vibes
A good time, but not entirely my cup of tea. A mixed bag of characters and a conclusion that tackles me before I'm even aware of it hurts the overall narrative for me.
I enjoyed spending time with and getting to know Mae, even if she's sometimes too much for me. Probably definitely intentional, but still. Beatrice is best, please spend time with her. Angus is a sweetheart, a lovely bear. I'm not sure if Gregg rulz.
A warm art style perfect for the autumn setting and pleasant music helps keep this game memorable for me. Worth a playthrough, most certainly, but after the hype I've seen and heard for it I was ultimately underwhelmed.
I enjoyed spending time with and getting to know Mae, even if she's sometimes too much for me. Probably definitely intentional, but still. Beatrice is best, please spend time with her. Angus is a sweetheart, a lovely bear. I'm not sure if Gregg rulz.
A warm art style perfect for the autumn setting and pleasant music helps keep this game memorable for me. Worth a playthrough, most certainly, but after the hype I've seen and heard for it I was ultimately underwhelmed.
It seems like this game was hyped up by a lot of people, but I honestly didn't feel that hyped for it when I was to start playing it, mainly because I had played Overland which, while good, was kind of broken, and therefore I didn't expect a lot for this game. That was an expectation that wasn't exactly supported by the game, as I actually enjoyed myself quite a lot with this game. Actually, that is not completely true, the game itself is actually pretty boring a lot of the time. But I feel like my time with this game was worth it, because of the characters mainly. This game acts a lot like a visual novel in that the absolute main focus on the game is the dialogue and characters, which definitely are the strongest aspects of this game. The dialogue is pretty Undertale, but actually a lot better in my opinion. It seems to be perpetually self-aware of itself, so everytime the dialogue is a bit ridiculous, it always seems intentionally so. I also LOVE the environments of this game, it really nailed this pixar short film-feeling. And I also loved how the story got progressively crazier and crazier, culminating in an almost Lynchian fashion. I think a big reason as to why I got so relatively into this game was because at first, I played it with my girlfriend, and her enjoyment of it made me enjoy it a lot more, and we actually played it for a couple of hours together. A lot of times, this game may feel like a slog to get through, because there is just so much to do at most times. Talk to every character every day. And you should also explore completely as the secrets you find will absolutely be worth it in my opinion. But I'm not gonna lie: it was hard motivating yourself sometimes. But I ultimately felt it was worth it, because of the elements mentioned above. Something that adds to the game is how incredibly immersive it feels. My favourite element of that immersion is definitely the fact that the tune that plays when you are about to wake up from sleeping is constructed in a way that makes it feel awkward to turn it off by waking up whenever you do it. This is a good metaphor for being in a dream and suddenly waking up, and I do believe they thought about that when they made the game. Also, you can play games within games, and there is a lot of attention to detail when it comes to world building. Every major company that you would expect to see has been replaced by a similar company, but in this imaginary world. So, this game is interestingly enough a game that pulled me in through something entirely different than its gameplay. It had its moments, but it was the characters, setting and art that really made me stay. Great game, honestly!
Kerouac-inspired copycats and other slice-of-life works only dream of being half as inhabited as Night in the Woods. A game that feels like a collective shared moment. <3
why do i have to be rude to my friends
===================
year and a half later edit (not really a proper review just organizing some thoughts i have about nitw and a similar game):
been thinking about this one a lot recently. not because i've really changed my opinion or love it now, but because it feels like such wasted potential. forgive me if this one is hard to read, my thoughts about this game are very tangled and laying them out in a way that makes sense is difficult
one of my favorite games of all time, echo (a free vn basically no one has played but i digress), has nearly all the same building blocks as night in the woods. you've got:
-vaguely a coming of age story
-about coming back to your rural dead-end hometown from college
-reuniting with your old friend group, hanging out & talking with them
-you get to choose who to hang out with & get different content based on who you pick
-a member of the friend group is gone, you progressively figure out what happened to them and why
-pretty gay and pretty "indie furry", in a way that deters a lot of the people not in the target demographic from ever trying it.
i could go on but i won't because that would land itself in spoiler territory for one or both, but if you've played both they should reveal themselves to be very similar in premise. there's enough differences to matter but my point is that they're 2 games that are so easy to compare to one another that one could do it with nothing but the first sentence of each game's product descriptions. so why do i love echo as much as i do, and not really care for nitw as much as i do? for me, the answer lies entirely within execution.
