It's not difficult to be trapped in the past. All of us have moments we wish we could go back to, things we could've done differently. People we could see again, places we wish we could tread. Regret is a part of the human experience. And it's difficult not to be caught up in it, to let that regret consume you. I certainly know that feeling, as someone who is neurodivergent I have a nasty habit of spiraling due to bad conversations and interactions I've had in the past. The past is a shadow that haunts me to this day. It's difficult to not let it consume you. All that anger, all that resentment, all that sorrow. It will eat you if you let it. Imprison you in a cage of your own making, never to see the future.
Oxenfree - When You're Stuck in Time
What is Oxenfree?
Oxenfree is a 2016 graphic adventure game with horror elements released by Night School Studios. Night School Studios was founded by a former TellTale developer, as well as a former Disney Interactive developer, and the TellTale influence in Oxenfree is undeniable. In Oxenfree you play as Alex, a high school senior who is heading off to the now uninhabited island off the coast of their hometown, Edwards Island. Edwards Island used to be a military base and testing facility many decades ago but now mostly serves as a tourist destination, with it being a popular campsite and protected historical location. Every year, before prom, the seniors in the town head out to Edwards Island to throw an all night beach rager before the end of the school year, but this year the party is a more small scale intimate gathering. Most of the school has decided against the tradition and Alex's best friend, Ren, has decided to only invite a handful of people to his small scale recreation mostly to have an intimate scenario to ask out a girl he likes. But he also wants to investigate some of the mysterious phenomenon on the island. There are strange radio signals emanating from a mysterious cave near the beach, part of this island's long history of bizarre phenomenon.
Equipped with a handheld radio of their own, Alex and Ren, along with Alex's stepbrother Jonas, infiltrate the cave. Following the radio signals leads them to a small passageway in the rock, just wide enough for people to squeeze through. Ren stays behind but Alex and Jonas go deeper into the cave, following the strange radio signals until they come across a truly bizarre phenomenon, a tear in the fabric of space-time that emits radio waves. As they tune into it, they come into contact with ghosts that use the radio to communicate and, after telling them it's safe to return, the group quickly finds themselves cast throughout Edwards Island, with no memory of how they got there. As they try to reunite, they become aware of bizarre time phenomena. Sometimes they'll continuously loop the same events over and over in rapid sequence. Others they'll find themselves displaced entirely, with minutes or even hours missing. Still others they get transported backwards, sometimes years, being forced to relive moments. The group realize something is toying with them, and learn it's something that wants off this island. And if they don't escape before dawn, it'll use them to do it.
Oxenfree is, as mentioned before, a graphic adventure game. If you aren't familiar with that specific wording, it's essentially a point and click adventure game, games like King's Quest or TellTale games. It's definitely more of the TellTale style than the latter, though, Oxenfree's actual traversal and puzzles are very limited. Alex can't do much more than move, interact with predetermined objects, choose dialog options, and tune her radio which is how most of the game's puzzles are solved. What Oxenfree is built around, instead, are the dialog options. Alex will be given options to respond to her friends and make decisions on what to do at various points and how she talks to her friends or how she decides have a major impact on the story's end. If Alex is meaner, her friends might ghost her. If she's nicer, they might stick together. Outside of that mechanic, though, Oxenfree's radio usage is really fascinating. The island is absolutely covered in odd radio signals and if Alex tunes in she'll catch all manner of bizarre jazz stations, weird messages, hidden codes, etc. Alex must use these tools to figure out the puzzles, discover the mystery, and try not to let her friends get consumed by the entity.
Stuck in Time
Edwards Island
Spoilers from here on out, like, major plot stuff. I'm going to just openly talk about the big plot threads native to Oxenfree so if you want to play it and that's a problem for you, maybe sit the rest of it out.
