Oxenfree 2 struggles to bottle lightning twice

polygon.com:

Riley wakes up on a bus stop in her hometown of Camena, eyes flicked open from the surprise of walkie-talkie static, a chilling hiss that’s now a calling card for developer Night School Studio.

Riley is a new hire to a team of environmental researchers interested in radio waves; her job is to set up the beacons used to catch the right signals. (Better get used to that static!) Riley is a military dropout who’s returned to her hometown right at the precipice of major change. She’s paired up with a former high school acquaintance, Jacob, to put up several of these beacons over the course of a few days. Naturally, that’s before the first beacon goes haywire and connects to a static portal above Edwards Island, a gateway to a techno-ghostly world that the two don’t yet know is being summoned by a group of teenagers (separate from the bunch from Oxenfree). Like its predecessor, Oxenfree 2: Lost Signals revolves around walking and tuning a radio to the supernatural world, but now there’s also a decent amount of climbing and a walkie-talkie. In Oxenfree 2, the radio and walkie-talkie are storytelling devices that add layers to the world you immediately see on screen, where the two main characters are already wrapped up in an otherworldly plot.

Oxenfree 2 builds upon the scaffolding the first game provided: It upgrades the rich, detailed environments, weaves in a town’s worth of new characters, and continues to nail the increasingly creepy atmosphere of a world in which ghosts hang out in static and radio waves. There are pieces of Oxenfree 2 that made me question the static in the air around me; they formed a compulsion to keep looking over my shoulder for something amiss. But often, in other moments, I felt pulled out of that