thought 1: i feel like the biggest sticking point for me is how nitw handles emotion, that being, it barely does. which for a game all about talking to people is pretty bad! often the most you'll get is a character narrowing or opening their eyes a bit more and dryly delivering an "oh my god" or a "no fucking way", but the character sprites barely emote, and there's no descriptive text that lets you fill in the details. echo at least has your standard neutral/happy/angry/etc visual novely sprites for each character, but where that game shines is in its text descriptions. the combination of these two does wonders for the believability of that game's world and its characters--it's really no wonder why so many games about talking to people opt for a visual novel format. contrast that to nitw, where every character talks like they're texting one another. people don't talk like this, they type like this, which is a very important distinction to be made, and i couldn't help but be pulled out of the experience any time i noticed it.
thought 2: night in the woods often emphasizes the fact that possum springs is a dead end town no one really wants to live in, but aside from the text there's really nothing backing it up. for a town as "shitty" as everyone thinks it is, it looks way too pleasant to exist within. night in the woods is simply too pretty for what it's going for. if you want to say that the game is actually about how this small town isn't actually that bad, might i point you to some plot beats that happen in the story that directly contradict that? contrast that to echo, which isnt nearly as wishy-washy about how it wants to present the town; it's oppressively hot, most of the houses are vacant or abandoned, everything is barren or messy or grimy or all of the above, the game goes the whole nine yards. the refuge from this is in the friendships the mc has formed, and when things go badly you can't just escape to "oh look at how pretty the game is", it's all laid bare in a way you can't ignore. night in the woods clearly wants to tug on your emotional strings, but it's missing any sort of bite, which leads me pretty cleanly to my next point...
thought 3: to me, night in the woods feels conflicted in what it wants to be. nitw is a cozy game where you hang out with your friends but it's also a game that delves into the troubles that can befall a freindship, particularly in bea's events (i will mention that i only played one or two of greggs when i played the game so i can't really comment on them). this is all good and fine, but the issue is that the game is too scared to let go of the "cozy" descriptor, so things happen that should have an effect on the dynamics of the friend group, but end up changing basically nothing. i'm not sure how much of a spoiler this is, but regardless of whether you choose to hang out with bea or gregg, the narrative converges towards the same point in the end as a plot starts to take center focus. this unintentionally kind of says that it doesn't really matter what you say to the people around you and if you never hang out with them, that they'll still be your friends, which feels... wrong? like that can't be what they're going for, right? mae is allowed to be at best a total klutz and at worst actively malicious towards the people around her and no one really minds all that much in the long run.
it all comes down to narrative goals; night in the woods tells the player "it's ok to be confused about life in your early 20s" but there's so many extraneous elements that this idea is often shoved to the wayside. once the plot gets going it's basically completely gone as a theme. contrast this with echo, which, to be vague as to not thematically spoil it, has an undercurrent of "trauma" that the game carries across large thematic and tonal shifts. almost nothing in echo feels like a convenient accident despite how wildly different some of the routes can be from one another, whereas night in the woods, to me, feels like a collage of a bunch of different ideas thrown together with little thought put into their cohesion.
for most people these issues are ignorable, for me they're not. had a hard time putting my finger on why exactly this game failed to resonate with me at all, but after i saw a game going for something kinda similar do it with flying colors, it's led me to thinking about it again. only real reason i wrote this is that i mostly just wanted to get my thoughts down about this game now that ive got a good grasp on them lol
===================
year and a half later edit (not really a proper review just organizing some thoughts i have about nitw and a similar game):
been thinking about this one a lot recently. not because i've really changed my opinion or love it now, but because it feels like such wasted potential. forgive me if this one is hard to read, my thoughts about this game are very tangled and laying them out in a way that makes sense is difficult
one of my favorite games of all time, echo (a free vn basically no one has played but i digress), has nearly all the same building blocks as night in the woods. you've got:
-vaguely a coming of age story
-about coming back to your rural dead-end hometown from college
-reuniting with your old friend group, hanging out & talking with them
-you get to choose who to hang out with & get different content based on who you pick
-a member of the friend group is gone, you progressively figure out what happened to them and why
-pretty gay and pretty "indie furry", in a way that deters a lot of the people not in the target demographic from ever trying it.