Oxenfree is a game that is about being trapped in the past at its core. Most of the cast, both those in the present and those calling to them from the past, are stuck in their own history, hung up in their own past. As such, the setting of the game reflects this perfectly. Edwards Island was a military base during the Cold War and was suddenly abandoned after the explosion of a nuclear submarine in the waters around it. It has been, more or less, preserved as is in the intermittent decades, the entire island being government protected land that is maintained by its caretaker and only full time resident, Maggie Adler. Maggie's efforts have all but ensured that the island has no other residents, outside of a very small tourist industry that has arisen around the docks populated by people who work on the island but don't live there, the island remains more or less untouched.
This gives an eerie vibe to the island. Even without being literally haunted, it still feels haunted. The island was, due to Maggie Adler's efforts, never cleaned up after the explosion. The military base there, Fort Milner, sits untouched, buildings destroyed and decaying. School groups and tourists do come here, but the buildings aren't being upkept, the fort seemingly standing on its own forgotten. The past is therefore a suffocating presence, the scars omnipresent as you explore the island. Exploring Edwards Island feels as if the war never ended, and it will continue to feel that way long after anyone stops visiting it. In a way, Maggie's efforts to preserve the island have ensured the past will consume the present, that time will never truly move forward. Even moreso now that she's passed and the island is likely to be abandoned without a caretaker. It's a poignant sight that really sets the stage for this game's themes of the past looking to consume the present.
The Radio
The prominent usage of a radio in a game about being stuck in the past is fascinating to me. Oxenfree is set in the modern day, or at least modern to its release. It never gives a concrete time frame and, honestly, you could be fooled into thinking it is set in the 80s or 90s due to its clear inspiration from that era of teenage coming of age films. But the main characters use smartphones and have more of a 2010s aesthetic so it has to be set in the modern day. But throughout most of the game, you are tied to your radio. When you first arrive on the island, the radio doesn't seem to have much of a purpose. Ren demanded you bring it, but he's keeping the reasons why cagey and he says outright that, genuinely, you can't get a signal on most of the island anyways. The only radio station that you seem to be able to pick up is a station that is communicating a message in morse code, likely a relic of all the Cold War era communications equipment around. Once you get in touch with the entity haunting this island, though, things change.
Much like everything else on the island, the radio becomes attuned to things both past and present once the entity has been allowed into our world. The radio suddenly picks up a lot of radio stations, all of which seem to be from decades in the past. Classical, jazz, old pop staples, these all broadcast from the radio should you tune it to the right frequency. The past is imposing upon the present. Not only that, but once you are in the entity's grasps, the radio can pick up on all sorts of weird broadcasts, broadcasts it should not be. There are loads of odd radio signals that can be picked up on Edwards Island. Titled anomalies, outside of the entity's grasps they just appear as very odd static, violent and crunchy but indecipherable. Inside the entity, though, they are legible, and they are bizarre. Old military call signs. Weird phenomenon in the 20th century, like picking up on ghost ships or the conversation where the man believed to be Bobby Dunbar states "I know who I am, and I know who you are, and nothing else makes a difference." As if every strange or unexplained occurrence across the past century is folding in on this one specific moment in time.
The radio is serving as a beacon, but also a prison. It's not just reaching out in time, it's trapping them in it. Due to their contact with the entity, they, in a way, exist within the radio waves now. Every anomaly that occurs, from possession to time looping is accompanied by the radio. It is forcing our cast to confront their past, threatening to leave them in it. It's not just picking up simple signals from the past, it's pulling dissonant pieces of it together, the entity using the radio to blend its world with the present. It preys upon the past, preys upon the characters' relationships, their trauma, all the while reducing their identities to little more than. Static. Noise in a radio. The most haunting anomalies of all are the ones that aren't taken from the past. The most haunting ones are those that are just. Alex. Who knows which Alex they might be, how long ago they were recorded. But they're her. Stuck in the loop like everything else.
