Oxenfree's gameplay is; 1) you guiding Alex from one place to another, 2) having her tune in various signals on the radio, and 3) dialogue trees. Characters will say something, and Alex has three possible responses, each mapped to a button based on its location. Something I didn't recognize until the second playthrough, you have the option to say nothing. Dialogue balloons will (usually) fade in a few seconds if you don't say anything. I don't feel like your choices make much difference to how the plot plays out, but they do impact your relationships with the other characters.
How they do that, in terms of which dialogue options prompt what shift, I couldn't tell you. Sometimes when a character says something, their face will appear in a dialogue balloon above another character. Clearly whatever was said caught that character's attention, but in a good way? A bad way? No idea! Until Dawn had a screen you could check that would show how relationships between whichever character you were playing and all the others where trending, but Oxenfree's got nothing similar I could find.
Which is accurate - not like you can be sure how a comment will go over in real life - but frustrating in a game where so much is about talking. I played through 5 times - doesn't take more than a few hours once you know where to go - and when the game tells you how things turned out with everyone at the end, I kept getting basically the same results. Jonas and Alex were always distant, Ren moves across country and Alex rarely hears from him. She has only a vague notion what Nona's up to.
The 5th time, I got it where Jonas and I are tight-knit siblings, and Ren and Nona are dating. I have some idea what I did for the latter, but no idea what prompted the change in outcomes for Jonas and Alex. If anything, I thought I was doing worse than usual with him. Now I did somehow create distance between Alex and Ren, so I'd figure that was enough, except it didn't change anything vis-a-vis Jonas when I did the same thing on playthrough #4.
Maybe that's just down to me. I tried to pick different responses, or make different choices. There's a point you decide to check if the museum on the island might have any clues, and one of Ren, Jonas or Nona is coming with you. I usually pick Ren, since it's his idea, and between he and Jonas, "best friend" wins over "step-brother of 5 minutes." But one time their arguing was so irritating I picked Nona. It didn't seem to change anything, but everyone's incredulous reactions were funny.
Still, certain situations I always responded to roughly the same. Sometimes I couldn't remember what I picked the time before. Or I didn't like the other options. Too cruel, maybe. The last 3 playthroughs, I told myself going in that I'd take the spirits up on the offer to let them have Clarissa in return for letting the rest of us go.
And, without fail, when the spirits made the offer, I'd refuse. The first time I chalked up to a sense maybe their hold on us wasn't as secure as they claimed if they were bargaining. After that? It was just stubbornness. Or else a feeling that, even if Clarissa was cruel to Alex, she didn't deserve that.
I don't understand the time travel - time displacement - aspects of the story. How characters vanish and appear somewhere else. Yes, sometimes the spirits possess you, and so you lose time, but you wake up in the same place. I can sort of square the notion that this throws Alex back into memories of her and her deceased brother, maybe because the spirits are trying to distract her (although you can apparently alter past events, at least according to subsequent flashback trips.) Doesn't explain people appearing or disappearing or dying in front of you, then turning up fine later. I also don't understand how winding antiquated tape players gets you out of smaller time loops.
Part of the reason I kept playing was to see if I could get them free entirely. First time, I tried closing the doorway from the other side, consigning Alex to a horrible fate. Didn't work. We've already discussed my reluctance to give them Clarissa. At a certain point, you can find letters around the island that tell what happened to the spirits. I was banking on that info to help Alex reach the spirits' humanity, convince them to let go and move on, if I could just find the right thing for Alex to say. No dice, and a cursory search online suggests I can't get this group out, only maybe save a different Alex from falling into the same fate.
Which is not an ending that puts a guy in the mindset of having accomplished anything by finishing the game.
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