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Night in the Woods is a single-player adventure game for Microsoft Windows, macOS, Linux, and PlayStation 4. It is developed by Infinite Fall, a studio founded by game designer Alec Holowka, and animator/illustrator Scott Benson. Wikipedia
Platforms: PlayStation 4, Microsoft Windows, Macintosh operating systems, Linux
REVIEW
At one point a few hours into Night in the Woods, I almost attempted to weasel my way out of doing the review.
Thank goodness I wasn’t successful, or I would have missed one of the most moving game narratives I’ve ever experienced. I enjoyed Night in the Woods a lot more once I stopped waiting for the game to start.
From the moment 20-year-old Mae arrives in the dilapidated mining town she calls home (having inexplicably bailed on college) I was impatient to get to the real meat of the story.
Sure, it was pleasant enough watching Mae leap around Possum Springs, chatting up friends like Bea, a squandered genius stuck managing her dad’s store, or Gregg, an up-for-anything anarchist that clashes beautifully with his boyfriend, the more buttoned down Angus. I even found myself repeatedly chatting up the more ancillary (yet surprisingly well-realized) denizens of the town, something I don’t normally go in for.
But all the while, there was a nagging impatience for the real game to start, the big earth-shattering moment that sets the narrative to a sprint. But Night in the Woods seemed maddeningly content to just keep ambling.
There is a connecting narrative in Night in the Woods and rest assured: It goes to some fucking places. Existential terror, the nature of God, the terrible burden of being a human, it’s goes to all the places.
But the bulk of the experience isn’t so overtly monumental. It’s a quiet game, woven from small scenes between friends enjoying each other, hurting each other, reconciling and attempting to move forward with what remains.
These scenes are, without exception, written beautifully. Even when the dialogue veers too cutesy, it feels true to a group of characters straddling a gap between adult and childhood that seems precipitously wide these days.
Those characters are the game’s biggest strength. They’re all damaged in different ways, but in very believable, understandable ways, ways we’re all damaged. But each of these anthropomorphized animals also have more heart, depth and decency than most games boast in their entire human cast.
Oddly, the one character I wouldn’t extend that last compliment to is Mae, Night in the Woods’ feline protagonist. She is often selfish, cruel, self-absorbed and destructive in ways that may be believable and relatable but rarely ever pleasant. Mae is somewhat redeemed by a childlike joy in simple pleasures, a streak of loyalty to her friends and some late-game realizations about her own failings, but only somewhat.
After a scene where Mae belittles her parents for working for years so they could afford to send her to the college that she had just bailed on, I found it pretty difficult to re-engage with her. But I’m also a parent and feel a lot further from Mae’s side of the kitchen table than I used to.
It’s a bold choice to center a game on an unlikable character, and it’s an effective way of highlighting the virtues of the supporting cast. But the behavior of those other characters towards Mae, the way they work to preserve their relationships with her, makes me wonder if the game’s developers were fully aware of how grating their hero can sometimes come across.
I realize I’ve largely focused on the narrative of Night in the Woods, but only because there’s not much to discuss from a mechanical perspective. It’s sort of a platformer, and you’ll spend a lot of time leaping from rooftop to rooftop. There are some one-off minigames, and a few that you’ll return to like shoplifting and playing bass in Mae and Co.’s band.
The minigames are perfectly adequate, but getting around the world often slows down the pace of a game that isn’t exactly hurtling along to begin with. Mae also does some platforming in her sleep, and these dream sequences in particular are dull, especially late in the game when the story starts to pick up momentum. They’re nice to look at and (like the rest of the game) beautifully orchestrated, but still dull.
The gamier aspects of Night in the Woods aren’t its strength, but it does make good use of being interactive. The fact that you can largely choose which characters you want to interact with -- and how frequently -- gives the connections you build a more personal feeling. Perhaps it’s the fact that you’ve searched them out, as opposed to having them forced on you.
In fact, much of Night in the Woods is preoccupied with just that question: What are we forced into and what can we choose for ourselves? There are no pat, easy solutions to that query contained within. But the answers that are unearthed are terrible, beautiful and achingly humane in a way that brought me to tears more than once.
