Oxenfree

A superb dialog-rich, story-centric adventure game, with excellent script, characterization, graphics, animation, music, and sound.

Sounds perfect, right? Well, it won't be everyone's cup of tea: gameplay is very linear, walking around is slow, and you'll be listening to a lot of dialog. It's more a choose-your-own-adventure game than a point-and-click quest. The most free-form adventuring you'll do is if you go for the collectibles to get an achievement (and learn more about the background story in the process).

My complaints are petty. There's not quite enough time to make dialog choices, and the dialog bubbles sometimes might appear off-screen if you're standing near an edge, so a few times I didn't manage to click in time. Also, I wish it was longer: I realize a lot of effort went into creating content for various choices the player makes, but since I don't plan to replay, I would have preferred fewer choices and more upfront game length. Finally, though the script is a delight, I found the dialog to be a bit too precious at times. Everyone in the game sounds like an English major.

Whatever. I thoroughly enjoyed it and hope for more games from this great team.

I would also like to thank the developer for supporting Linux. Much appreciated!