Night in the Woods is a game by all rights I should have liked, I wanted to like, even. 2 Months ago when I was utterly fixated on Pentiment I watched every interview and talk Josh Sawyer has ever given, kind of obsessively. It was from these talks that I got the recommendation to play Night In The Woods, cited as the main game inspiration for Pentiment, as well as Mutazione and Oxenfree. After Playing the game I can definitely see what he was talking about, the minigames, dialogue structure and format of the setting, even the subjects broached are all pretty similar.

And yet I find myself wondering why does Pentiment work for me so well and NITW really doesnt? The protagonist, Mae Borowski is in theory the most relatable character in fiction to my life circumstances in pretty much every way except for our gender. I also had a complete breakdown when I moved out and utterly crashed spectacularly at uni and came back to try and go back to the stability of home. I also struggle with becoming a "proper adult" and finding meaning in existential questions. I also dread seeing a lot of people here back home cause of embarassing shit I did and feel kind of stuck at times. I also wonder if Im holding back my friends who seem to be making something of their lives unlike me. I am also Bi. I am an atheist, and yet somehow with all of this said and done I found myself relating to Andreas Maler, a deeply religious german renaissance painter 100 times more than Mae.

That's not to say that relatability is the be all and end all of storytelling, but I felt as if in the case of NITW I was SUPPOSED to be relating to her somewhat. Shes just really kind of unlikeable for most of the runtime and of course being a videogame you have to actively aid her in being shitty and doing shitty things at times. I was ready to abandon this game at the 2 hour mark although apparently that wasnt enough of a fair shake so I kept pushing through hoping maybe something would happen beyond the standard coming of age stuff and angst. I can say now that I finished it that something did eventually sort of occur.

Im not slapping this game with a 0.5 cause even though I disliked it, and it takes way, way, WAY too long for it, some good moments eventually do happen in the second/third act. Like 4 hours in this game actually starts (I could have watched Lawrence of Arabia in that time) and we get some kind of intrigue. Some character moments get some actual fucking payoff and one or two lines finally managed to get a light chuckle out of me. I like the gay bear dude, and I also like Angus. And look, I like Wayward Strand, which is a game in which bugger all happens, but that game was full of sympathetic (and unsympathetic too) and interesting characters with lovely dialogue. Being narrative focused with little mechanics focus is FINE, but you are riding on that narrative to hold up everything else and man this dialogue. I really dislike this dialogue, nobody talks like real people; which is fair enough I suppose given they are anthropomorphic animals but this Webcomic from the 2010s type dialogue just poisoned everything else especially for the first couple of hours.

There is some light platforming but its kind of a waste of space. Especially the dream sequences that scream filler to me. At the end of it all, all the existential stuff is the payoff for the game but Ive honestly seen it all before tackled better elsewhere (well, in Pentiment for one thing but I guess thats cheating given the timeline). Nothing is really tackled with much depth and it just makes me scratch my head when I see reviews being like "this is the first time I had played a videogame that explored these subjects" and like theres no way to say this without sounding like an asshole but what? You need to play more videogames then. I love EEAAO but if this is how that movie looks to people who dislike it then I'm sorry for recommending it to people. I think I'm just done with media about positive Nihilism (and yeah I get it, the Null Symbol, you are very clever Mr/Mrs writer), its unfair to rag on NITW for this reason, cause its from 6 years ago now but I have to be honest with how I feel. The art style and sound design/soundtrack are good though.

If you've gotten this far into this horribly written, mess of a review I ask you consider the fact that my life is a mess, which is coincidentally why its weird that I didnt like this game.