How Netflix has changed Oxenfree developer Night School
One of the least surprising moves Netflix has made during its on-going experiment in video games, was the acquisition of Night School.
The studio is known for its atmospheric, story-driven games, the most famous one being 2016's award-winning graphic adventure game Oxenfree. It made a mobile spin-off game based on Amazon's Mr Robot TV series, and was briefly tasked with making a Stranger Things game with Telltale (before the latter company closed). In other words, Night School sounds like the perfect fit for a TV streaming platform.
The acquisition was announced in September 2021 and now, almost two years later, the Night School team is about to release Oxenfree 2: Lost Signals. We played the game at Summer Games Fest, and it reassuringly played just like Oxenfree – there are certainly no signs of any meddling from Night School's new parent company.
"We work with branding people who work on TV shows and movies, we have a great recording facility that we'd never have had before"
"[The Netflix acquisition has] changed lots of little things but hasn't changed either the mission of the studio or how our culture feels or what our guiding sentiments are when we greenlight a game," explains Night School founder and studio director Sean Krankel.
"We just care about whether we can we let people inhabit a story and push and pull at it in new ways. We want to always try to add new ways that you can have agency inside of a story. That has not changed at all."
But Netflix has resulted in some changes, most notably the developer now has new offices.
"We've moved into a Netflix office, and that's pretty cool," Krankel says. "During the pandemic we had outgrown our other office, so we were offsite the entire time. Early last year,
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