Recent reviews by Mother_Flowers

Forgettable and uninteresting. Definitely not worth the price, wait 'till a sale. 5 missions; 2 of which are played on the same 'map', a 3rd which is The Royal Conservatory from Dishonored 2, 4th being a relatively small mission and only one actually good-sized 5th map. And the thing is even then that barely annoys me when compared to the other things I'm about to list in this review. Like Daud's nonsensical hatred towards the Outsider, which gets so annoying to the point you'll hope he'll shut up (until you realise it's the only thing he does in the game).

If do you like great potential being wasted however (or what I like to like to call whole-lot-of-one-thing bloated in your face) then you'll love all of the different cults! There's the brand-new-Eyeless gang (discount Bottle street gang), then the good-old Outsiders who have brought their blind sisters along for the party (because you can't have enough cults!), then there's another cult who they didn't even bother to name because there are so many ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ cults and then to round it all up you got another group of the same cult but 'transformed' into the badass-looking void monster thingys.

Now, they were one of the things I was most excited about (props to whoever designed them they're friggin wicked), but their potential is completely wasted, more so than Daud & The Outsider, as we see these 'monsters' for all of 15~ minutes and you can sneak past them if you're too lazy* to fight 'em. Like they literally pose no threat to you if you've learnt how to use your Void powers - which shouldn't be too hard since you only get 3 powers in the entire ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ game! - and sneak past them (which can hardly be defined as sneaking anyway) onto the Outsider.

Then there's the poorly written Billie Lurk who's voice actor doesn't do her any favours and sounds completely flat and uninteresting. Oh and how dare I forget The Outsider, he's what this game is all about! The god who seems to be getting weaker and less interesting in every iteration of Dishonored. Remember him? He was awesome in the first Dishonored and not as bad as I was expecting with his new VA in the 2nd! Yup, they made him forgettable and uninteresting too. I was rather hoping he'd maybe taunt Billie & Daud or something, or do pretty much anything in the game - like literally anything - but nope, he has a handful of cutscenes, he comments when you inspect these Bioshock-like tears on posters and statue(s) around the world but that's about it. For a game that's centred around killing a friggin god, everything seems rather unnecessary and boring when the main reason you want to kill him is actually Daud's (and not forgetting all this hatred seemed to have started when he willingly killed the Empress), you as a player have grown an attachment to him(?) and don't want him dead and you're never really given a reason that sticks out to you why you should kill him. But hey, look on the bright side, (minor spoiler, it's really not that bad but just putting it here so I don't get shouted at) he has really nice eyes in the end cutscene!

Now don't get me wrong, huge Dishonoured fan here. over 140+ hours accumulated in both games and I even got a couple physical-♥♥♥♥ from Dishonored too. I'm loving the new 'Void Power' system and the powers you get, contracts were pretty cool too (even though they felt like the 'completely-optional-things-you-could-already-do-in-the-games-that-were-out-of-your-way-but-they-now-have-a-name-and-are-at-a-slightly-higher-frequency'). The gameplay itself is still fun as well, It's just extremely debatable whether the quantity & quality of the game equals the price and I've focused on the negatives deliberately, however none of this stops the game from being a hugely disappointing and anti-climatic end to the Kaldrin-era of Dishonored. The story began 5 years ago to Corvo staring up at Dunwall, now it ends with Bille literally looking at a seemingly-bottomless pit. Very disappointing. They didn't even mention Corvo, if he became the Duke or not etc.

Someone should probably make a review with this simple sentence:

Note: Almost forgot to note that performance is fine-ish, in fact, It seemed that the game was running a little better than Dishonored 2 (post-patches) ever will. (Please remember performance will vary depending on your specs)
Note(2): I wanted to focus on the negatives of the game I guess and in some cases, I am comparing it to the other two Dishonored games (which are very worthy of the awards they won)
Note(3): In case anybody else gets their pants all ruffled up, in the map which gets re-used for 'The Bank Job' (mission 3), the 'bank-section' of the map is bigger than it was in the first iteration (mission 2). Unfortunately, that's the only change to the map, excluding some trivial things like a new 'security' system to the Blackmarket shop etc.

*By 'you can sneak past them if you're too lazy' I meant lazy when compared to going all high chaos on their asses in that specific part of the game, not the entire franchise. And even then, if you've played the part I'm talking about you'd know it doesn't exactly take a lot of effort to sneak past the void-monster-thingys. The designers made it very easy to use Displace and sneak past.

IS. LEAVE. POSSIBLE.

Pff, is not enjoying this game possible?! I am in no way a fan of the horror/mystery/adventure game genre but my god was this game amazing.
See it on sale? Buy it. Don't wanna wait? Well, first off remember that you're eligible for a full refund of Oxenfree so long as you play for < 2 hours within 2 weeks of the game's purchase - so on the rare chance you have horrible taste you don't like the game you can just refund it and move on. Ok so now that's out of the way, the first play through of Oxenfree took me a fair less than 6 hours and I was being disturbingly slow (I was also trying to complete all of the extras and not 'leaving' any possible content behind). However, the game has A LOT of possible endings, even a 'secret' ending and a New Game Plus mode which changes the game's dialogue and arguably the original ending itself (for better or worse - this might not make sense to you, but I'm not going to go into detail because SPOILERS), so the £14/$20 price tag could easily be justified IMHO, but of course that's very subjective. Hence why I'd recommend simply waiting for it to go on sale as it's more than worth the price then. Trust me, this game is one of those hidden gems and you should totally, at the very least, keep it on your radar.

Pun intended.