Maggie Adler
Maggie Adler is one of the most fascinating characters in this game, Recently departed, Maggie spent much of her life tending to the island by her lonesome. As previously stated, she led the campaign to make it a National Park, ensuring the island would be free of residential development. She was, in fact, its only actual resident and much of the lore of the island comes from her. She is the shadow cast over Edwards Island, a person who has hidden clues to what is truly going on here across the island that are only available to you if you can find the right radio frequency. And, as is typical of this game, she is stuck in her own past, unable to move forward from the things that have happened to her.
Maggie, as a child, underwent a similar experience to what Alex is now going through. She had discovered the radio anomalies and managed to tap into the Entity, which proceeded to try and possess her and her best friend, Anna. It wanted off the island, and was willing to do anything to accomplish the goal. This would cause it to try and possess the girls, unsuccessfully possessing Maggie and killing Anna in the process. This would leave the Entity without a way to enter our world, forcing it to retreat back into its prison. Maggie would be shaped by this event, the loss of her best friend to this dark being that infects Edwards Island. It would become her life's obsession.
You see, Maggie's life's work, the preservation of Edwards Island, is all about to this day. Maggie has been fighting so hard to preserve the island, to ensure that there will never be full time residency on it and that when she passes on, nobody will inhabit it, because she is attempting to stop people from meeting the same fate as Anna. Maggie's life's work has been devoted to containing the entity, all the while attempting to develop a possible way to defeat it. Necessity has dictated that she never move on, that she always relive her best friend dying so as to ensure that fate never happened to another. But doing so has cost her greatly, her moral imperative to never move on costing her friends and family. She lived a reclusive life, inside a big house on the coast where she tinkered with radios and old films. Her house is cold and sterile, the only connections shown in it being old photos of two people. Maggie herself and Anna. Moving on may have been an impossibility for her, she may have needed to be stuck never moving forward, but it's still a tragedy.
Jonas
Jonas is not the most complex character, but I think his weight on the theme is super interesting. Jonas is Alex's stepsibling, their parents have very recently gotten married after Alex's got divorced and Jonas' mom died. Jonas wasn't really supposed to be here originally, Ren had intended it to just be Alex, him, the girl he likes, whose name is Nona, and Nona's best friend Clarissa. Jonas, however, tags along in an attempt for the new stepsiblings to have quality bonding time. For their part, Alex and Jonas are very cordial with each other and seem to become fast friends. Jonas ends up being Alex's primary companion throughout the journey, with only one sequence actually happening where you aren't partnered with Jonas, and so he's often the person whom Alex's plans and thoughts are being bounced off. Which is a thing I actually do really enjoy, in a game about being stuck in the past, Jonas and Alex's bonding represents something of a metaphorical path forward for Alex to overcome her trauma.
And for a lot of the game, that seems to be what Jonas' role is. He doesn't seem to have much the Entity can exploit to fast track his possession and seems so out of the Entity's grasp that he barely even notices the Entity's timeline warping. Whereas other people are quick to notice how wonky time is, Jonas seems relatively aloof to how time is going screwy until Alex tells him. Several times throughout the game, Alex informs Jonas that they're looping, something he seems to fail to notice on his own during the events of the story. This, of course, makes perfect sense. Jonas seemingly doesn't have baggage to exploit, his role in the story seems to be the antithesis of the Entity's goal. He is Alex's path forward, her future, the doorway to the world beyond these anomalies.
However, things aren't that simple. As Alex combats the Entity, she learns she has to set the anomalies "right" by fixing tape decks that appear in key areas. These tape decks are a symbol for the Entity's time manipulation, as if the Entity is using an old film reel that it's playing faster or slower and splicing together. As Alex fixes these tape decks, making them play at the right speed, a song comes through each of them. And it's a song Jonas recognizes, a song that his mother used to sing to him. Jonas gets caught up in the song, thinking he even hears his mother in the broadcast by the end of it. And his deceased mother allows the Entity to get to him, it's a hang-up it can exploit. Jonas doesn't get full-on possessed or killed like the others, he gets briefly possessed but always snaps out of it, because that's not really his role in the story. But the Entity does effectively use this thing to isolate Jonas from Alex, forcing Alex to be alone at the final conflict as she attempts to seal the Entity away for good. The literal embodiment of the path forward being himself stuck in the past.
