This, much like Celeste and To The Moon, is another narrative-focused indie game that I’ve had on my radar for AGES. Tons of people I knew loved it, and I really didn’t have any reason to think I wouldn’t love it too, but it was still a task of getting off my butt and actually playing it XD. In my recent binge on a bunch of PC games, however, I finally made it to playing it (yet another game I got for free on the Epic Game Store at some point). It was a lot of fun playing it alongside my wife (for whom is this a favorite) over the course of a couple days off we both had~. It took me 10~12 hours (I had a lot of idle time, so hard to be sure exactly) to play through the English version of the game while doing every side activity I could possibly find.
Night in the Woods is the story of Mae, a 20 year-old on her way home from university. She’s not sure university is actually for her, so she’s decided to come back to her home town for a bit to clear her head about things and hang out around old familiar faces, and there are a lot of old familiar faces to see! Her best friend Gregg and his boyfriend Angus, her friend Beatrice, her parents, and a whole community await her in the sleepy Appalachian town of Possum Springs.
This is another game where I honestly hesitate to give much more plot summary than that (at the risk of making the game sound a bit boring), because so much of NitW’s appeal is just how well done the writing is and how well paced the story is. NitW is a story about individual issues, but about communities big and small too. It’s a story about how life just kind of sucks, that no matter how ready or unready you are, at any moment you can just get thrown a curve ball that throws everything into disarray, and you’re just expected to deal with that. From Mae herself to her friends to people she barely knows, NitW is very concerned with showing tons of different angles of how people deal with how things change, and especially how things just kinda keep getting worse. And why are things getting worse? Capitalism.
I had no idea about it going in, but I was very delightfully surprised at just how fiercely anti-capitalist this game’s narrative is. It does an incredible job of painting a picture, from a single person up to the entirety of the town, of how our modern society simply does not care about those not immediately valuable to the almighty dollar, and will readily leave behind in the dirt those who cannot fend for themselves. This is a story with a lot going on and a lot of layers to dig through, and I’m sure people much smarter than me have already spilled tens of thousands of words on the larger and smaller themes of this game, and honestly it’s not hard to see why. It’s honestly hard to only write about the story this little myself XD. At any rate, I’d heard this game was written super well, and it absolutely lived up to the hype for me in that regard.
The gameplay is a side-scrolling action/adventure game, but it’s far more on the adventure side of things. You go around town day to day, ending every day sleeping at your house, and you can platform around town as well as side activities with Mae’s super jumping powers. The general way you make days progress is by picking either Gregg or Beatrice to hang out with, but there are times that you need to engage in other things as well when the plot needs it. In the meanwhile, you can do all sorts of other activities with the denizens of Possum Springs if you take the time to get to know them. Walking past the same familiar faces and striking up conversations slowly helps bring Possum Springs to life for the player as Mae is filled in on the two-ish years of stuff that’s happened while she’s been gone. You don’t have to do most of that stuff, of course, but I’d certainly argue that exploring around town day to day is one of the most fun parts of the adventure, or at least it was for me~.
While I honestly have no complaints anywhere about the writing, I have some very minor complaints with the gameplay design, and its largely in the more game-y parts of things. This is a game that loves dark environments, like in the dream sequences, and on both my monitors (but especially my main one) there were lots of times where I could genuinely not see anything beneath me and I was platforming in effective total darkness. That won’t be a problem for everyone, sure, but given that the game has no internal gamma adjustments and changing the brightness of either monitor did nothing, it made already kinda pointless-feeling platforming segments feel even more frustrating.
Another thing to that point is the game’s insistence on a diegetic pause menu. Mae’s journal will fill up as she does various activities, and of course she can’t pull it out in her dreams or in a cutscene because that makes no sense. However, your options menu is reached via that journal, so if you’re trying to say, put the game back in windowed mode so you can drag it to your other monitor to make this dream sequence perhaps easier to see in, you’ll need to quit out of the game back to the main menu (resetting all your current progress in the area) to do it. Again, that’s a very me-issue, but it was enough of a problem that it’s hard to just completely pass it by here.
The aesthetics of NitW are very pretty. The colorful shapes and styles that the world and characters are drawn with almost give the game the look of a picture book come to life. Characters are delightfully expressive in both gestures and facial expressions, and it was very easy to see how so many of my friends love the cast of this game so much. The music is also very good too. Whether it’s the music underscoring a dream sequence or the song played during one of your band practice mini-games, all the music is fantastic, and it underscores the action at hand beautifully.
