Grade: B
A meandering narrative adventure about a young adult in crisis
**Spoilers Below**
Night in the Woods is one of the larger games I’ve reviewed. This one takes 6-8 hours to play through, at least.
At heart, Night in the Woods is a coming-of-age story about a college dropout, Mae Borowski, who returns home to their run-down town of Possum Springs. You are living Mae’s life, and the game is a step-by-step walkthrough guide to a young adult in crisis. The game centers around dialogue trees, character-driven story-telling, building ambiance, and some light platforming and mini-games thrown in for good measure.
Night in the Woods genesis has a heart-warming backstory you don’t often see. Going public with their project and requesting crowdfunding, the developers raised over $200,000 on Kickstarter in 2013. Not only were the devs able to raise money for the game, but they partnered with a publisher, Finji, and successfully launched their product in 2017. After overwhelmingly positive critical reviews, game awards, and general audience reception, Night in the Woods was a breakout indie success story.
So by now, you’re probably trying to square that overwhelmingly positive critical acclaim vs. the middling grade I’ve given it. Well, let’s start with the good.
Genuinely fun mini-games
Most of Night in the Woods is exploration and dialogue, but you get a break at a few points for mini-games.
There are a few things to pass the time in Mae’s room back at her parent’s house.
First, you’ve got a “guitar hero” style game that highlights the great songs you encounter throughout the game. There’s no reward for excelling as a bass player in the game other than the pride of a well-done job. Even without integration into the storyline, it was still a good time. The Pumpkin Head song was too hard for my taste. I gave it my best shot, though.
Second, you’ve got a game called “Demon Tower,” where you’re fighting and clawing your way up a la 16-bit dark souls. As you get higher in the tower, you have less health but more dodge actions. It’s a difficult trade-off, and the game ends when you have one health to defeat the boss. I got as far as the blood moat before I lost steam. Demon Tower is 100% the most challenging part of Night in the Woods.
There are also a few mini-games where you’re breaking lightbulbs with a bat, looking for stars, hitting strangers with a water cannon, or knife-fighting your friends, which are a fun break from the dialogue.
The game story intro brings you into a day-in-the-life
The story in “Night in the Woods” was on railroad tracks. The player hadn’t much agency, and I felt more “along for the ride” than a part of the story.
We started our journey when Mae dropped out of college and came home but doesn’t want to talk about it. Mae gets re-acquainted with the town of possum springs, reconnects with her friends, her mom, and her dad, and does everything possible to avoid dealing with her feelings.
As Mae avoids dealing with her feelings, there’s some foreshadowing of dangerous police activity in Possum Springs. There are also some magical dream journeys where Mae sees some of the gameworld’s gods come to life. They give her some vague prophetical warnings.
The story embraces the weird.
After the general intro and character-building material, things get weird when Mae sees someone captured at a fall festival. nstead of calling the police, Mae is convinced that it’s a ghost, and the friend group investigates Scooby Doo style. After tracking down a trio of clues, you find out there’s a Cthulu Cult in Possum Springs. The cult started as a group of miners that found a giant hole in the ground during mining exploration. They’ve been sacrificing people to bring prosperity to the town.
Mae’s weird visions and depression are directly connected to being chosen by an ancient evil Goat lord. She has been feeling worse and worse physically and mentally as the story progresses, and this depression was a main reason she ran away from college.
The epilogue just has Mae waking up without the ancient evil in her head, and she recommits to just pushing through and living her life.
The main character was exhausting.
Overall, the story just left me feeling flat. I think the overarching reason is the main character. I felt hyper-annoyed at Mae for the majority of the game. She’s doing incredibly selfish and self-destructive things, but the game wraps it in a cutesy humor like it’s supposed to be funny.
Mae was encouraging her friend to steal, she acted entitled to her parents, rude to her police officer aunt, did some knife fighting with a friend (which could have ended horribly), was breaking lightbulbs all over a parking lot, and more. Mae appears to have never been taught/learned the ability to look thoughtfully at how her actions affect others. Instead of looking at her own behavior and starting a journey of growing up, Mae only has slight flashes of reflection and then continues to do things that hurt others.
No personal accountability
Mae’s actions, at the end of the story, were justified by the Possum Springs ancient evil being in Mae’s head messing with her mental center of balance (which metaphorically represented Mae’s depression). So Mae is miserable, and partly it’s the evil Goat god’s fault she is spiraling out of control. But Mae, even after getting the ancient evil out of her head, doesn’t seem particularly interested in taking accountability for her actions.
For example, I’m not sure having a part in the death of a dozen or so cultists and then not reporting all those deaths to the police counts as character evolution. Mae could easily end up in jail just from that decision alone, and it’s just hand-waved as a point of non-concern.
So I get it; it’s just a game. I play games with terrible protagonists all the time. So why did Mae, in particular, annoy me? Maybe the setup where I’m playing “a day in the life” style game was the turnoff. The developers took great pains for you to inhabit this character’s mindset. For my sanity, I needed to take frequent breaks from Mae as an individual. I could only proceed in small doses. Mae is utterly exhausting as a person, and my experience with Night in the Woods reflected that.
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