Night in the Woods, which arose from a successfully funded Kickstarter by the development studio Infinite Fall and Austin-based publisher Finji, bills itself as an adventure game. Players assume the role of Mae in this 90s-inspired 2D platformer, but perhaps what Alec Holowka, Scott Benson, and Bethany Hockenberry have made could be best described as a narrative-driven experience. Or a side-scrolling mystery. Or more of an occasional platformer with an always stunning soundtrack, courtesy of Holowka. If you dig around, you can even find a roguelike top-down dungeon crawler in there [thanks to Adam Saltsman, of endless-runner Canabalt]. Night in the Woods is a lot of things at once, and to boil it down to any one of them would not do it justice. It is a patchwork collection of melancholic narrative, anarchic vandalism, and bass-playing. It is brilliant.
Focusing on Mae’s attempt to re-acclimatise to living in her hometown after dropping out of college, Night in the Woods is expertly written, and boasts fully fleshed out characters from stoop-dwelling poets to Mae’s childhood friends, Angus, Bea and Gregg. While perhaps a bit more slowly paced than some may prefer, especially when it begins to feel as if it’s leaning too hard on Benson’s animation roots towards the end, it rewards the patient and the curious. As you explore the disquietly crumbling town of Possum Springs, it is clear that characterisation is the game’s strength. Dialogue is understated and clever, never overemotional without earning it. In one scene, Mae and Bea head to the shopping mall where they used to hang out as kids in an attempt to salve their now tense relationship. Instead of the glittering 90s hangout Mae remembers, the pair find it full of Dollar Stores and shuttered shops. Even the water fountain is turned off. They wonder where the mall of their youth has gone, where Bea admits to having stared up at the food court’s glass ceiling, believing it was where God lived. She says, embarrassed, “I used to stare up there, eating a burger, trying to see if I could see God.” They laugh at themselves, at each other, and scrape together enough change to grab milkshakes on the way home.
Night in the Woods, published by Finji. Photograph: Night in the Woods
From barbarous jabs swapped between friends, to quiet riverside reflections about inaccessible upward class mobility, to sheepishly confessed thoughts on God’s real estate, Hockenberry and Benson have written a game which easily sits next to the likes of Oxenfree, Gone Home, and Kentucky Route Zero as a modern day classic. Night in the Woods is, ostensibly, about the ghostly murderous thing in the woods. Perhaps there is a plot where this murder and others are concerned, but it doesn’t feel as if that is the point. In the same way that Kentucky Route Zero is about delivering a package, Night in the Woods is about stopping a ghost. Which is to say, it isn’t. It’s about losing God in the ceiling of a shopping mall and getting milkshakes. It’s about that uneasy feeling at the end of a party when your friends all quietly decide to just go home and go to bed. They are busy. They are working. They are working so hard, and they have grown up so much faster than you have. “There is a hole at the centre of everything,” you are told, and maybe Night in the Woods is about exploring that. If you let it.
While slow in patches when it deviates from its core strengths, or occasionally fiddly in its mini-games, the game is buoyed by its dialogue, warm and charming art style, and Holowka’s soundtrack [available to purchase on his Bandcamp], which keeps even the occasionally clunky platforming from feeling too tedious. The mini-games don’t overstay their welcome [despite how bad I am at any and all rhythm games], and as a whole the game deals with its themes of liminal early adulthood and melancholy millennial stagnation with grace, maturity and humour. Night in the Woods is not a feel-good experience, more tear-jerker than side-splitter, but it never feels malicious. Even when your dialogue choices are reduced to Mae’s temperamental outbursts, it is to narrative interest. Refreshingly, Mae is not a likeable character; she is not a hero. She’s tired and depressed and wonders where God has gone. She misses the pasta place in town. She wants to smash capitalism and get a cute girl’s number. She wants to survive being 20, to survive a failing job market, to survive a night in the woods.
You can save your progress at almost any time by viewing Mae's journal and selecting the "Save and Quit" option.
This is also how you pause the game, though there's rarely a need to do so.
Time needed per session:
Plan on playing for longer sessions, as there's a lot to see if you're willing to explore and take the time to appreciate it.
Does this game pose issues for Christian players?
Screenshots
Game Overview
Unlike most video games, Night in the Woods isn't about saving the world, earning a high score, rescuing a princess, or going on a grand journey. Instead, you'll be taking part of a slice of life story about Margaret "Mae" Borowski and her friends in the small town of Possum Springs.
The story begins with Mae dropping out of collage and returning home to what she hopes will be a simpler life. Despite her age, she's still very much a child a heart, and wants to spend her time hanging out with friends, playing video games, eating pizza, and living her life by her own rules. But, while she hasn't matured, the people around her have. Her friends now have jobs and responsibilities, stores are struggling to stay open, and Possum Springs is slowly being forgotten by the outside world.