The Entity
The significance of the game being called "Oxenfree" is not immediately obvious. Oxenfree is a term I'm sure we're all familiar with, growing up we would all play hide and seek or games like it and to tell everyone "the game's over, the seeker has given up", we would say "olly olly Oxenfree". It's not a title that seems to make sense for a lot of the game, a game which does not seem to be about hide and seek. That is, until you get far along enough to where you learn more about the entity that is haunting our group of teenagers. And you quickly find out that IT is the thing coming out of hiding. It's a being that likes to play with its food, framing its attempts at possessing the cast as "games". But it's done playing. It's coming out. Olly Olly Oxenfree.
When Alex and Jonas awaken the entity, it's unknown what exactly it's deal is. They recognize it to be some manner of ghost or specter, a supernatural being calling out to them to know if it's safe to come out. But they don't at first know what exactly it is. As the game progresses, though, they discover evidence that the Entity is actually not a singular being, but rather a legion. They are the crew of the nuclear submarine that exploded in the waters decades ago. They had, mysteriously, disappeared after that explosion, leaving no trace of the disaster. What had happened is that they got thrust into an alternate plane of existence, a reality in which they existed for decades, stewing in their resentment of being robbed of their lives. This contempt for the world they left behind has caused them to believe they deserve a second chance at life, and they will use whatever means necessary to get it.
They have, in the past, tried to breach through the barrier to the real world through other people who have contacted them. But it's gone poorly, as you read with their attempts to possess Anna. So they learned one thing: you have to be patient. You have to slowly overtake the person, let them give way to yourselves. And it's most effective when the people you're possessing have existing hang-ups, trauma you can exploit to align their hatred with their own. The entities wish to escape their fate, to untie themselves from being trapped in time, by imprisoning others in it. And the notion that what they're doing is wrong is one they're uninterested in entertaining. They believe they were robbed of life and so see it as only fair to rob others so they can escape. Every time phenomenon, the looping, the traveling, the displacement, is their attempt to buy themselves some time so they can infect the gang on Edwards Island even more. Feeding off them until they take control completely, a goal they almost succeed at with at least one of the teenagers.
It is not difficult to draw comparisons between the damned crew of this submarine and the way older generations in real life behave right now. A group of people from decades ago actively robbing the futures of teenagers because they're mad that the world isn't what they worked for, isn't what they were promised. That they followed their orders to a T and instead of getting rewarded for it, they got forgotten about, cast aside by a world that kept moving forward without them. But instead of accepting this reality and allowing the newer generations to push forward and build a brighter future, they wish to tighten their grasp on this world at any cost. When the time anomalies begin, one of the most prominent features is that random bits of decades old furniture starts randomly appearing on the island. Chairs, tables, old tape decks, etc, these all appear randomly strewn about Edwards Island once the crew have begun enacting their plan. As if their world NEEDS to be dominant over the present, the natural landscape overtaken by the world they left. They need to assert themselves over a world they feel has abandoned them.
But they are not only stuck in the past in this sense, trying to create a world akin to what they left, they are stuck in their own past as well. It's why the entities love\ games, why they treats their possession like a series of playground activities. The crew of this doomed submarine has mentally and emotionally regressed, their understanding of the world being turned into that of a child. They are selfish about their needs, driven by not only resentment but a lack of empathy, a specific kind of inability to think of others that is only present in children. It's funny, to draw another comparison to the current state of the world, when they are confronted with the idea that what they're doing is wrong and only seeks to harm people, they basically respond with "I know, but what about my needs". The entities feel the need to recapture a life it didn't lead and it seems like that includes its childhood.
