I wrote about this game on my blog in January 2020, here is the post:

I played Night in the Woods last summer and I haven’t stopped thinking about it since. It’s a video game in which Mae, a young anthropomorphized cat, drops out of college and returns to her hometown of Possum Springs. She reconnects with old friends, works on her relationship with her parents, and deals with past trauma. She and her friends also discover a conservative death cult, sacrificing those on the outside of society to appease an old god. At the time, Night in the Woods felt like it was holding up a mirror to my own life and I resonated with the hopelessness and apathy Mae felt. The further I get away from the game the more I understand that it is not just a reflection of my own life, but of society today. The game came out nearly 3 years ago, and in the time since the world seems to have become more and more bleak.

In Night in the Woods the player controls Mae and decides who she talks to and what she does with her time. Mae drops out of college early, seemingly ruining her chances of escaping Possum Springs and making her family proud. She hangs with her friends, each of whom are stuck in Possum Springs for their own reasons. Gothic alligator Bea works at the local hardware store to support her father, who lost his home because of funeral costs for his wife. Punk fox Gregg and his boyfriend, the quiet bear Angus, are trying to save money to leave Possum Springs. Gregg works at a convenience store, not making enough to leave anytime soon. Mae’s father works at the local grocery store, and constantly complains about his bosses not paying him enough for his hard work. None of the characters are happy with their lives in Possum Springs, and the only hope for a better future comes from leaving the town. This bleak situation becomes worse with the involvement of the cult.

Early in the game Mae finds a “Missing” poster for her friend, Casey Hartley, last seen walking away from the town on train tracks. Her friends believe that Casey left Possum Springs, disillusioned with the lack of prospects in the town. Later the cult reveals that they took Casey and sacrificed him, stating that no one would miss him as he was a dead-end loser. Rather than do their best to improve Possum Springs, the cult members took out those who didn’t have a future there. And these cultists aren’t strangers, they are townsfolk that knew Casey. The cult members know Mae, and Mae knows them. They kill and oppress their neighbors under the guise of improvement.

I can’t help but feel that Possum Springs is a microcosm of the United States. Our country does not have the best record of improving society, instead making it worse for many marginalized people and communities. Before I was born, Ronald Reagan cut taxes under the demonstrably erroneous idea of trickle down economics. Mental health hospitals closed, wages stagnated, and the rich became richer. His administration ignored the AIDS crisis, and their negligence caused hundreds of thousands of deaths. His administration introduced crack to African American communities and sold weapons to Iran to fund right-wing militias in Central America. George H. W. Bush started a war in Iraq, to be finished by his son. Bill Clinton signed the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, imprisoning countless African American men, particularly egregious after the drugs introduced by Reagan. George W. Bush started two pointless wars, and should be held responsible for war crimes. Experts estimate that over 400,000 Iraqi civilians died in the Iraq War. Barack Obama continued the wars, expanding into warfare with unarmed drones, piloted by young military members in Nevada deserts. His administration deported millions of immigrants, sending them back to countries that the United States helped destabilize. Now, Donald Trump continues to separate migrant children from their parents. His xenophobic, racist, misogynistic rhetoric has increased the amount of violent hate crimes in the United States. He is currently in the process of starting another pointless war, an exercise of military aggression that will not help the United States. People are homeless, dying from starvation and cold while forclosed houses lay empty and grocery stores trash all but the freshest, most visually appealing food. Privately-owned prisons use prisoners for slave labor. Citizens can’t afford to see doctors. We, as a country and as individuals, do nothing about it but continue to oppress, bomb, and marginalize.

The leaders of this country actively make our situation worse — and we vote for them. The citizens that voted for these terrible people and policies aren’t strangers, they are our neighbors. We live with them and work with them. I live in a particularly conservative town, and I know the people that I see at work, church, the gym, and the store probably voted for Donald Trump. I still don’t know how to reconcile my feelings about it. I can’t do what Mae did, and trap the cult in a mine. I won’t do what Ellen Degeneres did, and equate perpetrators of war crimes like George W. Bush as someone who only has different political beliefs. There is a moral difference.

The cult in Night in the Woods commits egregious acts of violence and control against people with no power in the town. Possum Springs was once a prosperous blue-collar town, filled with people who worked hard, were members of unions, and lived happy lives. After the mines closed and the unions left, the people of Possum Springs were left with nothing. Possum Springs is not unlike many blue-collar coal-mining towns in America, abandoned by their country. Displaced miners with few transferable skills are unable to work, and suffer medical problems from years of coal mining under negligent corporations. Possum Springs, like many American towns, feels like a shell of the town it once was, with no hope for the future. I don’t pretend to have the solution for the fictional city of Possum Springs; their story is supposed to be bleak and hopeless. However, the cult is not the answer. Making the town worse for marginalized citizens under the guise of an intangible concept of blessings from a dark god doesn’t help Possum Springs.

Scott Benson, the creator of Night in the Woods, writes, “[Night in the Woods doesn’t] simply depict people struggling to get by, but doing so in a world haunted by dreams of the future that never came, where even the barest hints that things could really get better, that things could really change, are seen almost as nostalgic.” When I was younger I was promised that anything was possible in the United States. As our leaders make the world worse, any improvements seem more and more impossible: Medicare for All? Apparently it’s too expensive; Green New Deal? Preserving the earth is too radical. Even owning a home seems too distant and impossible a prospect for me, a college graduate with student loan debt. I worked 30 hours/week my entire college career, and still couldn’t afford in-state tuition at my university. How can I begin to pay off my nation’s fiscal and moral debt caused by terrible leaders and policies when I can’t even pay off my education? Is it possible to improve the country? Yes. But I don’t think it will happen, I don’t know how to hope for change when hope feels nostalgic.

The tagline of Night in the Woods is “at the end of everything, hold onto anything.” I will continue to hold onto my family and friends. I will even cling to powerlifting and video games, trivial hobbies in this terrifying world, because they are something that can temporarily distract me from the atrocities I see and read about daily. At the end of everything, I will keep going, the weight of a lost future weighing heavily on my heart.