Game Review: Night in the Woods

[dorchadas]

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?

In the dying of the year, former college sophomore Mae Borowski gets off the bus and returns to her hometown of Possum Springs, a small former-mining town in the unspecified mountains. Her parents thought she was coming home the following night and aren't there to meet her, so she has to walk alone, at night, through the empty parking lot and the abandoned playground back to her house. This sets the tone for the rest of the game.

I was talking with redpikachu about the game at our weekly book group, and she said she had a hard time with it because she found Mae to be a huge asshole. And...she's not wrong. For most of the game, Mae is a jerk, deliberately or inadvertently, to most of the people she meets. Maybe if I had played this game when I was twenty like Mae I'd have more sympathy for her, but at thirty-five I spent the first half of the game on a sine wave, liking her until the next time she opened the wrong side of her mouth. Oh, college isn't where you needed to be right now, after the loans your parents probably took out to send you there? How convenient. You want to offer life advice when you don't even know what you want out of life? Well...that's incredibly common, actually, but it doesn't make it more sympathetic coming from her.

But, Night in the Woods is about discovery. Mae spends most of the game not really knowing what she wants, doing things for reasons she isn't sure about at the time. There are reasons, and playing the game will uncover them. But it did require getting past the initial dislike and a lot of exploring and talking to the inhabitants of Possum Springs. Fortunately, that’s the game.

I love the fall and the dark.

I was surprised that Night in the Woods wasn’t a visual novel, because the course of the gameplay is structured like one. It’s divided into days, and each day Mae is free to wander around town and talk to people or look at what’s changed since she left for college. I’m a completionist and, once I met the townspeople and got invested, I wanted to know everyone’s story, so I spent a while every day looking around town, jumping onto roofs and power lines to see what was happening above the street level--it's surprisingly active up there, considering how often people talk about falling off the roof--and talking to everyone I met. There are a surprising number of one-off characters, visitors from out of town or people that Mae doesn't usually talk to, but the main draw are her three closest friends Gregg, Angus, and Bea.

Gregg is the first friend she meets when she returns home again, and his response sets his personality, with wild flailing arms and liberal use of exclamation points. His boyfriend Angus is, I realized, literally a trilby-wearing atheist who tips his hat at least once, but is also the kindest, most chill character in the entire game with the possible exception of Mae's parents. And Bae is a goth who carries sarcasm as a shield and a sword and seems like she's one step away from punching Mae in the face for most of the game. They're in a band that never performs, only practices, and spend most of their free time together when they're not working. This is the main way the story diverges, as often Mae must choose whether to hang out with Gregg or with Bea.

I picked Bea, because I was also a teenage goth who carried sarcasm as a shield and a sword, and like Bea it was often a way to prevent the world from getting too close. I don't want to spoil it because the character interactions and learning more about Mae's friends was one of the best parts of the game for me, but I can say loved Bea's character arc. This is a game that can make a fight with a friend feel horrible, like something that has to be fixed before it grows beyond repairing.

At times, I even wished I had a friend like Mae. But only sometimes. redpikachu isn't wrong about her.

Roof's crowded today.

When I talk about jumping onto roofs, that's because the game is a strange combination of visual novel and platformer. Early on, Mae explains the power of a triple jump and how the third jump is always higher--due to "physics," she claims--and while it's possible to spend most of the game on the ground, you'll miss a lot of the best parts like the rat babies and some of the friendships that Mae can make. This does require mastering the triple jump and occasionally finding just the right places for a running start so that the third jump will carry Mae onto a higher level. And there are some minigames that require jumping.

Night of the Woods is full of odd minigames, actually, like the pizza-eating game where Mae's army reaches out to grab pizza to the Rock Band-esque game of playing the bass when the band is practicing. It's harder for me to get a handle on the controls than on the story. Platforming allows for exploration and the direct control of Mae rather than point-and-click movement allows for dramatic moments later in the game, but there were multiple times I fell through a platform for no reason I could determine and had to work around back to where I was, and near the end of the game when I already knew where everything was I started really longing for a fast travel option from one side of Possum Springs to the other. As fun as it is to watch Mae kick fallen leaves as she runs and see the cars drive by, realizing I wanted to talk to someone on the opposite end of town and having to run all the way back got old very quickly.

I played with mouse and keyboard and never even tried using a controller. Maybe it's better, but I can't imagine doing the band practice sessions with buttons. Especially that third song.

And sometimes acutely stressed.

schoolpsychnerd got worried about me sometimes when I was playing, because it's filled with rust belt dying town hopelessness. It takes place near HalloweenHarfest, and at one point, Mae has this exchange with Bea when they're talking about spooky things:

Mae: "Okay, what's scary."
Bea: "Uh. Things are like monumentally screwed right now. And no one in power gives a shit, or they're actively making it worse out of spite or profit."
Mae: "Whoa! Geez! I meant, like, a skeleton or something."

I'm not sure I can sum up Night in the Woods better than that quote.

