Oxenfree, a supernatural adventure game with a cast of relatable, realistic teenagers, was a cult hit when it came out at the beginning of 2016. That cult kept growing as the game won awards and was ported to more hardware, and now, over seven years later, fans are at a fever pitch for the sequel. Fortunately they only have a few days left to wait. Ahead of Oxenfree 2: Lost Signals’ release on Wednesday, July 12, I was recently able to sit down with Sean Krankel (Night School Studio‘s founder and studio director), Adam Hines (lead writer), Sara Hebert (community director), and Bryant Cannon (Oxenfree 2‘s director) to talk about the original game, what’s new in the sequel, and their status as a Netflix studio. Along the way we got to talking about how their past games informed the new sequel—a first for a studio known for inventing new worlds or novel takes on existing ones—as well as how they developed the visual language for the series’ ghosts and supernatural and more.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Paste: How the hell did you come to the conclusion to finally do Oxenfree 2?
Sean Krankel: That took a long time. Yeah, I mean right after Oxenfree, we were not in a place where we wanted to, actually. We thought this story was so complete and we knew exactly what we had made and were proud of it and wanted to pivot. And so going to Afterparty, which was a very different game, very different tone, was in many ways the counter to what the first game was like in terms of the tone and the world. But during that time and during the subsequent work that we had been doing, I think we took a step back and were able to start to see what made Oxenfree special to us. Because when we made it, we didn’t know if it was, “Does it all have to be about Alex, or is it this spooky world that we’re in? Or is it just the vibes of it, or is it the quality of the storytelling, or is it the specific cast of teens butting up against each other?” And the further we looked at it and saw players looking at the game too and having themselves get reflected in their own playthroughs, we kind of took a look at that world of Oxenfree and said, well, Camena—which is the coastal town that you hear about in the first game but you don’t go to until the second one—and Edwards Island, which is where the first game takes place. And all of the strange supernatural events that are taking place there that essentially made Alex and her friends have to reckon with their own personal demons. That’s the thing. Like we could put anybody through that sort of machine and go, “Okay, they’re gonna have a new, unique, potentially life altering experience.” And I think that was like a big aha moment for us a few years ago where we were like, “What if we told another coming of age story, but for people who are further into life? You know, in their twenties or thirties. What are the types of things that they’re grappling with? And yet still inside of this very freaky set of rules that the first game had.” So it took a while, but yeah, that’s I think why we landed there.
Paste: How hard has it been removing yourself from having to write teenagers as you’ve aged up your cast in the sequel?
Adam Hines: I always have to be 10 years older than who I’m writing [Hines laughs] I honestly never, and we kind of as a studio, really think or talk about the characters in terms of how old they are. It’s always what they want, what they’re struggling with, what their obstacles in life are, and how to reflect that in the crazy story that we told. So honestly it wasn’t any bigger a challenge or needed other types of writing. We still approach it as people first.
Paste: How does the cast compare to the first? Oxenfree 2 has two protagonists, as opposed to a group of teenagers, and their boss Evelyn, who is on the walkie-talkie, but now there’s a cult as well as the ghosts that have haunted Edwards Island.
Hines: Yeah, that was one of the most fun parts about making this game, cause in Oxenfree we were limited to just the teens that went to the island. And of course the ghosts that make up the backstories you learned about and uncover and have to dig up. With this one, with the walkie-talkie mechanic, we were able to give you just a much wider breadth of people. The fact that you’re not on the island, you’re in the main town of Camena, means you’re able to bump up against what other people in the town are dealing with when this anomaly and supernatural stuff starts to happen. So on a walkthrough, you’re able to talk to way older people, way younger…you just get a lot of different perspectives and different personality types. And you can choose to be friends, choose to ally yourself with someone, choose to align yourself with them temporarily and get something from them. And it’s great to be able to just kinda pull out the walkie-talkie whenever you want to start the conversation based on what’s happening in the environments that you’re in, and get their perspectives on it and ask them what would they do here.
Paste: What else does the walkie-talkie add to Oxenfree 2?
Bryant Cannon: I mean the radio in Oxenfree, you were on a remote island, so you didn’t pick up any stations, but now you’re on the mainland, right? So there are a lot more radio stations to find. But also there are stories that take place on these radio stations now, there are characters you discover through these radio stations that you can find and interact with in different ways later on. So we just wanted to kind of deepen that element while adding these other, you know, ways to interact with the world with characters.
