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This well-received indie title has been ported over to Linux. Combining plenty of elements of 80s teen movies and packaging them in a polished adventure, Oxenfree may be worth checking out if you’re a fan of adventure games.

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This is a game that was actually available earlier this month but fell through the cracks news-wise.

It seems that Oxenfree answers the question of what would happen if you brought the premise of a summertime adventure with teens with spooky happenings from the realm of movies and turned it into a game. The visuals are interesting and the soundtrack seems appropriate for its overall vibe. For what it’s worth, there’s also a cast of professional voice actors that help bring life to the characters. Most interesting is the claim that the choices made by the player affect both the story and character relationships with the player. Adventure games tend to get a little stale once you beat them, so it’s good to know that there’s potential replay value with new storylines and endings available on subsequent playthroughs.

Official About
Oxenfree is a supernatural thriller about a group of friends who unwittingly open a ghostly rift. Play as Alex, a bright, rebellious teenager who brings her new stepbrother Jonas to an overnight party on an old military island. The night takes a terrifying turn when you unwittingly open a ghostly gate spawned from the island’s cryptic past. How you deal with these events, your peers, and the ominous creatures you’ve unleashed is up to you.

You can grab Oxenfree on Steam or DRM-free on the Humble Store or GOG. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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History, sci-fi, technology, cooking, writing and playing games are things I enjoy very much. I'm always keen to try different genres of games and discover all the gems out there.

Oh and the name doesn't mean anything but coincidentally could be pronounced as "Buttery" which suits me just fine.
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12 comments

Linas Jun 30, 2016
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Right on time with the sale. ;)
coeseta Jun 30, 2016
Already bought it in the steam summer sale but hadn't the time yet to play it :/
blukpun Jun 30, 2016
This is the best example of positive and audience friendly advertisement.

Thank you for posting about that game, it's linux release and all that during the game sale!

This post made me registered here and i'm looking forward to submit my part of the statistics.

By the way i have amd r9-280x and it's first and the last amd product i'll ever buy. Just do not believe they will ever be able to treat their linux customers correctly.
BTRE Jun 30, 2016
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This is the best example of positive and audience friendly advertisement.

Thank you for posting about that game, it's linux release and all that during the game sale!

This post made me registered here and i'm looking forward to submit my part of the statistics.

By the way i have amd r9-280x and it's first and the last amd product i'll ever buy. Just do not believe they will ever be able to treat their linux customers correctly.
Welcome to our little community :)

I don't want to hijack the comments for this article but AMD on Linux these days isn't so bad. The old proprietary (catalyst) drivers are trash but if you have a recent Mesa version, things are overall smooth. Performance lacks in places but is getting better pretty quickly. I say that as a fellow AMD user. You may also want to see the recent articles which are pretty encouraging in terms of support from them. We're not quite there yet but I'm cautiously optimistic. Hopefully we'll have more benchmarks in the future.
blukpun Jun 30, 2016
i have amd r9-280x and it's first and the last amd product i'll ever buy

You may also want to see the recent articles which are pretty encouraging in terms of support from them.

I wrote that exactly because of what i felt reading those articles and watching shiny new video from them about DirectX 12 and Vulkan. I have this card for two years and still can't make proprietary driver work with Gnome. And it seems like it will never work. Looking at the amd drivers statistics here only proves my feelings about them. Just like 'GamingOnLinux' don't believe in crowdfunding projects (if i'm correct), i just can't believe in amd anymore.


Last edited by blukpun on 30 June 2016 at 4:17 pm UTC
BTRE Jun 30, 2016
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I wrote that exactly because of what i felt reading those articles and watching shiny new video from them about DirectX 12 and Vulkan. I have this card for two years and still can't make proprietary driver work with Gnome. And it seems like it will never work. Looking at the amd drivers statistics here only proves my feelings about them. Just like 'GamingOnLinux' don't believe in crowdfunding projects (if i'm correct), i just can't believe in amd anymore.

That's unfortunate, but the proprietary catalyst drivers are pretty much abandoned. AMD is directly contributing to the kernel and Mesa with its new driver strategy. Though their main focus is AMDGPU PRO and new cards, there's a common codebase with Mesa and as a result Mesa has improved quite a lot for AMD users. If you need help figuring out how to get things working right, I suggest you pop into our IRC or post in the forums.
blukpun Jun 30, 2016
Thank you!
Even though, i still can and will play with opensource drivers on my 280x, so it's not that bad.
boltronics Jul 1, 2016
Thank you!
Even though, i still can and will play with opensource drivers on my 280x, so it's not that bad.
Not so bad? That's the recommended way to play! The majority of benchmarks right now show Mesa beating the proprietary drivers. But the nice thing about AMD is you have a real choice. Good proprietary drivers, and good free software drivers.

Good luck trying to do GPU pass-through with Xen using Nvidia drivers! Have fun manually installing the latest drivers from the command line. AMD cards just need the microcode installed once on your system, and everything else you need is free software supplied by the distribution. Even when Nvidia does release firmware compatible with free software drivers (which knowing them will take another year to get around to), the card functionality will always be crippled compared to the proprietary drivers. Meanwhile, AMD's drivers just keep getting better and better over time.

Heck, I just purchased a Fury X this morning because they are so cheap now (a nice upgrade from my R9 285) - and it was a really hard decision because the 285 is still a really good card. The Fury X performance generally sits somewhere between a 1070 and 1080 under Windows, and we've been seeing massive performance improvements in AMD's modern GCN architectures using free software drivers. We've seen some benchmarks where Mesa is beating the proprietary drivers in Windows 10! All we need now is support for OpenGL 4.4 and 4.5 (which looks like is coming very soon) and you'll pretty much get great performance on AMD cards with just a plain distro install.

I've had such bad experiences with Nvidia drivers on GNU/Linux and business practices, that I never want to support that company again so long as they keep behaving this way. Granted AMD is no angel either (eg. the way it handled the pump noise issue when the Fury X was first launched, and both companies have previously cheated in benchmarks) but it's the one not trying to actively frustrate customers with signed microcode, paper launches, restrictions on virtualization they refuse to admit, etc.
boltronics Jul 1, 2016
I don’t know how Fedora handles the nvidia drivers but on Gentoo it’s just updated like any other package. Ok, yes, it’s from the command line :p. But any decent distro would do the same with whatever package manager they use.

That's true (for distros that aren't strict about proprietary drivers at least). Generally you want the latest from the nvidia.com website - which won't install if Xorg is running without feeding it some special flags at least - but you'd probably get the binaries pretty quickly with rolling release distributions such as Arch and Gentoo GNU/Linux.
Cheeseness Jul 1, 2016
I wonder if Oxenfree is just a visual novel / walking simulator, or an adventure game.
I feel like it's an adventure game, although there's not really an inventory as such and the majority of meaningful interaction is done through dialogue choices. I found the lack of a mouse interface cumbersome, but it didn't impact on my enjoyment of the game.

I did my first playthrough in one sitting and found it great it in spite of a bit more teen angst than I'd normally find palatable.

The game has content that isn't available on the first go round, so I'm looking forward to revisiting it again when I have time.
Nezchan Jul 1, 2016
I'm mostly interested in the game because the sound design was done by the composer of the wonderful Time's End remix of Majora's Mask. Apparently they're involved with the MM fan film as well.
Nezchan Jul 1, 2016
Just like 'GamingOnLinux' don't believe in crowdfunding projects (if i'm correct), i just can't believe in amd anymore.

Eh? The site regularly promotes crowdfunded projects. They just encouraged people to contribute to a kickstarter yesterday, in fact.

It's pre-ordering that they tend to be highly critical of.
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