At the same time, though, they positions themselves as authority figures. That because of their age, they somehow have the authority to judge the teens. In one of their times confronting Alex, the crew reprimands her for "agreeing to get into this situation without knowing what they were getting into". They dare call Alex naive and arrogant for messing with things she did not understand. All the while, they are just voices on a radio playing children's games, chasing a past that no longer exists because they can't face the reality of their own sunsetting. They are the past which haunts us to this day, the lawmakers and voters who are chasing a childhood that never truly existed, an idyllic world of their own creation where the problems that plague the world don't exist. And they will rob everyone of their future if it means gaining such a world.
Clarissa
While the crew of the sunk submarine are unambiguously the bad guys of this story, they are not the only antagonistic force. Clarissa, in classic teen movie fashion, is the token "mean girl" of the group. The absurdly popular girl who just so happens to hang out with this ragtag group because she's besties with the quiet artsy girl who has ended up in the group. She attempts to be civil with the group, but her and Alex have a history. And Clarissa intends to dig up that history as, from her perspective, Alex ruined her life. Ruined her chance at a bright and happy future. Perhaps even moreso than any of the characters we have talked about, Clarissa cannot let go.
When the "party" starts, the first suggestion is to play an icebreaker game. Jonas is, after all, new to the group and barely even knows Alex, let alone all these strangers. The game, however, quickly becomes tense as Clarissa takes it to a place that is way too serious. Demanding Alex tell Jonas why her parents got divorced, why he's even here. Demanding she admit fault. Because in Clarissa's mind, Alex is at fault for her parents' divorce. See, Alex's parents got divorced after the traumatic death of Alex's older brother Michael. Michael drowned to death off the coast of Edwards Island a year ago and the family apparently fell apart after that incident. The thing is that Alex was there when her brother died. She watched him drown and, being unable to swim, did nothing to save him. Clarissa was also there as, at the time, Clarissa and Michael were dating.
Clarissa hates Alex, therefore, because to Clarissa Alex robbed her of something. She genuinely loved Michael, it wasn't just a simple high school thing. We find out through the game that the two of them were planning on moving in together, that after Clarissa graduated high school (Michael is a year or two older than her and Alex), they were going to move out of the small town they live in and start fresh somewhere else. In Clarissa mind, Alex's inaction has killed her chances of a happy ending, and that resentment has bubbled up over the past year. And now that the two of them are stuck on an island together, Clarissa's deep-seeded hatred for Alex can only consume her.
After the initial time anomaly, Alex and Jonas have to find Clarissa in the old military fort. The crew have cast her their, trying to isolate the teens so they are easier to possess. When you head off to the fort, however, things are different with Clarissa than the other teens. While Ren and Nona have both experienced bizarre phenomenon and minor instances of possession, Clarissa already seems too far gone. She's already fully at the mercy of the crew, who puppet her body around to lure Alex and Jonas further into their trap, showing them Clarissa walking around and then immediately disappearing. This all culminates in the crew seemingly forcing Clarissa to end her own life, making her jump out of a third story window to her doom. However, it's not long before Clarissa reappears. When Alex heads back to the dock to try and find the key to the Adler house, Clarissa is there waiting for her. Sitting on top of a lamppost as if it's the most casual thing in the world. Except, it's not really Clarissa.
Clarissa, at this point, has been fully overtaken by the crew. For the remainder of the game, she is their primary voice, they communicate with Alex and torment her through Clarissa. It is not difficult to parse why. The crew preys upon the things you can't let go, it uses your trauma as a doorway into your body. Of the teens, Clarissa is the one who has the most trouble letting go. She has blamed Alex for a freak accident for an entire year, believing that a girl who could not do anything to help should've sacrificed her own life to have a one in a thousand chance at saving Michael. Clarissa has not healed from that moment, has been unable to view it as a horrible situation that was ultimately out of everyone's control, and has seemingly believed every bad thing that has happened in Alex's life since is deserved. She is the poster child for this theme, a young woman who refuses to move on being literally consumed by the past she wallows in.
