I have played through Oxenfree a few times now on my iPad Mini 4. The main character Alex, along with her group of friends, have kept the game fun during my multiple game sessions. I chose what I would do in real life during my first run, which was enjoyable. Soon after that, I did a mean run through and purposely made all of the characters hate me, which was amusing. However, as much fun as choosing different dialogue might be, my favorite play through so far is a silent one.
Whenever the dialogue pop-up is displayed, I don’t choose anything so Alex just stares back at everyone blankly. Sometimes the other characters will chime in and answer questions for Alex, which keeps the conversations moving forward. Also, the characters will occasionally comment on Alex’s silence and I find it even more entertaining than the reactions to the mean choices. In fact, sometimes it feels as though characters are even more annoyed with Silent Alex than Mean Alex.
The main reason why the silent run is my favorite is because I am finally sitting back and paying more attention to the dialogue. During my other sessions, I was considering which option to choose and stopped paying attention to what characters were saying to me. Now that I don’t need to make a choice, I can finally focus on what is being said and fully appreciate the amazing job the voice actors did when delivering their lines. Therefore, I highly recommend a silent playthrough of your favorite RPGs at least once, provided the game gives you the option to keep quiet.
It should come as no surprise that silence can be a great way to see just how well a game’s dialogue was written. It can show how much thought a developer has put into the difficult outcomes of a conversation. For example, when you choose not to speak do the characters just continue the conversation on without you, do they push you further to choose an answer, or do they react in an annoyed or confused way? If the characters just move on to their next line of dialogue anyways, this could indicate that the current conversation is either unimportant to the game’s plot or the development team did not think to program an appropriate response to the silence. A well-designed game, on the other hand, will either give the player another chance to chose a response or the character will react to the player’s silence, which is usually in a negative way.
Most modern games are paused until the player chooses a dialogue option, but games which provide silence as an option include many (if not all) of the Telltale games. The animators really shine in a silent playthrough of a Telltale series because the player characters show exactly how they are feeling with detailed facial expressions. It’s truly a shame that there aren’t more games which provide the choice to say nothing at all.