i could go on but i won't because that would land itself in spoiler territory for one or both, but if you've played both they should reveal themselves to be very similar in premise. there's enough differences to matter but my point is that they're 2 games that are so easy to compare to one another that one could do it with nothing but the first sentence of each game's product descriptions. so why do i love echo as much as i do, and not really care for nitw as much as i do? for me, the answer lies entirely within execution.
thought 1: i feel like the biggest sticking point for me is how nitw handles emotion, that being, it barely does. which for a game all about talking to people is pretty bad! often the most you'll get is a character narrowing or opening their eyes a bit more and dryly delivering an "oh my god" or a "no fucking way", but the character sprites barely emote, and there's no descriptive text that lets you fill in the details. echo at least has your standard neutral/happy/angry/etc visual novely sprites for each character, but where that game shines is in its text descriptions. the combination of these two does wonders for the believability of that game's world and its characters--it's really no wonder why so many games about talking to people opt for a visual novel format. contrast that to nitw, where every character talks like they're texting one another. people don't talk like this, they type like this, which is a very important distinction to be made, and i couldn't help but be pulled out of the experience any time i noticed it.
thought 2: night in the woods often emphasizes the fact that possum springs is a dead end town no one really wants to live in, but aside from the text there's really nothing backing it up. for a town as "shitty" as everyone thinks it is, it looks way too pleasant to exist within. night in the woods is simply too pretty for what it's going for. if you want to say that the game is actually about how this small town isn't actually that bad, might i point you to some plot beats that happen in the story that directly contradict that? contrast that to echo, which isnt nearly as wishy-washy about how it wants to present the town; it's oppressively hot, most of the houses are vacant or abandoned, everything is barren or messy or grimy or all of the above, the game goes the whole nine yards. the refuge from this is in the friendships the mc has formed, and when things go badly you can't just escape to "oh look at how pretty the game is", it's all laid bare in a way you can't ignore. night in the woods clearly wants to tug on your emotional strings, but it's missing any sort of bite, which leads me pretty cleanly to my next point...
thought 3: to me, night in the woods feels conflicted in what it wants to be. nitw is a cozy game where you hang out with your friends but it's also a game that delves into the troubles that can befall a freindship, particularly in bea's events (i will mention that i only played one or two of greggs when i played the game so i can't really comment on them). this is all good and fine, but the issue is that the game is too scared to let go of the "cozy" descriptor, so things happen that should have an effect on the dynamics of the friend group, but end up changing basically nothing. i'm not sure how much of a spoiler this is, but regardless of whether you choose to hang out with bea or gregg, the narrative converges towards the same point in the end as a plot starts to take center focus. this unintentionally kind of says that it doesn't really matter what you say to the people around you and if you never hang out with them, that they'll still be your friends, which feels... wrong? like that can't be what they're going for, right? mae is allowed to be at best a total klutz and at worst actively malicious towards the people around her and no one really minds all that much in the long run.
it all comes down to narrative goals; night in the woods tells the player "it's ok to be confused about life in your early 20s" but there's so many extraneous elements that this idea is often shoved to the wayside. once the plot gets going it's basically completely gone as a theme. contrast this with echo, which, to be vague as to not thematically spoil it, has an undercurrent of "trauma" that the game carries across large thematic and tonal shifts. almost nothing in echo feels like a convenient accident despite how wildly different some of the routes can be from one another, whereas night in the woods, to me, feels like a collage of a bunch of different ideas thrown together with little thought put into their cohesion.
for most people these issues are ignorable, for me they're not. had a hard time putting my finger on why exactly this game failed to resonate with me at all, but after i saw a game going for something kinda similar do it with flying colors, it's led me to thinking about it again. only real reason i wrote this is that i mostly just wanted to get my thoughts down about this game now that ive got a good grasp on them lol
reviews are inherently subjective and im here to tell you that this game is very dear to me. should you play it? i don't know! will your experience with it depend on whether you've also been a queer kid with mental health issues who has lived in a small town? probably!!
anyway it's a critique of capitalism which is always sexy. and you can raise rats and jump on powerlines and be a dick to your cop aunt. the writing and art are stunning. there are gay people. is this the best ever video game? probably not, but it's my video game
anyway it's a critique of capitalism which is always sexy. and you can raise rats and jump on powerlines and be a dick to your cop aunt. the writing and art are stunning. there are gay people. is this the best ever video game? probably not, but it's my video game
A game with a brilliant presentation and legitimately good character writing plagued by a complete lack of direction and barely any story to speak of for the majority of its run time. I wanted to love this so bad, but it just isn't for me.