In December 2013, Holowka and Benson, along with co-writer Bethany Hockenberry, released a companion game titled Longest Night.[2] In December 2014, a second supplemental game was released, titled Lost Constellation.[3]
Overview
Mae, an only child, has returned home to Possum Springs, where times have changed since the closing of its coal mines. Now living in her parents' attic, she uncovers a dark mystery that leads her into the nearby woods, forcing her to confront a horrible secret the town has hidden for decades, involving not only the town's mine, but also the recent disappearance of her longtime friend Casey. Mae's friends also include Bea, a cigarette-smoking alligator and Mae's childhood friend; Mae's best friend Gregg, a hyperactive fox; and his boyfriend, a bear named Angus. Paste describes the themes covered as "mental illness, depression, the stagnancy of the middle and lower classes, and the slow death of small town America."[4]
As Mae, players run, jump, and learn other mechanics that allow them to explore Possum Springs, a town populated by various anthropomorphic animals. Benson describes the key actions for the player are "explore, converse, see and touch", while Holowka describes their approach as "narrative-focused" rather than "gameplay-first".[5] Players will also make decisions that affect the course of the story, though Benson has said, "it's more like 'do you hang out with this person?' Okay, cool. That person might not know you as well by the end of the game, but this person you hung out with, you're going to get to see their storyline."[6]
Story
Margaret "Mae" Borowski is a 20-year old college dropout, who relocates back to her hometown of Possum Springs, which has been struck by the closure of the coal mines and the stagnating economy. She meets up with her old friends, including gloomy but intelligent Beatrice "Bea" Santello, hyperactive anarchist troublemaker Greggory "Gregg" Lee, and Gregg's quiet but modest boyfriend Angus Delaney. Mae also learns that another one of her old friends, Casey Hartley, has mysteriously disappeared.
Mae spends several days exploring Possum Springs and spending time with her friends, but she also begins to have strange and vivid dreams. At the town's Halloween festival, Mae witnesses a teenager being kidnapped by a mysterious figure. The four friends begin working together to figure out what is going on, with Mae's mental health slowly deteriorating with every one of her dreams. After intensive searching, the four stumble across a strange group of cloaked figures in the woods, who chase after them; Mae ends up falling and lapses into a coma.
Mae eventually wakes up and returns to her friends, and she reveals that the reason she dropped out was due to her increasing dissociation from people and the world (it is implied that Mae suffers from some sort of dissociative disorder), seeing everything as merely shapes. Mae's journal, in which she draws pictures for each major event in the game, was given to her by a doctor to write down her emotions after she bludgeoned a student with a baseball bat six years ago after experiencing a dissociative episode. Due to this incident, the townsfolk became wary of Mae and caused a financial and emotional strain in her family. As her dissociation worsened at college, Mae mustered up the strength to leave and return home, hoping that being back in Possum Springs would help her return to normal.
Still wounded, Mae decides to venture out into the woods alone to find the group who chased her and the others, only for Gregg, Bea, and Angus to refuse to let her go by herself. The group enter the old mines and meet the mysterious group, who are revealed to be a cult. The cult turns out to be behind the kidnappings of several residents, including Casey, taking those whom they deem useless to society and will "not be missed" into the mines to sacrifice them to a god-like entity called the Black Goat in exchange for keeping the economy of Possum Springs afloat. The cult's leader allows the group to leave, threatening them to never tell anyone about the cult - however, while riding up the mine's elevator, a member of the group attempts to kill Mae. The others manage to save her and the elevator falls, collapsing the mine and presumably trapping the cult underground.
Depending on who the player interacted with the most throughout the course of the game, Mae will sit down with either Bea or Gregg and talk about the events of the previous night, and all the things that have happened in Possum Springs. The others join them shortly after, and Mae tells them that although they will all be forced to grow and adapt to life as it goes on for better and for worse, they can still enjoy their time together now. The game ends as the four decide to forget about their problems for the time being and have band practice.
Development
Night in the Woods was announced on October 22, 2013, on Kickstarter. Holowka and Benson set a US$50,000 funding goal, which was reached in only 26 hours.[7] The project eventually earned over US$200,000 in crowdfunding. The additional funding allowed Infinite Fall to hire animator Charles Huettner to create additional animations, and for Infinite Ammo and game developer Adam Saltsman to create a roguelike that is playable within Night in the Woods. While Benson believed adding further stretch goals would result in additional backers, Infinite Fall limited the amount of stretch goals to avoid scope creep.[8]Benson names Chris Ware, Mike Mignola, Mary Blair, Flannery O’Connor, and Richard Scarry as influences on his work on Night in the Woods
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