Things take a drastic turn just after the "Longest Night" festival - Mae catches a glimpse of a figure attacking someone. Rather than involve the police, she becomes convinced that a mysterious "ghost" is attacking the residents of Possum Springs, and talks her friends into helping her search for the fiend. But, while the gang's Scooby Doo-style escapades are fun and generally light-hearted, this isn't the game's actual focus.
You see, Night in the Woods is about how we respond to the inevitable march of time, our own mortality, and the fact that everyone is eventually forgotten. This is a pretty heavy topic, and by choosing who we have Mae interact with, we'll learn what the people of Possum Springs think about it. Even Mae's ghost hunt is an example of her approach to this question - ignore it, and have some fun.
Unfortunately for her, you can't ignore problems and pretend they'll go away on their own. Her escapades eventually result in serious consequences for her and her friends, forcing her to confront the fact that we will all eventually pass on and be forgotten.
This is a fairly serious game, with many emotional moments of every sort strewn throughout. There are many heartwarming moments, many sad moments, and even several scary moments. I'd definitely recommend this game to anyone who enjoys stories with some meat to them, though I'd also suggest going into this game with as little foreknowledge as possible - the less you know about the story, the more you'll get out of your first playthrough.
But, I'd also warn against letting younger children play it. A lot of the game is spent talking about the past or mourning the future that could have been, and there are even discussions about whether or not God exists. This is all a bit heavy and sometimes even depressing, so players need to be old enough to able to process this kind of thing.
Points of Interest
There are all sorts of things to do scattered around Possum Springs and neighboring areas. Finding them all will likely take you several playthroughs, if not help from an online guide. Some of these interactions also build on each other, changing Possum Springs in different ways.
Night in the Woods uses more traditional Platforming mechanics when Mae is wandering around or exploring, but many activities are done using their own minigames. Everything from eating pizza to playing guitar, to browsing the local library are done through their own little minigames, greatly immersing the player into the story.
There's even a playable video game on Mae's computer.
Thanks to an incident in the past, the local town doctor, a Dr. Hank, was called in to help Mae deal with her issues. He wasn't much help, but he did instruct her to keep a journal. During the game, Mae uses it to scribble doodles about things that she experiences, creating something of a log of her misadventures.
It's apparently possible for a dedicated player to fill her journal during a single game, though the developers admitted that they weren't able to do it themselves. Players who manage this impossible feat will be rewarded with an extremely rare achievement for their Steam profile.
Every time you have Mae interact with other characters or the world around her, things change slightly. Each action starts a new ripple in the storyline, and by the time the story ends, many things will be unique to your current playthrough. Not only does this create a lot of replayability, but many events only happen when certain other events have taken place. Unless you're extremely thorough, you're going to miss out on something each time you play.
There's a set of Steam trading cards available for anyone interested in earn them. However, most of the people playing this will be more interested in collecting the 31 achievements that can be earned while you play.
Earlier I wrote that you'll get more out of this game if you don't know how the story goes, and it seems that the developers agree with that sentiment. They've set all of the achievements has hidden, which means you'll only discover what they are for after you've earned them [or searched out a guide and spoiled the story for yourself].
The good news is that most of them are earned by reaching specific milestones in the story, so you should be able to figure 'em out after playing through the game a few times.
Concerns and Issues
Mae's mother works for the local church. Although it's blocked off at first, you'll eventually be able to visit the church and meet their pastor, a woman nicknamed Pastor K. Like anyone else in this game, she's dealing with her own battles too, and can offer Mae yet another viewpoint. But, while this looks very much like a typical Christian church, it seems to be its own fictional religion.
Other supernatural things are seen throughout the game, mostly during the Halloween-like Longest Night celebration when Mae can play carnival games [including a pretend tarot reading]. Mae herself dresses up as the Witchdagger, a character who wears a cloak and a large hat with a dagger stuck in it. A witch is also involved in the play that retells the town's backstory.
Nobody is careful about their language in this game, though some characters are more likely to swear than others. For example, Mae openly swears fairly often, though she often abbreviates the f-word to "eff" instead. Related to this are Mae's remarks about the police; in addition to saying "eff the cops", she also writes several variations of the ACAB slogan in her journal.
Bizarrely, some of the swearing is completely censored during the climax, suggesting people were getting mighty colorful with their words.
Although nobody is ever shown doing anything more sensual than holding hands, sex and sexual orientations are referenced at various points. An early example is that Mae's computer is overrun with malware from her visits to risque websites. Later on, a group of teens pretend to be mystical gate keepers, and quiz Mae and Bea on embarrassing things, such as whether or not they're still virgins.
Lastly, three of the four main characters are LGBT+. Gregg and Angus are a gay couple, with Mae being pansexual. The only real impact that Mae's orientation has on the storyline is that she gets flustered around cute boys and girls, which is kind of adorable.