This review contains spoilers
I'm kinda indifferent about this game.
I enjoyed a lot about it, like the art style, the exploration bits, the soundtrack, and a lot of the writing. I usually enjoyed the more intimate moments a lot when dialog tackled real-life problems in a very direct way and makes the characters come across as very real and believable people. Even when the dialog options during those moments were kind of frustrating at times and I found myself siding with the other party of the conversation rather than Mae a lot of the times, those were the best part of the game for me. With each start of a new day, I just wanted to hit up the daily routes in the city, check up on my favorite NPCs, and progress in the main plot.
Like I said in my earlier post the dream sequence platforming segments were cool in concept, had a nice visual style and music, and were fun at points, but ultimately kind of got repetitive and felt like they got in the way when I just wanted to get out there and learn more about the characters or see what's next in the story. It's not a big problem, but I do feel like they could have been less frequent.
My biggest gripe with this game, for lack of a better term, is the final act when the game becomes less about relationships and intimacy, and instead almost abandons those aspects of the game to go on this kind of sudden "secret cult in a cave" adventure. It was kinda cool and I enjoyed it for what it was, but it wasn't at all what I expected or really wanted from this game. The whole time the game gets more and more intimate with the relationships you follow while you learn more and more about each characters' background, but then it just goes this sudden route of this occult murder mystery that at points felt like the game was jumping the shark for me and ends a bit abruptly.
I didn't hate that, but it just wasn't what I expected or hoped this game would be.
The game also didn't grab me emotionally nearly as much as I thought it would, especially after hearing other people's experiences with it. The personal moments characters have with each other were mostly quite effective and engaging, and all the themes of figuring out how life works were absolutely relatable, but I just thought there would be more, or that the game would do more with it.
It's still a good game. But it probably wouldn't show up on any of my favorite game lists.
I enjoyed a lot about it, like the art style, the exploration bits, the soundtrack, and a lot of the writing. I usually enjoyed the more intimate moments a lot when dialog tackled real-life problems in a very direct way and makes the characters come across as very real and believable people. Even when the dialog options during those moments were kind of frustrating at times and I found myself siding with the other party of the conversation rather than Mae a lot of the times, those were the best part of the game for me. With each start of a new day, I just wanted to hit up the daily routes in the city, check up on my favorite NPCs, and progress in the main plot.
Like I said in my earlier post the dream sequence platforming segments were cool in concept, had a nice visual style and music, and were fun at points, but ultimately kind of got repetitive and felt like they got in the way when I just wanted to get out there and learn more about the characters or see what's next in the story. It's not a big problem, but I do feel like they could have been less frequent.
My biggest gripe with this game, for lack of a better term, is the final act when the game becomes less about relationships and intimacy, and instead almost abandons those aspects of the game to go on this kind of sudden "secret cult in a cave" adventure. It was kinda cool and I enjoyed it for what it was, but it wasn't at all what I expected or really wanted from this game. The whole time the game gets more and more intimate with the relationships you follow while you learn more and more about each characters' background, but then it just goes this sudden route of this occult murder mystery that at points felt like the game was jumping the shark for me and ends a bit abruptly.
I didn't hate that, but it just wasn't what I expected or hoped this game would be.
The game also didn't grab me emotionally nearly as much as I thought it would, especially after hearing other people's experiences with it. The personal moments characters have with each other were mostly quite effective and engaging, and all the themes of figuring out how life works were absolutely relatable, but I just thought there would be more, or that the game would do more with it.
