(This article contains some spoilers. I promise not to spoil the bigger stuff if you haven’t played it yet.)
“It’s gonna be okay.”
Let’s talk about Night In The Woods, a game about someone you know. Or maybe a friend of a friend. Or, maybe you.
Because I’m not trying to make a funny when I say that these animals are more ‘human’ than most human characters in stories. Mae Borowski is one of the most deeply flawed protagonists in recent memory, and for fundamentally modern, human reasons, yet it’s hard not to empathize with her, even when you’re getting frustrated at her for the choices she makes. There’s a shimmer of rain beneath Gregg’s manic energy. My heart broke for Bea, my personal favourite of this motley lot.
This is a horror game, of that I am completely confident, but the conventional elements we associate with horror games take their sweet time creeping in onto this cozy yet dead-end town, like a cyanide drip in your tasty latte.
Usually, horror (games or otherwise) deal with personal issues and doubts and struggles by couching them in layers of visual metaphor: the Babadook as the agony of overburdened single motherhood. Silent Hill 3’s highly suggestive bestiary as metaphor for the dangers and fears of teen pregnancy.
But Night In The Woods starts out – and continues on – more like, I dare say, films like The Big Chill or The World’s End minus the aliens (so, The Big Chill then). Films where we see a group of people reuniting, only to find they’ve drifted in ways that may at first seem irreconcilable.
And for the first long while, that is what this game is about: Mae reconciling, or failing to reconcile, that her hometown as she knew it was not the hometown she remembered, people included. She went to college, dropped out without a plan, came back home and stayed by-and-large the same. The town around her, and those around her, didn’t.
Though everything seems pleasant enough, there is an undercurrent of authentic tension in these first hours. And I do mean undercurrent, it can be subtle, but occasionally it rises up to splash you into ice-cold lucidity: older adults in her neighborhood starting to look at Mae in a more condescending light as it becomes clear she dropped out yet has no intentions of seeking out employment (and with Gregg and Bea miserable at their own jobs, her support group doesn’t give her a ton of impetus). The financial situation Mae’s parents have found themselves in, which, if one was in the habit of pointing fingers, could be blamed on her, leading to a terrible fight between Mae and her mother. The wall of ice between a saddened Mae and embittered, disappointed, downtrodden Bea.
I am absolutely enamored with how deftly, realistically and respectfully these issues are handled. And I say that because, while I was definitely aware while playing of the darker, deeper elements prickling away in the shadows, at the fringes of thought, it didn’t take me long to accept these deeply personal, slice-of-life elements as a horror in and of themselves. And there’s a universality to the problems and themes at work here, but delving deeper, this game is willing to be more straight-up and honest about the troubles of modern life than you usually find in the medium.
Look at it this way: Mae dropped out of college, putting her family in dire financial trouble for nothing. She has no plan, no pressing desire to get a job for her own source of income, not even a driver’s license. She just wants to play bass (she’s in a band with her friends but they haven’t gone anywhere beyond rehearsals), play video games and run around town.
In short, she wants things to be just like they used to be, but life doesn’t work like that. You feel for her, because the social alienation becomes very real rather quickly, but at the same time you get frustrated with her: frustrated with the choices she makes, frustrated with the things she asks of her friends (goading overworked, overstressed shopkeeper Bea into shoplifting? Dammit, Mae), frustrated with Mae in general.
But you know what? How haunting must it be to truly have no plan in life, no direction, and in the darker moments, so little hope? That first scene in the woods, at the party – without spoiling things, it’s a heart-churner. Oh, Mae. (I do like to think that the title of the game can refer both to the events of the climax, as well as this first night, where you can practically feel a dam burst as the hard realities of Mae’s return really start to set in and appreciate.)
And on the other side of things, you really just want to reach through the screen and give Bea a certified cheque of enough in-universe currency to make her life stop sucking. She lost her mom, then had to take over the business and support her dad after they lost the house, all without the option to do what she really wants which is to go to college and give herself options, and now her childhood friend comes crashing back into her life, having squandered the college opportunity and is now acting so aloof and womanchildish that – you know, it’s hard not to take Bea’s side when they argue.
That’s what this game does. It gets in your head, it plants its hooks in and it makes you think about it long after the fact.
You know what? Talking of the aesthetics, I think I know why this game affected me so, when various other narratives tackling these sorts of slice-of-life scenarios, while well-handled, didn’t have quite the same effect. I mean, of course, a big part of it is that this is one of the best-written games I’ve ever had the privilege of playing: in a very different way, of course, than other paragons of video game writing like God Of War 2018 or The (first) Last Of Us.
But I really do think a big part of it is the heavily stylized aesthetic: anthropomorphic animals in…I want to say a “2-and-a-half-D” world. Because I tend to think that aesthetics like this have a way of more easily reaching the human core of things simply by being ‘one step removed’, visually. But maybe that’s just me.
But point is, I honestly don’t think that this exact narrative would have worked nearly as well if it was just standard ol’ human characters. I tend to think of Night In The Woods as having a “South Park aesthetic” but with anthro characters, if you get me, which – as far as ‘one-step-removed’ visuals go – has an added level of deceptive simplicity to it that plays off brilliantly. It just works.
“But the game has been out for a few years now, you knew you’d get sucked in, but you’re only now playing it? Have you been in space or something?”
Relevant question, top points.
It’s just a combination of factors, really. It started out as a PC-only game, and without derailing this too far, I do not like playing anything even remotely involved with a keyboard. I get the appeal of playing shooters with a mouse, but keyboards are unintuitive as hell for me even with the abilities to hotkey and remap, and at this point I don’t think that’s ever going to change.
Then the game popped up on the Switch e-shop, but by that point there were whispers of a physical version in the works via Limited Run, so I decided to hold out for that instead – only for shocking circumstances (to be very blunt, the death of one of the members of the creative team) to put the prospect of a physical rollout into indefinite hiatus, and it may or may not ever happen, as of this writing.
So time passes, and Itch.io did that massive indie bundle supporting the Black Lives Matter protests, and I dropped money on it and ended up with my very own PC copy of Night In The Woods. I booted it up, and within ten minutes, I knew two things: one, I was already sucked in by the characters, dialogue and atmosphere, and two, I really wasn’t enjoying the keyboard controls. This isn’t even a challenging game for the most part – move left, move right, jump and interact, all without any risk of dying – but the PC experience was just plain hampering me.
So I double dipped for the game on the Switch e-shop, where I could play it on a proper HDTV in a comfortable posture. And you can bet your bottom dollar that if a physical pressing does eventually happen after all, then I’ll be first in line to triple dip for it. That’s how much this game came to mean to me.
But that didn’t really answer your question: yes, that big indie bundle gave me a taste of it and hooked me, but why not have bought it earlier, knowing I’d get sucked in?
That’s just it. I could already tell, from the discussions that unfolded around the game, that this was the kind of game that would consume me, hook into my brain and get me really, properly glued in. I wanted to savour that, and not have it take place in the stress-nightmare that was 2019. Like, I love Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, as anyone who browses Roundabout Media for twenty seconds could tell you offhand, but I played the hell out of that game in Spring/Summer 2019, which forever cements it as being mentally associated with the most stressful summer of my life. Not personal stuff, work stuff. Put it this way, there is such a good reason Bea is one of the characters I empathize with most in this game. (I’m in a better place now.)
And that’s another thing this game does, it pries open the part of your brain that wants to talk about things, talk about your life, just talk and make connections. It’s also the kind of game where you’ll play it, then the lyrics of the music you listen to afterwards will start reminding you of it. (That is also assuming that you’re not like me where that happens with everything anyway because you’re constantly stuck on multiverse-brain where everything feels connected to everything else in a gigantic web of ideas and themes as a baseline. Macrocosmic mania is fun!)
But let’s pivot back before I get episodic on you! I finally played Night In The Woods in June 2020, savoured over night after night, on a large HDTV with surround sound and the same dimmed ‘theater lighting’ setup I use to watch movies and shows. If you’re a fan of the game and you haven’t tried it in a setting like that, I recommend it.
As a game, it’s pretty unique in that the bent is not really toward challenge. There are minigames which are easy to just pick up and learn from the jump – simple stuff, like a pizza-eating minigame, or that time when Gregg challenges you to a friendly knife fight because Gregg is a whole thing. A whole thing.
Now, a couple of these minigames are not so ‘mini’: Gregg’s boyfriend Angus gives Mae a computer game called Demontower, which is a Gauntlet-style game-within-the-game with progressively harder levels and enemies, fully-realized boss battles – I expected it to be a one-and-done fun little time waster, but it is a legit full-fledged game inside the game. (I got to level 6 on my first run before things started getting wild-hard. I was getting so deep in the game within the game that I started to hear the Inception noise and I knew the time had come to back off.)
Now, Mae plays bass guitar, and there are numerous times when you’ll be thrust into what can best be called Bass Hero. I am singling out these sections because I am shockingly horrid at them. First of all, when the first mandatory one happens, I had no idea that it was coming, and there I am, suddenly playing a convincing pastiche of a game genre that I have traditionally avoided on the grounds that I’m terminally terrible at, like, all of it.
I played this on a Switch Pro Controller (that hella expensive controller keeps having nested value, because I can only imagine the horror of trying to do these sections in handheld mode, or god forbid, the Joycons), and it’s the one part that makes me wonder if keyboard control wouldn’t be slightly better, but then you’ve re-introduced the keyboard problem of clawing your hand over the keys in a constant state of semi-agitation.
I think the big issue is that the interface really screws with my muscle memory and makes me unable to properly intuit it, because the four side-to-side bass strings on the screen do not correspond to the four-square layout of the pro controller.
But, this isn’t a mean game. You bomb the bass sections, and all you’ll get is some dialogue telling you you blew the song, maybe a unique illustration in Mae’s journal, and the game continues as normal.
While I was playing, a small part of me wondered if Mae’s ups-and-downs through Possum Springs weren’t possibly a bit of a deconstruction of the traditional RPG protagonist – Link wanders around villages, breaking all the pots and pans in hopes that someone stashed money inside, scares the chickens, comes into your house and rolls around a bit while shouting “HYAAH!” repeatedly – meanwhile, Mae might be a resident of this town rather than being an adventurer from afar on some epic quest, but she’s going around listening in on NPCs from an uncomfortable close distance, jumping around like Mario and balancing her way across power lines like a deadass fool, and while the context is wildly different, it becomes difficult to not draw the parallel.
That said, I had the most fun simply walking around the world and talking to people than I’ve had in any game since the Mass Effect trilogy. In Mass Effect, I could spend so much time just wandering around and soaking up the sci-fi energy, whereas in Night In The Woods, the game’s uniquely idiosyncratic, yet reflective-and-reflexive mirror of modern life gave me endless reasons to press deeper and hit me in all the right ways. (That’s all a wordsy way of saying those feels, bro.)
And the later parts of the game would not have been nearly as effective without the preceding hours. This game had well-earned the cold chills I got during the final act.
I approached the thought of playing it a second time, this time possibly with my Elgato unit just in case I’d later find uses for the footage, with eager anticipation. (Besides, I was pretty sure I’d missed a scene or two in my first playthrough.) This is the kind of story that begs to be experienced at least twice, the first time as blind as possible, and the second time with foreknowledge of why things are the way they are, both in terms of the darker elements, and in terms of why various characters are reacting to Mae the way they do.
Maybe it’s for the best that I happen to have played this in 2020: a time in which we’re all knocked out of our comfort zone, where we’re all at home yet everything’s so uncertain and weird, where there’s literally an invisible malignant force out there in the world that we can’t yet cure as of this writing, creeping around us at all times even as social forces draw us to unrest. And then it turns out that the state of things now, has revealed that the normality we once clung to out of inertia, wasn’t actually working for most – many of us are either chained to an unfulfilling job yet can’t make enough to give ourselves any other options because wages have stagnated while the cost of living has broken the stratosphere, or we’re feeling like everyone and everything has simply left us behind – two extremes explored through the characters in this game, incidentally. And those structures where we go to shop, that serve our food, that keep our societies functioning – as it turns, not set in stone, so much as being a house of cards waiting for some cosmic force to flick it.
A time when things just feel different. When the mainstays we took for granted a couple years ago have changed, or closed down, or just became unmoored.
Maybe Mae is a character for our time. Because that’s what great stories can do, take on meanings beyond what the creators could have ever intended – I sincerely hesitate to use the phrase ‘Death Of The Author’ here, given the tragic circumstances befalling one of the creators last year, but it’s otherwise appropriate.
In 2020, we are all Mae Borowski.
Or, in the language of the people – man, this game is such a mood lately.
This is a story that means to tell you that you matter. Your deeds matter. Your struggles may seem so small against an uncaring universe, but you matter. Loss hurts because what you lost really did matter so much.
It so happens that as I was playing this, the review embargo lifted on The Last Of Us 2, and out came a review that discussed how the reviewer felt TLoU2’s caustically cynical and poisonously pessimistic tone – of humanity tearing itself apart and splitting off after an apocalypse upends the world – feels surprisingly anachronistic in the age of COVID-19, a bleak and self-defeatist view of human nature as surveyed from the comforts of a functional society. And, I have to be honest, I don’t have a pressing desire of late to play a game whose main message is that we’re all screwed, life is short, brutish and without mercy and you should feel bad. (Incidentally, the first Last Of Us was not this way: it was a game about finding companionship and reasons to carry on, to be able to open yourself up again after tragedy. To come together when everything around you is breaking down. But TLoU2 appears to be the opposite.)
But in contrast to TLoU2, Night In The Woods turned out to be the perfect game for me to play of late. There’s a universality to the themes in this story, realism without cynicism: things are tough. Nothing is what we thought it would be. We’re dismayed, disappointed, struggling. But we’ll be okay. We’ll get through it together. We need each other. Life can be cut short, it can seem brutish and without sense or mercy, but we have each other. We need each other. And together we’ll make it through.
Because, as you reach the last hours, you come to realize that this is not just a story about social alienation. It’s a story about the things that bring you together being stronger than the things that pull you apart.
Or, to put it another way, here’s another way to look at a game like this versus a game like The Last Of Us 2: a few blocks from my home, there is a hollow that is always darker than the surrounding areas, because it’s right next to the forest that borders our subdivision. Natural light disdains it because the tree branches blot out the sun even on bright days. Well, while this article was in the cooking phase, I was out taking an evening walk down that way, and I noticed that people had done up the hollow with colourful streamers and ornaments, and hand-written signs hanging from the tree branches over the path: Better days ahead! And Be kind, be brave, you’re not alone! And It’s going to be okay! And more.
I think maybe I don’t have as much interest in exploring the blackest sides of humanity in times of crisis, when those little moments of humanity’s good soul feel so much more poignant.
And if you’re reading this in the years to come, hi! 2020 was the longest three years of our collective lives, but we got through it. We got through it together (even if we couldn’t physically be together, due to the particular nature of our blight), despite those who would see us apart and spread discord for their own gain.
You know what?
Sometimes you get so into a thing that you look back on the stuff you posted, weeks or months later, and think, “Man, I was so deep in with that specific thing, what the heck?”
But, speaking as a fan of entertainment-art, that’s pretty much the endgame for why we love these things, isn’t it? To feel a connection to a work to the point where you exit clock-time and all the walls fall away.
And speaking specifically as a creator, I’m genuinely grateful that I still possess the ability to be moved so deeply by things like this – stories, art. On that deeper level, right in the gut, without a single whiff of cynicism in sight. Not just being able to intellectually say ‘oh, yes, that was well-paced and well-written’. To feel it where it really matters. Because if I didn’t, then what the hell would I even be doing in this field?
Sometimes we can all use the reminder.
Because (and if you haven’t played the game, I promise this is a relevant reference) stories and art are not cold, dead things. Especially not stories like this. They’re warm, cozy, bigger on the inside. I’d say we need stories and art now more than ever, but that’s not quite true – the truth is, we always need them. One way or another, they remind us that things will be okay.
Night In The Woods is available on PC through Itch.io as linked on the official webpage and also through the Nintendo Switch e-shop.