Recent reviews by Ceruleany

I was so excited ever since I first heard about this game and am happy that I got to play it now!
TL;DR: I would recommend this game to you if you enjoy open world experiences that don't take you too long, enjoy themes of family and friendship, if you like the game Firewatch and like atmospheric games where you can dedicate a lot of time to exploring.

Playtime and motion sickness:
It took me almost 18 hours over the course of 3 days to finish the game and I never felt bored during my playthrough. After just a couple of hours I was so excited that I had to actually force myself to stop playing, because I got headaches from my intense concentration, from my motion sickness as well as the bright colors of the in-game desert. If you are sensitive to brightness, flickering textures/lights and motion sickness, you might not be able to play for long stretches, but to me personally it was still manageable. :) The motion sickness setting helped a lot, but everytime I was in a small room or had to look around a lot in search for things like a ladder, I got really nauseous from turning the camera.

Eerie/scary atmosphere:
A lot of these 18 hours have actually been spent very stressed. :D The witch, the large facilities and underground areas had me tense up a lot. After the first 4 hours I felt like watching a thriller unfold and the paranoia really got to me. Which is not necessarily a bad thing (I like thrillers!). But it is something to consider, if you are rather looking for something more cozy and are also quite receptive to an oppressive atmoshpere.

Size of the map/world:
Regarding the size of the map, I was really relieved! When I first played the demo I had concerns that it would be too small and that the game would be over after 3-4 hours. Luckily, I was totally satisfied with it.

Great exploration progression:
My favorite part about Caravan SandWitch was its exploration progression. I loved the fact that I got to see every location multiple times, because in most cases I had to come back with the next tool upgrade to progress even further. This backtracing can probably be frustrating to some, but I had a blast. There is a certain hidden secret which also kept me very engaged. To sum it up: There's lots to explore and I turned around every pixel to get the most out of it. I liked the little surprise moments, for example: At the beginning I was wondering, why on Earth the game had the physical Toaster terminals. Those getting a deeper/second meaning after being able to hack technology later in the game was perfect.

Great art and sounds + balanced amount of quests:
As others have already said: The visuals are great, the soundtrack and sound design are great and my favorite sound was definitely the crunchy plants in the forest. A fair share of my playtime has probably been spent on repeatedly walking through these plants and experiencing childlike wonder. I also liked the amount of quests, characters and locations. It was enough to keep me engaged and not overwhelmed.

After all, I didn't love the game as much as I had wished for. It didn't manage to touch my heart in the way I hoped it would. There are some negatives that I'd quickly like to mention (just from my subjective experience):

Questionable logic:
The worldbuilding felt incomplete sometimes. There were some logic errors that repeatedly threw me out of the immersion. Right at the beginning we start the journey by travelling on a space train that hasn't been operated in... years? In an empty space station? Does everybody just know how to drive a train in this universe? It seemed odd to do interstellar travel just like that, but it's fine, I guess. Other aspects also seemed to lack some logic, especially the fact that after 2 in-game weeks nobody in the village has been able to put on their Sherlock hat and come to the conclusion of what we and Neflé are plotting?
Nothing major that would have kept me from playing it, but it felt a little unpolished here and there. :) On a positive note: It kept me constantly thinking about this futuristic world, that has been crafted with a lot of love, I'm sure!

Frustration with underground exits:
One thing I simply couldn't get behind and am still frustrated about just thinking about it was the one-way exits of the underground areas. I could enter and leave through the entrance to each underground, but driving through what appeared to be the exit always led me to some completely different spot on the map. This is great for shortcuts and exploring, I guess. What really bugs me with this though: You can't go back in. In order to access the underground area again, I had to drive across the entire map. From my personal perspective there was simply no reason for making it hard on the player by not letting them get back to the underground through the same door they used to exit. It's an immense pet peeve I have with games when they "punish" you for literally just playing the game and trying out different routes.

Value of components:
To make it short: Gathering the components will most likely not be enough of a motivation in itself for a lot of people to explore and collect them. There could be a lot said about the way the game design of this "currency" leads to it losing its value in the grand scheme of things. At the end of the game I had probably about 300-400 components left in total. It is extremely easy to gather them and you don't need a lot of components to get to the next update of your van. To me, that was rather disappointing. After the last upgrade, I was convinced, that there would be some final main quest related item that I would need my 300 components for. Or that I would find someone or something that would reward me for all this exploring that I did. Because why else would the game give me so many of them? Realizing that this was in fact not the case and that my excitement had been for nothing was honestly a little devastating.