It's still a good game. But it probably wouldn't show up on any of my favorite game lists.
not recommended
literally cannot say enough about this game. everyone should play it in the fall. ultimate Vibes
Gameplay: Persona 1
Characters: Persona 2
Soundtrack: Persona 3
Story: Persona 4
Aesthetics: Persona 5
Characters: Persona 2
Soundtrack: Persona 3
Story: Persona 4
Aesthetics: Persona 5
This game is my SHIIIIIITTTTTTTTTTTTT
This review contains spoilers
how the fuck does the story end with them just shrugging off the fact that they just entrapped and killed a bunch of people and just go "lol lets jam"
this game has everything: talking animals, homosexuality, and existential dread! yay!
I loved the characters and the writing. Unfortunately the premise of “struggling at college teendult returns to economically depressed hometown and hangs out with high school friends” did too much psychic damage to me, due to Circumstances, and I will likely be unable to continue
Your enjoyment of this game will depend almost entirely on whether you can like Mae in spite of/because of her deep, deep flaws as a person. Excellent writing and excellent at creating a sense of place.
De lo mejorcito que he jugado nunca. La ciudad y sus habitantes son realistas y te los crees, con unas personalidades muy bien definidas en cada habitante. Mae es un amor y es un personaje con el que es muy fácil sentirse identificado y realmente sientes una conexión con ella y sus amigos. Crimes.
As a poor girl who also tried to escape the sticks it hit home real hard
This is how 2020 felt like
This game hits like a bus but like, in a good way? Idk, it has some of the best characters and writing I have seen in a video game.
I got a chance to demo this game as a stupid 20(?) year old back when I lived in Seattle. I was instantly charmed by the graphics, and just the simple act of getting to play as a cat walking on a wire.
The game is beautiful. When I did get a chance to play (and beat it) a year or so ago, I was mesmerized by the story, the gameplay, the graphics- every inch of this game was beautiful, and I knew I was lucky to be experiencing the story.
Please consider Night in the Woods. It's beautiful, and devastating, and there's nothing else like it.
The game is beautiful. When I did get a chance to play (and beat it) a year or so ago, I was mesmerized by the story, the gameplay, the graphics- every inch of this game was beautiful, and I knew I was lucky to be experiencing the story.
Please consider Night in the Woods. It's beautiful, and devastating, and there's nothing else like it.
I enjoyed getting to know the various residents of Possum Springs and getting to see how their relationships grew alongside Mae, the protagonist. Along with the art style and music of the game, I loved the subtle horror in some of the areas and the sense that something much darker was going on behind the scenes. Although that sort of leads into my main issue with the game: the buildup doesn't really payoff that well in the end and some of the choices you make as Mae aren't really choices whatsoever. Still, it's a really solid exploration game that can be played more than once.
BRIGA DE FACA MUITO BOM
really wanted to like this. charming visuals and characters. But after many hours the story hadn't moved anywhere and thus it wasn't worth enduring the lack of game play. Daytime game play was virtually non-existent, and the nighttime find-the-musician 'puzzles' were incredibly dull and frustrating.
My love and appreciation for this game is unexplainable, I'm just happy it exists, it resonates with me personally like no other experience does. The characters, the story, the lore, the soundtrack, PERFECT in what it is.
i liked this game a lot when i played it! thinking back on it the humour isn't exactly my cup of tea now but i think it was charming. really loved the art style of the game! the story was pretty cool too.
I think nitw is a near-perfect narrative focused side-scroller. The characters and storytelling are where this game really shines, but it looks and sounds amazing, too. Angus and Gregg are the best. Bite me. 💕 My partner and I play it every couple of years (every year is too soon) at Halloween. Sometimes I carve Gregg's face into pumpkins. I hugely recommend it to anyone looking for a chilled out spookfest.
This game is literally based on the economically crippled parts of Pennsylvania I grew up in, and it's fascinating and haunting until the final reveal. After that, it's just "pretty good."
Somehow deep and comfy at the exact same time. Play this game if you haven't already, and if you have MaeBea do it again sometime.
I was really into this whole world until you hit like three nights in a row where you get stuck in this tedious and boring dream sequence where you jump around on dark shapes set against a dark background to find musicians. Nothing interesting story-wise about this segment, just felt like bloat. NitW excels when it's not trying to be A Video Game but then those musician dreams happen, blech. Then the last act happens and... the story kind of goes over a cliff, imo? This is one of those weird games where I'll have to personally give it a mediocre score but yet heartily recommend everyone play it at least once.