game. It’s just horrible and I wanted to violently punch every character.
Also no sound mixing sliders with insanely loud repeating music. Just why?

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Update after completion: Literally the day I wrote this review after 10 years of players complaining about the music volume there was a patch adding volume mixing sliders, so this complaint is solved.
But dear god… the characters. I finished the game after all for the sake of mystery plot and I can’t stress enough how punchable this characters are, and how unimaginably cringe the writing is.
It goes beyond “it’s here to illustrate teenager mentality” into physical torture territory. This supercritical level of nonsensical yapping is unacceptable for a game where you supposed to hunt for and listen obscure radio transmissions on every corner of the island.
There was a point in a game where I gave up, muted the sound, waited couple of minutes doing chores, unmuted my steamdeck and Ren was still yapping. Unbelievable. I wish this mystery was wrapped in something else with different characters. Just no.

Obnoxious characters and mediocre writing. It's fine if you have nothing else to play. But for $10 there's plenty of other better games. They added volume sliders after 10 years which is apparently a very big deal for the developers.