“Launching OXENFREE II on PlayStation is a perfect fit,” said Night School Studio co-founder and studio director Sean Krankel in a press release. “Now even more players can explore the beautifully weird and eerie world our team is creating. With OXENFREE II: Lost Signals, we want players to carve out their own story in a frightening new location. We are crafting an adventure that builds on the mind-bending, choice-based storytelling of the original while introducing a new cast and series of dangerous mysteries for players to unravel.”
Get the latest details below, via Nigh School Studio co-founder and lead writer Adam Hines on PlayStation Blog.
Previously On OXENFREE
In OXENFREE (2016), a high schooler named Alex, her stepbrother Jonas and a few of their friends unwittingly discover that Camena’s town legend is actually real. Planning to celebrate the school year’s end with an overnight stay on Edwards Island — once a military base, now a tourist hot spot—they accidentally “tune” into a ghostly signal, opening a dimensional rift between time. The rift allows a horde of vengeful ghosts to come into our reality, who hope to take the teenagers’ lives as their own. Stuck offshore with no ability to contact anyone for help, Alex is forced to fend off the ghosts, reveal the true history of the mysterious island, and come to terms with her own guilt over the death of her brother, Michael, a year earlier. Happy ending, right?
BUT! It turns out, there’s more to the story…
Who is Riley?
In OXENFREE II: Lost Signals, you play as Riley Poverly. If you’ve watched our teaser trailer, she’s the one with the flashlight, running around in that snazzy yellow vest.
In OXENFREE, our characters were just finishing high school, and entering that period of time in their lives when they get to decide who they really want to be. Riley had that moment long ago, and is now grappling with the repercussions of post-adolescence. Were the choices she made the right ones for her? Is she who she really wants to be?
Born and raised in Camena to a veteran father and an absent mother, Riley moved away at the first opportunity, bouncing around between cities and jobs in an attempt to conjure up some direction in her life. Now, a recent change has pushed her to return to her old hometown, to take an entry-level job as an environmental researcher.
Mysteries of Camena
You see, the last couple of months have been odd ones for Camena. Unnaturally occurring electromagnetic waves have been interfering with the electrical and radio equipment around the small coastal town. TVs have been turning on and off. Planes have lost radar. Stations can’t transmit their signals through static. A research group from a nearby college has been contracted to study the phenomena and to trace the source of whatever’s causing the interference. Riley’s job, as a new, freshly hired research assistant — is to do the grunt work: plant radio transmitters in prescribed areas and report back the data those transmitters collect. Easy!
Until… well… things start going… weird.
Stay Tuned
In OXENFREE II, you’ll use much of the same tools as the original OXENFREE, a narrative game revolving around a robust conversation system and a radio that tunes into supernatural signals.
I wish I could get into more of the game’s story, characters and villains and what happens if you go into the old mining town, Garland, and I want to show you all the weird time travel stuff and what Time Tears are but the rest of the team is dragging me away from the keyboard now.
