Oxenfree 2 has been delayed

(Image credit: Night School Studios)

Night School Studio has delayed its "What's going on with that radio?" spook-em-up Oxenfree 2: Lost Signals. Originally announced with a release date of fall 2021, then pushed into 2022, it's now been delayed into next year. "Seeing your fan art, reading your excited comments, and connecting with you fuels our ambition to make this our best game yet", Night School said on Twitter. "To make OXENFREE II truly special and add more localizations, we're moving our release window to 2023."

The original Oxenfree made our list of the best horror games thanks to its eerie atmosphere, clever twist on the stranded-teenagers subgenre, and excellent dialogue. In his Oxenfree review, Andy Kelly wrote, "Often, conversations in videogames sound like two people taking turns to read out lines. But in Oxenfree the lines flow together seamlessly, and you can respond at any time by selecting one of three answers. The characters will even react to your silence if you don’t answer them, or if you decide to walk away and ignore them. This, combined with fantastic writing and voice acting, makes Oxenfree one of the best virtual recreations of real humans talking to each other—which is lucky, because the dialogue is almost non-stop."

Oxenfree 2: Lost Signals will star a new protagonist who returns to her hometown, a coastal community called Camena, and finds it besieged by unnatural electromagnetic phenomena. Like the original it promises to have choices that matter and an in-depth dialogue system, with a new mechanic that lets you use your walkie-talkie to start a conversation on your own time wherever you are.

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Night School released a comedy game called Afterparty in 2019, which didn't make quite as big a splash as its innovative debut. The indie studio was then bought by Netflix in 2021, and released a mobile edition of Oxenfree through them—Netflix remains dedicated to mobile games, meaning that even though its library includes games like Into the Breach, Moonlighter, and Oxenfree you can't play them on the laptop you probably watch Netflix on. Oxenfree 2 will still come out on PC, however, and will be available on Steam next year.

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.