As such, the crew REALLY likes Clarissa. Clarissa is a natural conduit for the entity, it's difficult to even tell what parts of her dialog are the crew and what parts are just Clarissa's resentment. They, more than anything, do not want to let this girl go, do not want this true manifestation of loathing slip through their grasps. So, at about the 3/4 point, they offer Alex a deal. Let them keep Clarissa and they'll back off. Let the other four go. And the player has the option to take this deal, to allow Clarissa to stew eternally in her contempt. To erase her from the story as the characters look towards the future. It's a fascinating little decision, one that allows the player to interact with the theme in a very unique way. Clarissa represents the past that won't go away, a wound that won't heal. And sometimes it's easy to simply pretend the past didn't happen than face it. To decide to pretend it doesn't exist.
Alex
Finally, our protagonist. Alex is the pin holding the story together, as I'm sure you can gather. She has the most impact on the plot and a lot of the game is about her personal drama. Multiple characters' effective role in the story is related to her relationship with her past, with the main villain literally exploiting someone who is deeply impacted by their shared trauma as the form through which they manifest. Granted, a lot of this is because we are inside Alex's head throughout the journey. Whatever Ren and Nona are going through as this entity is playing with them is pretty untold, most of what is happening is built around this trio of Alex, Jonas, and Clarissa. Still, Alex's own trauma, the ways she is still stuck in the past, are central to the story. What's more, though is that Alex's relationship with her trauma is very interesting because, while not entirely so, she seems to be kind of in denial about it.
There's a very interesting scene that happens about halfway through the night. Alex had spent most of the night up to this point believing she was immune to the Entity's possession, or at least so resistant to it's attempts that it had given up trying to possess her pretty early on. This is due to the fact that Alex is always lucid during time phenomenon and during confrontations with the crew. Whereas other people fail to notice things like looping or displacement until after they're already over, relying on Alex to inform them on what happened during it, Alex is always present and aware that things are going screwy. This is, of course, for the player's benefit, the player is aware of all these weird things happening so it makes sense Alex would be too. But it's also very interesting that she believes she is immune in the context of what ends up happening.
There's a part where Alex disappears into her past for an extended period of time. She relives memories she's had with Michael and Clarissa and despite being lucid during these too, they still feel real to her. Like she's really living these moments with her brother again, as if she's been transported back. When she comes out of it, though, she is informed that she had been possessed. The crew had successfully taken over Alex's body for a period of time and forced her into her memories. This comes as a shock to Alex because, again, she had believed that she was immune. It is likely that the crew simply was toying with her, they enjoy games and Alex, being the one with the radio, is the one best equipped to play with them. But I think that this also gives us interesting insight into what Alex believes about her own past trauma, and how much of a juxtaposition it is with Clarissa.
Alex's behavior with regards to the incident one year ago tends to be very laissez faire. She behaves as someone who has already healed from it and is instead looking to the future. Something that I'm sure makes Clarissa loathe her more. She has a new family now, her life has drastically changed and she just kind of wants to move on from the whole deal. She thinks she is immune to the impact it's had on her, that life moved on and she has to move on with it. But much like with the possession, she is kidding herself. Alex never allowed herself to confront her brother's death, never allowed herself to feel the impact it had on her. Inside of her she is guilty, and kind of hates herself, but she's masking by pretending she's moving on, that she's more than this moment that happened to her. But by never confronting it, she is stuck in it, and the crew is able to exploit that, able to literally trap her in her memories of the days leading up to her brother's death.
