Where its predecessor was about the pangs of teenage life, Oxenfree II is tackling far more terrifying territory: being in your thirties. But it’s tricky to map specific life experiences to someone’s thirties the way a creator can with high school or college. “Maybe the stuff that I went through as a 35-year-old, a lot of people went through when they were 25, or 45,” says Hines. Still, being in your twenties is a time of exploration and potential. By the time you hit your mid-thirties, he says, you’ve lived long enough to have decided and lived out some of that potential. The road now is half ahead, half behind.

In other words, to Oxenfree II’s creators, “this is a great lens to tell a horror story,” Hines says, “to have a big problem really exacerbated and to put a magnifying lens on these characters’ personal issues and choices.”

Though the Netflix acquisition took place partway through Oxenfree II’s development, the team says it hasn’t changed the direction of the game or the story they wanted to tell. It’s an end of sorts, a send-off for what could be the last time they create this specific genre of game. “We kind of had the both spoken and unspoken mindset of ‘we don't want to be the studio that only makes games that look exactly like this,’” Hines says. “We've piled on every idea that we had for Oxenfree and Afterparty that we just didn't either have enough time to make or didn't exactly fit.”

The team working on Oxenfree II is roughly as large as the original game’s dev team, a sign of how the studio is splitting more of its work up for other long-term projects. Under the safety of Netflix’s financial umbrella, Night School has grown from a handful of full-time employees and contractors to a team of more than 40 people. According to Krankel, that growth isn’t as “explosive” as it sounds. “It really was more like the Indiana Jones ‘sandbag into the golden idol’ thing, like we were moving folks into roles that we just couldn't afford full-time before.”