This post is not going to be terribly long today because I will be writing full reviews of both Night in the Woods and Oxenfree quite soon, and I don't want to end up repeating myself too much. I did want to give you a quick update however because at the moment I'm not too sure when I will find the time to edit these reviews together - hopefully I will have one of them done by next weekend at the latest and then have the other one ready to upload during the week after next. My PC has been acting up just lately though which meant that the latest Covertape Chaos took almost 6 hours to make when it should only take about 3 at the most.
Anyway, I should stop rambling and get to the point. Night in the Woods and Oxenfree share quite a few similarities: the are both gentle paced adventure games where being able to take your time and explore them thoroughly is really rewarding. Neither of these are a huge time investment, but both are set up in a way that it is impossible to do everything in one play through - so instead of fretting about what you might have missed or looking up how get the best ending, you should just enjoy the story that the developers have decided to tell and go with your gut instinct. At least for the first time through. I'm not sure whether or not I will come back and play either of these a second time - for certain games like the Telltale series, I like to just play them once and feel like that is my personal version of the story. Going back and doing things another way can sometimes spoil the illusion.
Both of these games are very well written, and do a very good job of portraying believable characters with interesting back stories combined with some very strange goings on in terms of the plot. Both of the protagonists, cat like creature Mae and blue haired teen Alex, are fairly likable but definitely have their fair share of neuroses and personal shit that they have to deal with. I know common wisdom states that Gregg is apparently the best character in Night of the Woods, but I found myself more interested in Bee, the chain smoking crocodile chick who is having to work all hours of the day to support her ailing father after her mother tragically passed away. It's clear that at one point in time Mae and Bee were extremely close, but her situation and resentment of Mae's decision to just give up college one day get between them. I chose to spend time with her and work through their problems rather than carry out crimes with Gregg.
Whereas Night in the Woods took a little while to get its hooks into me, I was fully committed to finishing Oxenfree by the time my first hour with it was up and got to the end in one roughly four hour sitting. I loved the painterly art style, exploring the island with it's interesting array of places, and delving deeper into the mystery of what's going on. It took me a lot longer to finish Night in the Woods over a dozen or so short-ish sessions, but one of those was almost entirely taken up playing the fully featured rogue lite that can be played on Mae's laptop. The quality of that minigame alone rivals that of many indie games, and it's entirely optional!
I am glad that I have finally crossed both of these games off of my backlog list. Time to think about what's next! I'm still plugging away at Mass Effect: Andromeda and starting to get towards the end game now I think, but I don't want to to finish it until I have at least completed all of the crew's loyalty missions. Other than that, I think I will probably try Pyre next, it does sound very interesting. I'm also playing the odd session of OnRush here and there, and will be messing around with some of the Games with Gold / PS Plus / Xbox Game Pass offerings this week, but that's not official Summer Backlog business so I'll save it for another post or video. I think that does it for the time being - keep an eye out for those two reviews over the next week or so, and I'll be back with another diary once I've had time to play some more. In the meantime, take care!
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