It becomes very interesting that Alex is able to hand Clarissa over to the crew in this context. The idea is that Alex wants to continue to pretend that she has moved on from her brother's death, to stop the pain by pretending it's not there. Clarissa exists as a wall to this goal. As long as Clarissa is in her life, a person who can't pretend that day DIDN'T happen and is driven by that resentment, Alex can never pretend it did happen. The pain will always be there, Clarissa will always be around to say "hey, your brother died, and it's your fault. Everything wrong in your life is your fault." So, while it may be cold, while it may be frankly evil, it does actually make sense that Alex would ever consider the offer to just let them have Clarissa. If Clarissa is gone, Alex can keep pretending that everything is fine. The pain can once again be pushed down. Alex can try and frame it however she wants, that she is trading one soul for four, but really it's a selfish action. A way to keep pretending everything is fine. It'd be evil, but it's also very human to want the pain to stop in the easiest way possible.
However, it wouldn't be a solution. Alex would not be free of her past if she wasn't too confront it. It would be a bandage on a bullet wound. When Alex goes to enact Maggie's plan to stop the crew once and for all, the crew warns that doing so will be a sacrifice. That she will simply be imprisoned with them, sealed away on this side for all eternity. It's a threat that she will, ultimately, be imprisoned in her own past if she does this, she hasn't actually moved on and so she will suffer their same fate. But, that's not exactly what comes to pass. Alex seals the crew away, either freeing or erasing Clarissa depending on your choices, and then is flung back to before all of this even began. She awakens in her home at a point before her brother's death, you get to have one final conversation with Michael. This conversation is everything, it's not simply a chance for Alex to talk with her brother, it is a chance for the player to engage with the theme of the game on their own terms.
See, throughout Alex's journey, she has been talked to at various points by her own reflection. For most of the game it's believed that this is the result of the time anomalies. The crew messing around with her head. Especially as they tell her cryptic things that don't make sense to her past self, stuff she's meant to tell her brother who Alex, at the time, believes she'll never see again. It's only now, at the end of the game, that we discover that these moments are actually Alex from the future, preparing her younger self to talk with Michael near the end. Prepping her for this final conversation with her brother and what choices she may have to make when talking to him. See, this conversation is a very powerful time anomaly. Depending on what the player makes Alex say, time will change.
The player must decide one very core, meaningful choice: should time pass as it did originally. Should we tell Michael the same things Alex told him originally, the sequence of answers to his questions that would lead to his death. Or should we save him? Should we convince him to follow a different path that will lead to him not drowning? It's a decision without right answers, it's entirely built around how the player engages with the game's theme. Saving Michael means Alex won't meet Jonas, that her stepfamily won't ever come into her life even if a divorce is inevitable. What the player is essentially choosing is thus: does Alex fix her past or does she move forward with her current present. Do they make sure Alex won't move on from Michael's death but also that she won't ever need to, or will they carve out a proper future for her. Is the player, themselves, trapped in the past?
After the final conversation with Michael, Alex awakens on the ferry off Edwards Island. All her still existing friends are there and they try to debrief from the night. The awkward atmosphere gives way quickly to frustrations about prom, an attempt to laugh through the trauma. And then the players' choices start reaching their consequences. Alex reads out a "where are they now" for each of the characters and how your actions on the island changed things for their relationships. Maybe Ren and Nona got together. Maybe Clarissa and Alex patched things up. Maybe all your friends hate you now because you spent the whole night trying to go with what you thought was the best option and it turned out they all thought you were mean when you were just being assertive. The most important thing, though, is that they all can heal, all can move on from the events of Edwards Island. But, our trauma doesn't let us go that easily does it? For at the end of her whole speel, Alex's voice gets distorted, and when it corrects itself, she's back on the day this all occurred. Ready to head out to Edwards Island for her friend's party.
It's not difficult to be trapped in the past. All of us have moments we wish we could go back to, things we could've done differently. People we could see again, places we wish we could tread. Regret is a part of the human experience. And it's difficult not to be caught up in it, to let that regret consume you. I certainly know that feeling, as someone who is neurodivergent I have a nasty habit of spiraling due to bad conversations and interactions I've had in the past. The past is a shadow that haunts me to this day. It's difficult to not let it consume you. All that anger, all that resentment, all that sorrow. It will eat you if you let it. Imprison you in a cage of your own making, never to see the future.