Quite the short ending:
After a while the plot got very predictable. Which, again, did not stop me from enjoying the game. It simply led to me being quite frustrated at the end of the game. Even if the last scene would have lasted a minute longer instead of showing just for a few seconds, that would have improved it immensely. A playable epilogue would have been the cherry on top, to round off the experience. I definitely appreciate it, for what it is though!

Conclusion:
Being able to develop such an amazing game from start to finish is an incredible achievement! Even though some aspects about the dialogues and worldbuilding can appear a little unpolished, it is a lovely game with wholesome characters, great exploration opportunities and a stunning aesthetic. I would and probably will play it again at some point in the future. :)

As a lot of the reviews here on Steam already have stated: This game is enjoyable, but had quite the amount of deficits. It even got to the point where I was unsure if I could force myself to finish it. Nevertheless it's a nice game and I would play it again. I'd say give it a try, but be prepared that you may be disappointed - especially if you loved the first Oxenfree game, which I did. The problems and bugs I will be addressing are what happened to me specifically and do not by any means have to apply to your playthrough.

Characters: For my personal liking, the characters in Oxenfree 2 were only 'okay'. I felt like carrying around a whole self-pity kindergarten group on my back for the first half of the game (and I'm definitely part of that group in real life). For me, it depends on the balance of having the characters be problematic and flawed but not to the point where it is too infuriating for the player. I usually like characters like Jacob. Hell, I AM a Jacob myself in a lot of aspects. Still, I strongly disliked him for half of my playthrough and he made me consider quitting the game. A lot of this is due to the amount and weird distribution of dialogue that I will get further into. In the end I felt a lot of empathy for Jacob and Riley and I was glad that they had each other. I could relate to a lot of the life lessons they shared. Jacob feeling the need to fix himself instead of always fixing other things made me cry in a good way. Regardless, I felt more sympathy for characters like Shelley, Nick or Evelyn - which is a pity when you are stuck with the two characters you like less for the majority of the time. After all, I still want to give Jacob and Riley a reassuring hug.

Dialogue: First off, the dialogue was great for what it was. The voice acting was also really organic and believable! I looove story-heavy games - give me all the dialogue options please and thanks! However, I've read a lot of reviews on here sharing the same opinion and I'll mention it once again. I was constantly asking myself "You are in a really dangerous and mysterious situtation and THIS is the stuff you are talking about?? How can you be this calm?". Most of my playing time was spent standing around like a package that was never picked up, staring soullessly into my monitor, waiting for them to be finished with talking. Somehow, I never had this issue in the first part of the Oxenfree series. The timing felt weirdly off. After being sure that Jacob finished his last sentence and waiting for 5 more seconds, thinking I could finally proceed to the next area of the game, he starts talking again in the middle of me clicking the button. This made me restart the game multiple times, because I didn't want to miss any important information. Sadly, I had many bugs concerning the dialogue too. Sometimes it seemed completely out of order and the game didn't track what topics had already been addressed. I let Riley tell Jacob the truth about her relationship to her parents. Two minutes later, being in a different area of the game, he suddenly starts asking me about my parents and how they are - as if he had never heard anything of what Riley just told him. This happened on multiple occasions with different topics. Towards the end of the game, before going to Edward's Island, I ran over the whole island again (an issue in and of itself) to search for the collectibles I had missed. Ironically enough, then I found myself wishing for another dialogue to fill the incongrous thick silence lingering everywhere.

Autosaves: Terrible. This almost turned into my final straw. I lost progress so many times due to me not being able to save the game. I had instances, where I needed to close the game or turn of my computer unexpectedly and knew that I would have to do the last sections all over again. My biggest pet peeve in linear story-driven games is not. Being. Able. To. Save. Sometimes, the game would load and it appeared like the autosave had been successful. I closed the game. When I opened it again, the last progress was lost and had in fact not been saved. This was very discouraging.

The map: The landscape was really beautiful and interesting, even though for me it didn't live up to Edward's Island. The climbing ropes are something that bothered me personally. At times it seemed kinda useless and it didn't feel as if it could speed up anything. The cave system at Waterhead Bluffs was another bummer. This was also due to my incompetence, but while searching for the collectibles, I got stuck there and had to look at two separate guides to figure out a way to cross this area.

