Why the developers of Oxenfree want you to outdrink the devil in Afterparty
pcgamesinsider.bizBack in 2014, California-based Night School Studio was set up by Disney and Telltale vets Sean Krankel (right) and Adam Hines (far right). The duo's debut was 2016's Oxenfree, with the company also releasing a mobile title based on hit television show Mr Robot that same year.
As of March of this year, Oxenfree has sold well over 1.5m copies, but there are probably around three million players thanks to subscription services like Xbox Games Pass and Games With Gold.
Where Oxenfree was a supernatural coming of age story, Night School's next game takes a slightly different tact, with players having to, er, try and outdrink the devil.
"It kind of did come from a night-out type setting. Initially what we had wanted to do after Oxenfree was built a game that had a smaller environment but also had different characters from different walks of life in it," Krankel says.
"We were looking at things like Papers, Please or other games that had a certain density as opposed to a very sparse and large experience. That transitioned to thinking a bar could be cool, but no-one has really made an entire experience around that. From there, we figured players didn't want to be a bartender per se and that it'd be more fun to go out on a crazy night. Then we looked to a lot of inspiration - things like Superbad or Edgar Wright's movies - about those 'crazy night out with your friends' stories. Finally, we knew we were making a bar game, we knew that drinking was going to impact the player, but we were asking who the craziest person you could go up against was. As a joke we were like: 'Satan?'. We sat on that for about a week - we weren't really serious - but then thought it was actually pretty badass."
In recent years, the notion that single-player, narrative-focused games aren't financially viable in a market focused on more service-based and longer-term affairs has emerged. Oxenfree's 1.5m sales count - and three million-strong player base - show that these games can be commercially
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