Krankel: I think conceptually we just like this idea of in the first game, everything was so kind of localized to Alex and the things that she was seeing—and we understood that the rest of the cast was out and about doing things here and there—but this one we really wanted to lean into that this was an entire town that has people being affected. That you may be doing something on one side of town with the understanding—with the walkie—that you can asynchronously be connecting with them, changed the design pretty dramatically. Especially because with the walkie, you can kind of jump in at any moment and call somebody, right? And then that cast continues to grow. Folks that you meet, you meet through that. So yeah, I think it just changed how we thought about the game spatially in a weird way. Like it changed the depth of interaction with characters.
Paste: I’ve gotten the sense through previews and trailers too that we’re also now explicitly time-traveling. There were glimpses of this in the first game, but tell me about how you broadened and built on that concept for the sequel. How much of the game will take place in other times on Camena?
Krankel: Yeah, I mean I think we want to keep how much of that and where you go a surprise, but that said, it was definitely interesting for us to try to look into more intentionally going to other timelines. Like the first game when you were jumping around, it was all kind of happening at you because of the nature of the world, right? So you’d get stuck in a weird time loop or you would interact with something that was a foggy, either perhaps memory or other version, of your brother who passed away. But in this one we were like, “What if we could kind of wield that a little bit in certain areas and intentionally go back and forth?” So it definitely plays a key role in how the story all plays out. It’s not just there for fun gimmicks, although even at that level it is a pretty fun gimmick.
Hines: At least to me, itt made sense of like something to put into the sequel. Something that we kind of hinted at and teased and you can kind of come up against in the first one. So it just made sense for us to make it a more fully featured thing you get to do.
Paste: In the preview, we open up a rift over Edwards Island, but the game doesn’t necessarily take place there. How big of a role do the events happening there play in the grand scheme of things?
Krankel: I’m good saying no comment.
[Everyone laughs.]
Krankel: I would just say that the way that we have thought about the events that are happening over there [Edwards Island] are such that, um, how do I put it? It’s sort of like the stuff that happened in the first game is impacting things here, but this is its own story. And so if we do ever end up dipping back over there for any even tiny narrative reasons, it is for this story for Riley. It’s very much like Riley’s story.
Paste: Was there ever a point in development where you considered picking back up on Alex and Jonas’ stories from the original title in the sequel?
Krankel: Totally. I mean, for a while we talked about, “What do you do with the direct sequel with Alex as the star?” And that felt like maybe the more on the nose thing to do, but then we were like, “Her story was done.” Like we felt like it was done and it was complete…And so I think that to us it was so much more interesting to dive into a new story, a new person with a new set of like, trauma to deal with, because otherwise we would turn Alex into like, you know, a Ghostbuster/Scooby-Doo character. Which, not that we would’ve fully gone that way, but we didn’t want to keep giving her some new challenge to go up against and give her more powers or whatever, you know. So it felt interesting to have a fresh start with a fresh new character, yet still have all the same challenges and rule sets that we had built from the first game.
Paste: How did you start developing the visual language of the ghosts and the rifts from the first game, and then how did you build on that for the sequel with the time tears?
Krankel: So for Oxenfree, it actually started first with us wanting to build like a painterly soft Disney feature animation vibe environment. So that when things go wild… that juxtaposition is all the scarier, right?… And so we didn’t really know early on what our ghosts would look like. We didn’t really know what it would mean to interact with them. There was a whole host of mechanics that we played with that some of them were ludicrous and made no sense in this game. But we were like, it would be cool if, and the further we went down that road, we’re like, we want our character to feel as human and grounded and simple as possible and feel like an extension of a real person holding a controller.
And so anything that’s gonna exist in this world that is sort of ghostly or strange should be very counter to what the rest of the game world looked like. So the first thing we thought was like, it’s not like a bloody monster’s gonna show up. It’s gonna look like, yeah, geometric and static imagery and all that kind of stuff. Cause it kind of just doesn’t belong in that space. The other piece of that was like, we knew we wanted to open a space up to communicate with these other beings, but like, this was actually—more than a visual thing, it was a like a game design thing—where we we were thinking about Ocarina of Time and other like inputs where a sequence could allow us to open something up. And so the sequence of three stations, we were like, “Oh, perfect, let’s do a triangle.” And so then our artist, Heather Gross was just like doing all kinds of different things that were like, “How do I match some of the ghostly static imagery with these lines that are drawing?” And it was like, I don’t know, it felt like a really good marriage of player input and storytelling needs. But I don’t think we ever would’ve landed on that crazy geometric version of stuff if we were just making a movie or a show. It was game design that led to that.
Cannon: Yeah, with time tears, we wanted to take it kind of a step further into that…kind of digging into how the mechanics of these otherworldly portals work. Obviously without telling you too much, it feels like you’re kind of reaching into the next step of what those portals are actually doing and exploring them in a new way.
