Night in the Woods is good. I recommend it, especially if you’re within the same age group as me. If that’s all you wanted to hear from me about the game, here you go. For anyone else who’s more interested, I kinda wanted to put some thoughts I had about this game into words. I guess it would be considered a review? I’m not sure. Considering how heavily narrative-focused this game is, there’s not much to talk about in terms of gameplay and all those other nitty gritty elements I like to blabber on and on about; no, we’re here to talk about the story of this game.
Night in the Woods is… different. Not just regular different, but if we were to assume that every kind of different in any other game was just similar in being different, as in same different, Night in the Woods is different different. It’s unique in a way that I’ve honestly never seen before. I want to give the game my proper thoughts, share some of my own personal stories, and maybe just talk about things in general about the game. It’s far from being my favorite game for sure, but it’s special. Really special. So special that I’ve decided to open up my blog from three years ago that I had abandoned to talk about it here. I could have simply opened OfficeLibre, typed in a review, taken a screenshot and posted it on Twitter, but I don’t. You’ll understand soon why. So without further adieu, let’s dive in.
Also I’m going to talk abstractly and vaguely about the plot so that I don’t spoil as much but there’s going to be spoilers for sure kthxbye.
When it comes to entertainment, I’ve always had this sense of detachment from the medium, be it the ongoing plights of the characters, their own inner struggles, the theme of the story, and so on. A lot of entertainment feels too general to me. Persona (as a whole and not just one game in particular) is about the power of your friends, which anyone can get behind. NieR Automata is about the absurdity of life but also the small beauty in it that keeps us living, which is not a bad message at all that anyone can understand. Danganronpa is about showing determination in the face of despair, and yeah hope is good.
All of these games have very fine messages that anyone can relate to, and that’s the issue: anyone. They’re messages that can apply to me when I’m a kid, when I’m an adult, and when I’m a frail old man. They’re messages that can apply to anyone really, and because of that, there’s this air of generality to it all that makes it seem like it’s a middle-aged writer shouting at a mountain top to the world, regardless of who might hear. There’s nothing inherently wrong about that, but it still created this barrier between me and the media I consumed that because I’m not being talked to directly and in private.
Night in the Woods feels like it’s speaking to me, specifically, or at the very least people of my specific age group, and just us. This is not meant for kids and this is not meant for middle-aged people or old people. The game might not even be for me in a couple years when I do become that fabled middle-aged man; it’s only speaking to me right now at this very moment when I typed in this very sentence. Night in the Woods is that friend who invited me to their room and went “listen, I have some stuff I need to get off my chest,” and I decided to stick around and listen. That barrier of generality is not there.
So what profound message does it have to say? Life sucks. There’s no life-changing revelation, no nudging into thinking or acting a certain way, and honestly nothing profound or “high art” at all. Nothing. It’s just life sucks.
And I think that’s very beautiful.
It’s no surprise that, given what I’ve been dancing around so far, Night in the Woods is all about the struggles of a young adult in the late 2010s, aka a millennial (and some Generation Z too), and how they cope in a world that is cold, uncaring, and completely unlike the stories told to them when they were younger. Sure, it’s also about a dark conspiracy rooted in the past of an isolated town, but who cares? Even the game shrugs that off to the side. What’s important are the millennial characters in the story: their personalities, their baggage, their regrets, and their vision of the world.
It’s also a story that feels like it’s being told from someone who was also a millennial around the time this game came out. There’s small bits and pieces here in regards to the language used in the writing, as well as the use of concepts and terms that are more millennial-oriented (and also Generation Z-oriented), whether these terms were invented by millennials or popularized around the time when they would have been most receptive to it. Sure, a lot of generations have folks who are anti-authoritarian and share a distaste for police and politicians, but this game specifically uses the term ACAB. That’s a millennial term (and a Generation Z term). Every generation had its own anti-police term, and we have ACAB. That’s our thing.
There’s also themes of time passing, and not just any theme of time passing, but the kind of time that we, as millennials (and also Generation Z I’m so sorry you’re being third-wheeled in this), lived through. The explosive colorful nature of the 90s and to some extent the 2000s that we all saw and grew up in the environment it spawned and were hoping to one day grow up and contribute to suddenly gone by the time said time had arrived. Gone were the red brick happy McDonald’s buildings, in with the drab and boring black rectangular interior and exterior designs. All the wacky nonsense you could get into on the internet in terms of how wild MySpace was and how crazy forums were, now replaced with social media with limited customization options and a general sense of homogenization. All gone. The future is here and it stinks.
