YMMV / Oxenfree 2

• Base-Breaking Character: Olivia. Depending on who you ask, she's either a grating character who is the obvious choice to sacrifice in the end, or as a sympathetic figure who deserves a second chance at happiness in the real world.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Unsurprisingly, Olivia was an instant hit with players because of her strong personality, sympathetic motivations, and Abigail Turner's voice performance.
• Heartwarming Moments:
  • Finally finding Athena (and getting to pet her!) just before the endgame.
  • If you get close to Jacob throughout the story, he'll be inspired to leave the rut he's lived in for decades and do something proper with his life.
  • If you played the first Oxenfree, getting to watch Alex and her friends finally walk free after being trapped for so long will be a happy sight to see amidst the bittersweetness of this game's ending.
  • In the epilogue, Alex sends Rex a lockbox full of memorabilia from the story and a letter telling him about his mother's heroic deeds. If Riley didn't step through the portal, Alex will tell her she has faith that Riley will be a good mom.
  • If you managed to get through to Olivia and didn't let her go through the portal, a recording in the epilogue will reveal that she's moved away and is slowly moving on from the loss of her parents.
  • At the end of Nick's sidequest, he'll encounter a window into another world or perhaps another time period. If you so choose, you can tell him how to widen it by tuning his radio, after which he'll sail through and finally live the adventurous life he'd always dreamed of.
• Jerkass Woobie: Olivia is bossy, abrasive, self-centered, and willing to gamble with the lives of everyone else in Camena to get what she wants. She's also deeply traumatized by her parents' death. Given that children raised in cults tend to have incredibly sheltered and insular upbringings, it's no surprise that she'd consider them her whole life and be willing to do anything to rejoin them forever, her own future be damned.
• Player Punch: If you were rude and distant with Jacob throughout the story, at the end of the game he'll volunteer to step through the portal, trapping himself in dimensional limbo so the others can escape. When questioned, he simply says that he doesn't have much to live for and that he doesn't like his life enough to stick around for it. A very melancholy epilogue follows if you let him go.
• Tear Jerker:
  • When you stop Olivia from opening a portal in the community center, she'll eventually fold and tell you about her Freudian Excuse, breaking her aggressive façade and revealing the lonely, grieving kid behind it all.
  • If you alienated Olivia and she didn't enter the portal, a recording from her therapy sessions in the epilogue will reveal her to be bitter and nihilistic, worse off than she was before. It's even worse if you befriended Violet and Charlie, as they'll both want nothing to do with her afterwards.
  • If Jacob is the one to step through the portal, you'll run into Athena in the epilogue who will immediately turn and run expectantly to the docks, still awaiting her master's return. The game ends with Riley sitting down and telling her about her adventures with Jacob.
  • In one of your late conversations with Nick, he'll give you this sobering observation about getting older:
  Nick: Every light is flipped on when you're a kid, ya know? You wanna do everything — everything seems like...everything — it's in front of you. The lights of possibility. What you're gonna do — gonna be — who you're gonna meet...one by one those lights get flicked off. And the rest are so bright you don't notice the darkness in the distance. Until you do.
• The Woobie:
  • Riley Poverly is in the throes of multiple strenuous life transitions — over the last few months she's lost her job, gone through a breakup, and unexpectedly became pregnant. She also never knew her mom and had a difficult relationship with her dad, which she fears she'll repeat with her future son.
  • Jacob has spent his whole life in his hometown being a nobody, making a meager career doing odd jobs with no one else in his life besides his dog. Everyone who knows him seems to expect very little of him, and he seems resigned to the belief that he'll never amount to anything and his life isn't worth much.
  • Nick had dreams of becoming an astronaut, but was too tall to be a qualified candidate. Because of this, his yearning for adventure and discovery was never realized and he lived out his life as a lowly fisherman.