Verdict: Highly Recommended. While I may’ve had a couple small issues with how the game itself is designed, that didn’t stop me from enjoying the hell out of the final product. From its setting to its characters to its themes, this is a story that encapsulates so well so much of the struggle of the times we live in, and it does it masterfully. This is absolutely not a game you can afford to miss out on if you’re a fan of narrative-driven games.
Night in the Woods is the story of Mae, a 20 year-old on her way home from university. She’s not sure university is actually for her, so she’s decided to come back to her home town for a bit to clear her head about things and hang out around old familiar faces, and there are a lot of old familiar faces to see! Her best friend Gregg and his boyfriend Angus, her friend Beatrice, her parents, and a whole community await her in the sleepy Appalachian town of Possum Springs.
This is another game where I honestly hesitate to give much more plot summary than that (at the risk of making the game sound a bit boring), because so much of NitW’s appeal is just how well done the writing is and how well paced the story is. NitW is a story about individual issues, but about communities big and small too. It’s a story about how life just kind of sucks, that no matter how ready or unready you are, at any moment you can just get thrown a curve ball that throws everything into disarray, and you’re just expected to deal with that. From Mae herself to her friends to people she barely knows, NitW is very concerned with showing tons of different angles of how people deal with how things change, and especially how things just kinda keep getting worse. And why are things getting worse? Capitalism.
I had no idea about it going in, but I was very delightfully surprised at just how fiercely anti-capitalist this game’s narrative is. It does an incredible job of painting a picture, from a single person up to the entirety of the town, of how our modern society simply does not care about those not immediately valuable to the almighty dollar, and will readily leave behind in the dirt those who cannot fend for themselves. This is a story with a lot going on and a lot of layers to dig through, and I’m sure people much smarter than me have already spilled tens of thousands of words on the larger and smaller themes of this game, and honestly it’s not hard to see why. It’s honestly hard to only write about the story this little myself XD. At any rate, I’d heard this game was written super well, and it absolutely lived up to the hype for me in that regard.
The gameplay is a side-scrolling action/adventure game, but it’s far more on the adventure side of things. You go around town day to day, ending every day sleeping at your house, and you can platform around town as well as side activities with Mae’s super jumping powers. The general way you make days progress is by picking either Gregg or Beatrice to hang out with, but there are times that you need to engage in other things as well when the plot needs it. In the meanwhile, you can do all sorts of other activities with the denizens of Possum Springs if you take the time to get to know them. Walking past the same familiar faces and striking up conversations slowly helps bring Possum Springs to life for the player as Mae is filled in on the two-ish years of stuff that’s happened while she’s been gone. You don’t have to do most of that stuff, of course, but I’d certainly argue that exploring around town day to day is one of the most fun parts of the adventure, or at least it was for me~.
While I honestly have no complaints anywhere about the writing, I have some very minor complaints with the gameplay design, and its largely in the more game-y parts of things. This is a game that loves dark environments, like in the dream sequences, and on both my monitors (but especially my main one) there were lots of times where I could genuinely not see anything beneath me and I was platforming in effective total darkness. That won’t be a problem for everyone, sure, but given that the game has no internal gamma adjustments and changing the brightness of either monitor did nothing, it made already kinda pointless-feeling platforming segments feel even more frustrating.
Another thing to that point is the game’s insistence on a diegetic pause menu. Mae’s journal will fill up as she does various activities, and of course she can’t pull it out in her dreams or in a cutscene because that makes no sense. However, your options menu is reached via that journal, so if you’re trying to say, put the game back in windowed mode so you can drag it to your other monitor to make this dream sequence perhaps easier to see in, you’ll need to quit out of the game back to the main menu (resetting all your current progress in the area) to do it. Again, that’s a very me-issue, but it was enough of a problem that it’s hard to just completely pass it by here.
The aesthetics of NitW are very pretty. The colorful shapes and styles that the world and characters are drawn with almost give the game the look of a picture book come to life. Characters are delightfully expressive in both gestures and facial expressions, and it was very easy to see how so many of my friends love the cast of this game so much. The music is also very good too. Whether it’s the music underscoring a dream sequence or the song played during one of your band practice mini-games, all the music is fantastic, and it underscores the action at hand beautifully.
Verdict: Highly Recommended. While I may’ve had a couple small issues with how the game itself is designed, that didn’t stop me from enjoying the hell out of the final product. From its setting to its characters to its themes, this is a story that encapsulates so well so much of the struggle of the times we live in, and it does it masterfully. This is absolutely not a game you can afford to miss out on if you’re a fan of narrative-driven games.