The ending/story: It was very nice, that they picked up a lot of elements from the first game and connected the dots. However, I think this happened at the expense of its sense of mystery. It took away from the suspense. Subjectively, I had a difficult time understanding, how Alex and her friends could just go back to normal life, like nothing had happened. Five whole years after their trip? And except for the fact that Alex was the main character... Why is she the only one remembering everything?? This seemed off to me. For the final decision, I chose Olivia to enter the portal. It felt like the game tried to push me really hard into liking her, when there was no reason at all to do so in the way I chose to play it. The only reason to not chose her would have been my conscience as an adult, because she is still so young. But because I got the most annoying version of her, there was no reason not to let her go. This being said, I understood and respected where she was coming from and why she acted this way.

I can't even put into words how positively nostalgic and emotional this game makes me. It feels like all of the good parts of my memories were stored into a neat little box where time stands still and everything is alright for all of eternity. It makes me want to cry my heart out in the best way. If I close my eyes and just listen to the beautiful atmosphere, I can almost smell the scent of my favorite summer holidays - my favorite parts of life as a whole even. A simple and wonderful game which I will hopefully play for many more hours to come.

-----Spoilers ahead------



I am really disappointed in what this game has to offer at this point in time, especially for its current price.

I won't even get started on all the bugs, that make this game a pain to play, because that would simply take up too much time. Also – bugs are alright in early access I guess.

At first we were really excited once we had a few caves down and could start to explore the story. That is when it all became tedious. We went through what felt like random patches of a „What if there are other dimensions and people mutate lmaoooo“-plot written in like 30 minutes at lunch. We got so much ammunition, getting hyped for a bossfight only to end up with an unrewarding piece of patchy multiple-dimension-story. There is definitely potential there! I still like the „below the earth“-approach. But it just wasn’t executed the way it could have been. Of course, the narrative is not necessarily the main focus of the game, compared to the survival aspect of it all. Nevertheless it felt incredibly anticlimactic, going through difficult caves full of endlessly respawning mutants, getting everything we needed to proceed in the story and then walking an empty, repetitive lava path that’s twice the length of the equator without even getting real bossfights.
I’m sure this feels different to Singleplayers but for the Multiplayer it’s outright garbage.

The ending was so sudden and raised so many questions, but not the good ones that keep you thrilled. I think the best way to describe the feeling is: incomplete. Considering the amount of time people have been waiting for this, it is kinda sad. :7 Hopefully there will be some additions in the future! I can imagine this getting a lot better and more rewarding.

I really enjoyed the look of bunkers though! Creepy backroom-like atmosphere, nice and funny weapons. That makes it even more unfortunate how unspectacular these locations were in total.

The island itself feels so incredibly empty sometimes and not for the fact, that it is remote and almost everybody is dead. Especially the „northern“ beaches are sloppy and uninteresting parts of the map.

All in all our personal expectations weren’t met and I get that this is very subjective. I’m glad that I could play it with my friends, because in retrospective there would not have been any reason for me to play this solo.

It's insane that this game is available for free! I could have played this for hours on end, man. Such a cozy and comforting experience with a slightly creepy undertone. This game is perfect for anyone who has enjoyed the Undertale pacifist run. They share a really similar vibe and I'm all up for that. The sound design is so good as well! I loved the areas, where the music suddenly stops and there are only environmental sounds. It's simple yet super effective. The story made me cry multiple times which directly sold me. At first I was concerned the dialogue could maybe become boring after a while, but I was WRONG. It's so well written and I soaked up everything. Studying game design I have never even got close to something like this and if I had, I would be hecking proud of myself.

If this game had existed when I was a child, I would have played the heck out of it. I love games that contain knowledge about animals and this one is so well made. Love the character design, the narrative and the message behind it. I think it's great for children, but even as an adult it made me really really happy. I'd love to play more games like this!

Dieses Spiel verkörpert viel "Zuhausigkeit", um es mit Alligatoahs Worten auszudrücken. Man kann auch immer gut auf Mutter gehen. Ich rechne Sea of Thieves hoch an, dass es mich gerickrolled hat und auch ansonsten ist alles in Butter auf dem Kutter. Egal ob vor Rührung und Schönheit oder Frust weil man schon wieder weggenatzt wird, das Game eignet sich gut zum Weinen. Würde jederzeit wieder in See stechen, aber bitte weniger Gegenwind, danke.