In the latest Oxenfree 2 dev diary, Night School gives a deep dive into how they created the indie game’s horror tone and balanced it with a feeling of realism. The team wanted to create a ghost story that felt all the more unsettling for how true-to-life it was, and that meant starting with the normal world.
Director Sean Krankel said Night School’s guiding principle was mixing a sense of wonder and danger and emphasizing the feeling that something horrible would immediately follow something good – or the other way around.
Oxenfree 2 begins in a town that seems like any other in the Pacific Northwest, full of beautiful scenery and people enjoying it. While the team didn’t want to stray too far from the original game, which they described as feeling like walking through a painting, they did want it to feel more realistic this time.
If you look closely in Oxenfree 2, you’ll notice small details like creases on a backpack or rumpled clothes meant to show the passage of time for characters and indications that, idyllic as their setting might be, they’re still living normal lives.
Until they aren’t. Night School senior artist Beverly Chen said the goal was creating what felt like a safe space at first, so the eventual slide into horror feels even more substantial. When portals to another dimension start opening across the town, the mood shifts dramatically. The familiar turns surreal, a strange fog hangs over everything, and harmless things such as a cabin in the woods become sinister and threatening.
Oxenfree 2 launches on July 12, 2023, for PC, Switch, PS4, and PS5.
Written by Josh Broadwell on behalf of GLHF