To summarize, Night in the Woods is coming from someone our age who uses ACAB, misses old McDonald’s and MySpace. Someone who was born in the 90s and has very vague memories of it from when they were a baby or kid, spent their late childhood and (early) teen-hood in the 2000s, and eventually grew into an adult in the 2010s. That’s us, and that’s them. The story you’re receiving from this game comes not just from someone who lived these events and concepts, but lived them at around the same time as we did. It may not be the best story out there, but it’s the most personal one.
On an even more personal note, while I don’t necessarily relate to Mae much as a person, I do relate to her in terms of… situations that she found herself in. The idea of having your parents planning out your future for you from the day you were born, and how deviating from that path makes you a spoiled, selfish and unappreciative child for being provided with what should be the bare minimum like food, clothes, toys and education, because you didn’t meet the arbitrary expectations in some other person’s head. The idea of sacrifices being made for your sake that you never asked for and are being guilt-tripped over it, and no matter how many times you’re told “it’s fine we’ll figure something out,” it will never be fine and that feeling of guilt will never go away. These are just two of several concepts introduced in this game that I’m very familiar with.
It’s easy to feel alone even when in the company of people, which is something Mae goes through in this game and is also a concept I relate to. The grim reality is that we’re all broken people, and sometimes we pass on our trauma onto others, be it through poor actions fueled by misunderstandings and false presumptions, harmful thoughts that sour relationships based on unfair presumptions based on that trauma, or by teaching it to the next generation of people, whether genetically, culturally or philosophically. This behavior has created an entire society that feels isolated, non-trusting and afraid in a world that should be more connected than ever. Talking would solve a lot of problems, but we cannot bring ourselves to do that, because of either a lack of understanding of what we go through is not normal, or a lack of confidence in not being taken advantage of and abused which would only further our laundry list of traumas.
Mae is one of the most mundane and plain main characters you will ever meet, but also one of the most interesting. She’s not some super genius, an athlete, a super hero or some kind of prodigy; she’s just a college dropout with a history of delinquency who came back home to a town that is well aware of her baggage and mischief, but not so much about what’s going on inside of her. There’s some breadcrumbs here and there that aren’t directly explained to you, but still paint a pretty grim picture of what she’s been through and why she is the way she is.
If you play the game, you notice that there are a couple moments where there’s tense situations, and normally you want to talk yourself out of them, but all of the responses Mae has are terrible and just make the situation worse. You don’t have options, and frankly, neither does Mae; her history, her trauma, her mental health have all coalesced into creating a persona that is awful at speaking her mind, reading the room and just not being so darn inconsiderate. There was even a moment where stuff Mae said made a character run away, and I was kind of confused too just like Mae (which might be a hint to something about myself that I should look into later).
“Mae is an asshole. She’s a bad person.” That’s what everyone says about her. The reality is that she’s just bad at being a good person; she doesn’t know how to deescalate fights, and sometimes her idea of fun might come at the expense of other people because her brain doesn’t work in a way where she can understand that what she’s doing is inconsiderate or selfish. Sometimes, other people are just broken and project their own heap of garbage onto Mae, but they’re in a higher arbitrary hierarchical status in society that allows them to establish that as normalcy. She lives in a universe that neither does she understand, nor does it understand her, and it’s where all that tension sparks off of.
Everyone enjoys having a protagonist that has it all sorted out or eventually does by the end of the story, because it’s fiction and consumers enjoy the power fantasy of wanting to be someone cool and taking away something of value after the story has ended, but you won’t get that with Mae. She’s very similar to Shinji Ikari from Neon Genesis Evangelion, with the difference being that there’s no resolution to her character arc. She’s as boring and plain as almost anybody who plays Night in the Woods. Having a character like that as a protagonist might come off as really uninteresting, but what we end up with is something really refreshing.
Mae isn’t the only important character in the story of course; we still have her three (four?) friends to talk about. Personally, I really like Gregg, though I didn’t get to see much of his story as I dedicated my first (and currently as of writing this article only) playthrough to Beatrice. However, something I noticed about Gregg is his erratic behavior, how he flails his arms around and has so much energy during the day, but at night feels exhausted or a little down when you chat with him on your laptop at night. These are symptoms related to bipolar disorder, and the way that is portrayed through Gregg is very raw and real. Maybe that’s why he’s Mae’s best friend and why they get along so well. I’m very interesting in seeing more about Gregg and how both he and Mae build off of one another in my second playthrough. Gregg rulez ok.
Seeing as I did see most of what her story had to offer, Beatrice also has a very relatable backstory, and the way she behaves is very intriguing. She’s very fond of goth clothes and expressing herself as a spirit free of authority and anything society deems as proper, which contradicts her behavior with how she takes her responsibilities at work and home very seriously. She’s also a proud socialist who hates the man, but when prompted to shoplift she hesitates and insists against it (and I have my theories why but that’s for a discussion much bigger than this article). The most interesting is that Beatrice probably used to be carefree much like Mae, but it’s certain events in her life that forced her into being who she is now.