Many of the adults [including Mae and her friends] drink alcohol during the story. This becomes a problem very early on in the game, where Mae attends a party and gets incredibly drunk on three cups of watered down beer. She makes a huge scene as a sobbing drunk, then right when everyone is staring at her, she vomits. And in case you're wondering, yes, they animated the puke, complete with particle physics. Not one of Mae's better scenes.
Meanwhile, Mae's friend Bea is always shown with a lit cigarette in her mouth. It later gets revealed that she's trying to quit, and her "cigarette" is just a wooden prop that helps her cravings. Smokers really do use tools like this to help them break the habit - it mimics the feeling of a real cigarette enough to scratch the itch, but since there's no nicotine, the dependency on the drug slowly fades.
On the other hand, there's a passing mention of a meth lab very late in the game, though by the time that comes up in conversation, there are some more immediate issues warranting the player's attention.
Without going into spoiler territory, violence does play a significant role in the story. Mae has a history of violent behavior, and there are a few points where she'll break something using a baseball bat. However, Mae usually only hurts people by saying something insensitive; we don't see her physically hurt anyone during this part of her life. Any violence that the player will be shown is down by another character.
Throughout the story, Mae and her friends will discuss a lot of things. Some of these include serious topics, like whether or not God exists, what else is out there, the purpose of life, and how we can face the reality that we'll eventually be forgotten. Everyone has their own answers and perspectives on these issues, suggesting that the developers really thought about these things while developing the game.
While the player has a lot of control over where Mae goes or what she spends her time doing, there are times when this control is limited. For example, at the party where Mae drinks too much, the player is not given an option to have Mae abstain from alcohol or drink less. The only way to progress at that point is to have Mae drink herself stupid.
Before moving on to the spoilery stuff, let's briefly look at the video game on Mae's computer. It's a dungeon crawler called Demon Tower. You play an old white cat, who is able to use a dash technique and a sword to fight various evil monsters. These include thieves, skeletons, spellcasters, and balls of rats. There is some blood in this game, though there's less of it than you'd see in stand-alone games, like Hero Siege.
Okay, this is a pretty huge spoiler, as this entire portion of the story comes so far out of left field that there's almost no way to take it seriously, even though the story obviously asks us to. In a nutshell, there's an eldritch horror called the Black Goat living deep in the abandoned mines. A group of the town's elders worship it by kidnapping children and throwing them down a hole in the deepest part of the mines. In return for these sacrifices, the Black Goat promises to bless Possum Springs with prosperity.
Mae accidentally witnessed one of their kidnappings, and she's been a target of the cult afterwards [hence why the "ghost" was following her]. It's also said that the Black Goat chooses his victims by singing to them. This is possibly the cause of Mae's increasingly weird dreams and the slow progression of her mental issues.
At the same time, there are reports that gasses and contaminated water from the mine are causing hallucinations and other mental disorders. Possum Springs used to be a mining town, so many of the elders would've worked near or in the mine. Mae also had contact with the mine early in the game, as she needed to wade through a waist-deep puddle of dirty water in order to get home. This detail makes it a little ambiguious as to whether or not the Black Goat actually exists, or if it's just the product of some sort of chemical poisoning.
And frankly, I'm not sure which is scarier - a group that sacrifices people to satiate the hunger of an evil god, or a group that kills people because they're tripping on toxic substances.
Mae's problems with collage didn't have anything to do with her being lazy or the tasks being too difficult. An untreated mental problem she struggles with had resurfaced. Long ago, she had a breakdown where she stopped being able to recognize people or objects as things. To her, it was all "just shapes". She had an episode of this during a baseball game, and for unexplained reasons [panic?] attacked her friend Casey, who was pitching. This didn't help, as the blood on the grass was just "red shapes on a big green shape". This seems like a case of dissociation
But, Possum Springs doesn't have adequate care for something like this. The town's doctor, Dr. Hank, attempts to deal with everything from dentistry to psychology, resulting in poor overall treatment of anything. He claimed that Mae had anger issues, gave her a journal, and that was it. Since this did nothing for Mae's condition, it gradually gets worse, until by the end of the game she's barely holding it together. Thankfully, by then, she's starting to open up to other people about what really happened, and there's hope that she'll get better treatment in the future.
Long before I reached the end of the game, before I even encountered the cult, I started wondering if one of the developers was using this game as an outlet for their own demons. Unfortunately, I was correct.
Alec Holowka fought with a lot of demons during his life, and this battle ultimately ended with his suicide. From what I've read, he wasn't the easiest person to get along with, nor a nice person in general, but I think his struggles are part of the reason Night in the Woods became the masterpiece it is.
In particular, Mae's final dialogue with the Black Goat sounds like it came from the mouth of someone who was struggling to put their depression into words: