Game Review: Night in the Woods

I'm a Midwesterner, born and bred. I remember corn fields visible from our back porch until the forest a mile away, and while houses gradually filled in that space, I still played tag in the corn fields every summer--the one element of my upbringing that my Southern wife feels free to mock me for. My father is from California, but he married a Wisconsin farmer's daughter and made a life here in this broad, flat land of corn and wheat, cows and cider farms, and hot summers and sudden, cold winters.

Okay, I lived an hour's drive from Chicago, so I wasn't exactly from prairie country. But when I heard that Night in the Woods was a game about millennial angst in the ruins of a midwestern town devastated by the economic changes of the twentieth century, and also that it was spooky, I knew I would play it eventually. And this past October it went on sale for the first time, and I bought it. I didn't quite finish it during October because Super Mario Odyssey also came out, but I'm not too far off. And now, I shall sing its praises the way Mae's band sings of their despair.

Q: What is life?

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