It’s because of this that Mae and Beatrice tend to clash often in the story. They may have been on the same wavelength of thoughts at some point, but Beatrice has changed a lot since the last time Mae was in town, and Mae is struggling to not only accept this, but understand it, especially when some of these events that changed Beatrice are things Mae did not experience herself and can’t relate to. It’s through here that we learn how Beatrice presents herself as punk, but on a deeper level acts proper and professional, and on an even deeper level to her core wishes she could be free, and realizing that hit me and it hit me hard.
This is also a bit of a nod, but I wanted to praise this game for making three of the four (five?) friends canonically gay, including Mae who is open about her bisexuality to her friends. LGBT portrayal is important, and is often left to side characters that matter little especially in larger stories from big companies. Having the main leads in a story about life for youth going through serious trauma and talking about their mental health be LGBT is a very big deal. I didn’t get to see the side of the story where their sexuality played a major part in the story, but it’s still really appreciated nonetheless.
Also the anti-authoritative messages intertwined in almost every aspect in this game is really cool. Boo bosses and CEOs.
Moving onto the last point I want to discuss, that being the ending. Night in the Woods feels like it ends abrupt, almost too abrupt. It’s like you get to the middle act of a story, and instead of the resolution that comes in the form of the third act, it just ends. It leaves you hanging, and while this obviously would not have worked in any other game, here I think it leaves a very potent message.
Being a millennial, I’m still considered somewhat young, and as a result there are many things I’m inexperienced in. I’m asking questions that I’ve had for a while, and looking for answers that I don’t really have. I feel this same energy emanating from the writer, where they too have questions about what to do but don’t know how to answer them and is hoping that one day someone will come along and take them by the hand. I can sense the writer’s confusion, frustrations, desperation and passion; because I too can relate to them and I fully understand what they’re going through.
This is not a story; this is real life. There are no happy endings, or sad endings for that matter, because life keeps happening and keeps moving on. Things may get bad, and there’s no guarantee that they will stop getting bad or that things will immediately get better. It’s not an uplifting concept to think about, so hey, maybe just appreciate the moment you have right now, which is your youth. Go to parties, hang out with friends, go on a bike ride, eat some pizza with friends, maybe go to a mall store and try out shoplifting (please don’t do this I’m just joking), go on a boat ride, or honestly anything that involves any sort of adventure, grand or otherwise.
We all have responsibilities and stuff in our lives dragging us down, and some of it might never go away. Maybe take a moment to breathe and say “hey, at least I’m alive,” and take a break every now and then to appreciate what little you may have or hold onto. Maybe take that time to open up to people more and try to explain what you’re going through to your friends; remember that you are not alone in this 1-star roller-coaster we call life, and no matter how much the world may change or time may pass, at the end of the day we have each other.
Now then, in regards to everything else that I really like about the game that’s not related to the narrative, I’m going to summarize them. The art style is really simple in that it doesn’t use any lineart, but still uses colors really well, particularly orange autumn. The minigames are very simple and in no way intrusive in a way that would ruin your enjoyment of the game, but I appreciate their existence because they do help a lot with the pacing sometimes, with the exception of Demontower which I found to be cumbersome due to being too simple and also too harsh given how enemies are really braindead, your attacks are very short and your i-frames are finicky where dodging over hazards is not guaranteed and you can easily take lots of damage with no i-frames after receiving said damage. I also wish there was a way to reload saves, especially since the bass rhythm sections are easy to mess up and you only get one shot and the game saves immediately after.
Thank you to everyone who took the time to read this article. It may just be a video game review, but it’s a particular game that touched on some heavy subjects, some of which I underwent, was undergoing during the time when I wrote this review, and am likely going to continue undergoing in the future, so it was a pretty big deal this time. Hopefully this blog doesn’t fade into obscurity again and I can find more topics to discuss here soon.
I would also like to recommend this video by PushingUpRoses Called “Exploring Mental Illness In Night in the Woods (SPOILERS) which dove deeper into the mental health portrayed in the game that I didn’t necessarily fully understand at first, as not only do I not suffer from all the mental health subjects tackled in this game, particularly bipolar disorder, but there are mental health issues portrayed in this game that I am going through but I do not have a full understanding of yet, and this video helped me connect the dots in ways to both understand the story better and also understand myself.
All images used were captured by myself, and are used under fair use for recreational purposes. All rights reserved for the original authors of the games with screenshots used in this article.
Kimo Force May Or May Not Nitpick About Games 