Krankel: That time tear thing that you saw [in my preview] you initiated that, right? You walked up and did that. And so one way we talked about it internally was like if the portals in Oxenfree are sleek and sort of geometric in nature, these time tears are like Kylo Ren’s lightsaber. Like a really violent, erratic thing. And so as you play the game, you’ll see that when those time tears are happening, it is not as calculated as opening a portal. It is a dangerous thing because the time space continuum is not very healthy in Oxenfree 2.
Paste: I really loved how the ghosts were written in Oxenfree, and lines like “Is. Leave. Possible?” have been stuck in my head for years. What’s it been like revisiting this world and that language and how have they grown since we last saw them?
Hines: It was really fun to revisit that very chopped up language where they kind of are trying to pull from radios and TV signals and just trying to desperately say what they want to say using only rudimentary tools. So it was fun just to play with that and expand on that and see them kind of learn more of what they can do to do longer chunks of things. But for the writing team, it’s most fun to just have human antagonists who can really put why they’re after certain things, why they want to do things [into words]. Like it’s someone that you could really engage with on the human stage. So it was just really fun to write that and have them be very emotional and try and make mistakes in the way that you just weren’t able to see from the ghosts.
Paste: You’ve briefly mentioned them, so tell me all about the cult. How did you land on making Edwards Island, an already haunted locale, even creepier with these guys?
Hines: We definitely just wanted a human element, just a human bad guy here, because the first game was all about you kind of against nature and kind of against just the rules of the world and figuring out that yeah, it is math. It’s not a quite supernatural thing that’s happening, we can kind of explain it in the science-y way of like they’re trapped between time streams. And we got a lot of juice out of the feeling of being kind of trapped in a hurricane dealing with the situation. So we just wanted people in here that are trying to influence and trying to affect that stuff for their own needs. Who would want to do that and why?
Paste: These are the questions I have because if I saw rifts opening up over an already haunted island, I would simply leave.
Hines: Well these people have very specific things that they’re after and they have almost a religious fervor behind them pushing them. So yeah, it was a ton of fun to just play in that mindset of someone that would be willing to kind of sacrifice themselves for this goal.
Sara Hebert: I just wanna add one thing to that: one cool thing that this team did was they looked at [the notion of] “How powerful could this cult be and what are the things that they could do?” And Oxenfree has been subject to some of those manipulations.
So they have overtaken parts of the radio in Oxenfree and if you wanna dig into what Adam was talking about, like what those motivations are, listening to those broadcasts is really an essential part of understanding why the hell would anyone want to open a portal over Edwards Island again?
Paste: So how did the team come up with that idea? Because I remember hearing about that and I thought, “Man, that’s fucking genius.”
Krankel: We are always trying to find ways to extend the narrative outside of our games like we’re doing. And you could call it an ARG, you could call it extended fiction, but like we’re always trying to find ways to continue the story basically. I feel like the term ARG comes with [baggage] like, “Oh, I have to run through a bunch of obtuse puzzles,” and things like that, which are cool and we’ve done some of that stuff and have fun with that as well. But the real intent is always to have the story feel bigger than just the game in a way that if you touch these other touchpoints, it feels just cooler and it’s not some gimmick, you know, that’s just sitting out there. So for the first game, we had done a pretty full fledged ARG that led to a bunch of fans going out to an actual island off the coast of Washington and digging up a military box that had a bunch of music on it that was from Jonas’s dead mother. You know, like really crazy stuff.
Leading up to this one, we just thought, “Wouldn’t it be cool to tease the story of the new game by infecting the old game.” And it was a big tough balance for us cause we were like, “We don’t wanna add too much to the first game to make it seem like weird or confuse people that are newcomers.” And so there was definitely a balance there, but it just felt right to the fiction of it because as you’ll learn when you play in this game, the cult is really messing with radios a lot.
Paste: It took a while for you guys to get back to Oxenfree and in the meantime you made a bunch of other really cool games. How did those games aid you and teach the team how to make Oxenfree 2?
Krankel: That is such a good question because it covers every vector of what our studio is. Like there’s aspects of it writing wise that I’m sure you’re about to speak to awesomely. [gestures at Hines] There’s aspects development and direction wise that you’ll speak to awesomely. [gestures at Cannon] I feel like ultimately each one of those games have, to me at least, felt like one big project, which is Night School. And so I just kind of feel like all of them talk to each other in different ways. I mean, Oxenfree was the most kind of raw, stripped down, yet purist version of this thesis for what a narrative game could be, and then Afterparty leaned into so many aspects of what two characters can do together and pushing and pulling at them as well as adding new different types of mechanics. And then Next Stop Nowhere was much more exploratory and had a broader palette of places that you went. And then, what am I missing? I mean, Mr. Robot…Weird hacker stuff.
[Everyone laughs.]
But like all those pieces creatively manifest in some way in Oxenfree 2. Like it’s not like we just put ’em all together, but I would just say like the learnings from each—the things that were better perhaps in those other games than certain aspects of Oxenfree, or things that are like a V2 that we felt proud of—we were able to continue to build on. The other piece of it is just like we knew where not to go too far now. Like I think that some of our other games maybe got a little too ambitious at times and those things got away from us and so we knew like, “Let’s get the band back together specifically to write another album like this and aim it in that direction.” And so, I mean we always bite off a little more than we can chew, but it was nice to return to a world that had rules and expectations around it so that we could be more laser focused and invent something new.
Cannon: I kind of see a lot of our games like a bunch of little Lego pieces we put together to tell a story and we’re adding tools to our tool belt to tell stories with more variety and more scale. So for instance, in Afterparty we had a mini version of the texting mechanic from Mr. Robot, which I always forget about. But little things like that that we kind of added or drew about that, you know, might come back in another Night School game in the future, just in terms of how the players interact with the story and talk to characters.
Krankel: Satan [a character from Afterparty] does not have a cameo in Oxenfree 2 though.
[Everyone laughs]
Hines: I don’t know, for me it’s like every project, particularly from a writing point of view, always kind of feels like starting from scratch honestly. Just cause the characters are always so unique, the situation is unique. It’s great and it was very comfortable in a good way coming back to Camena, back to Oxenfree, just cause like Sean says, it has that established rule set. You know where you can expand on it very smartly. For each [new game], from a story [perspective], it feels good kind of flushing down the toilet everything you learned from the last one like, “This is how Milo would put it, this is how Alex would say things,” and just developing it from the ground up again. It’s always fun.
Paste: You guys are a Netflix studio, what’s up with that?
Krankel: It’s been a lot more straightforward than a lot of people would expect, I think. We joined Netflix, we’d already been talking to them for about three months about maybe licensing some of our other games. And so that didn’t just come out of nowhere like “Join Netflix.” It was more like, “We really like working with you already. What’s it gonna be like if we become part of that umbrella?” And it’s been awesome because we maintain our creative autonomy. We decide what we’re gonna greenlight. We work essentially the same that we did before, just we have more hires that have been able to help out in places that we couldn’t afford previously. We have great facilities and partners that we couldn’t have had before, so like Oxenfree and [Oxenfree 2] are being translated into 30 languages.That doesn’t happen when you’re independent, you know? We are gonna be more on the world stage, so that’s a little bit more exciting because now we’re like, “Okay, we want to make sure that we live up to the promise of this partnership.” And at the end of the day, like the other thing is that they have so many other cool capabilities that we wouldn’t have had before. So we work with a trailer team that cuts trailers for the biggest TV shows…there’s a lot of those things that we never would’ve had access to, but at the end of the day, it just feels like they are kind of elevating us and we get to stay exactly us. So it’s been awesome.
Paste: You made Oxenfree as an indie studio, which puts a lot of pressure on your title to perform very well. Now being a Netflix studio that benefits from their distribution model and scope, how does that affect how you make games from here on out and where it lands?
Krankel: So [Oxenfree 2], you know, is multi-platform. We don’t have any idea exactly where our next stuff is gonna end up launching, but when I talked about autonomy before, even our release strategy is still basically within our hands. Now there’s a lot of stuff that they’re doing that is really cool and exciting. I think they’ve already made massive strides on mobile and so we’re super excited that our mobile launch will be on Netflix and that ends up being free to every Netflix user. So that’s pretty cool. So I just think it’s exciting that we are at a company that is both making content and a technology leader so that they’re building a lot of cool, exciting things that we can learn from and contribute to. So all that said, we still just make our own calls when it comes to like, launch strategy.
Paste: Final question: what Netflix property would you like to adapt?
Krankel: [Looks over at Hines] I know what he’s going to say and I’m going to steal it from him: I Think You Should Leave.
[The table laughs pretty affirmatively in response to this.]
Mine’s probably more on the nose. I don’t know, Stranger Things is awesome, I love Stranger Things.
Hebert: Bryant and I want to make an I Think You Should Leave game too.
Cannon: Oh, I know I know, it’ll be Beef, the videogame. Driving, road rage. It’ll be like Burnout or something.
Hines: I want a 400-hour open-world The Irishman game.
Moises Taveras is the assistant games editor for Paste Magazine. He was that one kid who was really excited about Google+ and is still sad about how that turned out.