Possum Springs used to be a prosperous mining town, connected by railroads to industrial centers and filled with good jobs where unions protected their workers and a man could feed his family and go home at the end of the day feeling proud. There was a factory that hired people to work on the products of the mines, the railroads, and all the businesses that those industries created. But gradually the mine dried up, and the factory closed up, and long-distance freight and air travel supplanted the railroads. The jobs went away, but people still have to live. They worked at the Food Donkey until that closed, and Pastabilities until that closed, and now they work at the hardware store or the Snack Falcon like Gregg or the Ham Panther like Mae's father. Jobs with good benefits become jobs with no benefits, jobs with stable hours become jobs with any hours they want. As a poem written by one of the characters states:

world where house-buying jobs
became rent-paying jobs
became living with family jobs

That never happened to my hometown because it's close enough to Chicago to be caught up in its orbit, fortunately, but the town where schoolpsychnerd went to college followed a similar trajectory. An old railroad hub that still sees rail traffic, but nowhere near as much. The plant closed and all those old union jobs went away. Without the college there as a source of employment, it'd probably be in the same position as Possum Springs. That's the situation Mae and her friends are in. They work their jobs to survive because they have no choice, and no one cares. In the face of almost total apathy or active malice from anyone who has the ability to make things better, they carve out what happiness they can from a world that gives nothing for free.

The first song the band practices, the song that I'm listening to as I write this, is called "Die Anywhere Else." The singer's highest wish is just to get out. To escape the small town gravity before it pulls them too strongly to ever let go, the way some of schoolpsychnerd's classmates got pulled back. But all they can do is sing, because they have no other hopes. What are skeletons compared to that?

Spooky

That's not to say there isn't less mundane horror present as well.

When I first heard of Night in the Woods, I figured it would be years before I played it, so I read up about it and I learned that some people didn't like the ending because they said it had a huge tonal shift. And while I can understand their feelings, I don't feel them myself. This is a game that leans into spooky from the very beginning and never gives it up. There is one other person in the empty bus station when Mae first comes back to Possum Springs, a janitor who fixes the door and walks outside, turning off the lights behind him. When Mae walks out into the night, he's vanished into an empty parking lot...until he comes back later, playing the part of the Forest God in the Harfest play. One of Mae's old friends also vanished, last seen walking out by the train tracks, and while some people in town are convinced that he just hopped a train to die anywhere else, she's not so sure.

Oh, and Mae find a severed arm out in front of the Clik Clak diner after eating pizza with her friends, just lying by the side of the road.

Strange fires and strange voices. Fallen leaves and a hint of frost in the dying of the year. Nightmares of something watching her from the other side of the sky. Ghost hunts. The second song the band plays--and the name of the upcoming director's cut of the game--is "Weird Autumn," and that's a good summary of the game's background. It's full Midwestern Gothic, with worn graves in the hills that might contain vengeful spirits, crumbling buildings in town, sinkholes opening up so the town is constantly either potholed or under construction, and rituals that seem bizarre to outsiders. When the spookiness arrives in full force later, it's walking a well-worn road.

In between the next two screenshots, I'm going to talk about that spookiness. For spoilers, highlight the text. To avoid them, skip to the text following.

You know...

So, ghosts.

In the end, Mae learns that the ghost she's been seeing, the nightmares she's having, Casey's disappearance, and the arm are all connected to the same source--in her words, a "murder cult of conservative uncles" who worship a thing they found down in an abandoned mine they call the Black Goatof the Woods. They throw sacrifices into a bottomless pit so that the jobs will come back, and the mines will reopen, and the government will stop giving money to lazy criminal immigrants, and everything will be just like it was. I couldn't help but think of that when I read an article about miners rejecting retraining because they think coal's coming back any day now.

It's a shift, and it's jarring to go from ghost hunts to cultists of the Black Goat, but it's not a change in theme. It's an exploration of the conflict between Boomers and Millennials. As much as Gregg and Bea complain about their jobs, they show up every day and do the work. Bea does all the work at her job, even though the hardware store is her father's business and everything is still in his name. They have dreams but they need to buckle down and work to survive, and meanwhile, this cult feeds everyone they feel is undeserving into the literal maw of the beast. They don't want to deal with the way the world is changing. They don't even want to put in hard work to adapt. They just want to appease the dark gods until the clock turns back.

Throughout the game, Mae finds the town council wandering around and talking about ways to revitalize the town. When a homeless man moves behind the church and the pastor wants to open up the land for people to camp on, the council is against it. What would businesses think, they ask? How will they attract businesses that way? They need to find favor with the Invisible Hand, and sensing the way that winds are turning against him, Bruce packs up and moves on back east. The land remains empty, and the homeless remain unsheltered.

The council isn't literally throwing people into a pit, but they're sacrificing them all the same.

"I believe in a universe that doesn't care, and people who do."

The spookiness isn't the reason I loved the game so much, though. It was Mae's interactions with her friends and with the residents of Possum Springs. Living in Chiyoda gave me some idea of what Possum Springs must have been at its height--the aluminum plant was at full employment and there was a giant supermarket/department store that kept the town well-supplied, but it was small enough that neighbors knew each others' names, dropped off vegetables at each other's houses at harvest time, and invited us to their barbeques when they saw us out walking, though that might have been because we were the only Americans living in town. The kind of place I still think fondly of. It makes sense to me that Mae would stop to talk to her neighbors and people in the street and they'd talk back, and that one of her old teachers would invite her to go stargazing with him, and that the poetry club wouldn't mind her listening in to their meeting. Where Mae's father would invite her to watch corny TV with him, and where she would accept.

The message of Night in the Woods is that the world is a cold, cruel place where terrible things can happen to anyone, and in the face of that, it's our connections with others that allow us to navigate the dark. Skeletons aside, that's the true horror of the world, but it's one that we have the power to alleviate. Against the monsters out there, and within our own heads, sometimes we can't beat them alone, and that's okay. It's okay to reach out.

I'm looking forward to that Weird Autumn edition. I haven't done any of Gregg's hangout events, and there's more connections to make. I'm ready to spend more time with Mae and her friends, on the rooftops of Possum Springs, in the dying of the year. 🍂