Night in the Woods (2017)

I'm of two (or more) minds about this game. It's mostly a very personal game. It has great characters, believable personalities, interesting and varied dialogue. It also, however, has minimal interactivity, makes the player run back and forth aimlessly a lot around town (and in dreams) and is lacking in progress indication.

The touches of cosmic horror in addition to personal angst are somewhere between chilling and genius.

Night in the Woods is a very specific game for a very specific audience. At first glance, it’s a cutesy adventure game featuring anthropomorphic characters with minor platforming elements. On closer inspection, Night in the Woods is a game that addresses depression, anxiety and the struggles of living in a small town. This indie game manages to punch above its weight and delivers a story with some serious emotional impact. Night in the Woods is far from perfect. The platforming sections are too basic to be challenging and too long to be engaging. There are some odd technical quirks that I found annoying. And lastly the story as a whole can feel disappointing at times as it tries to weave in several disparate plot threads in the finale.

You play as Mae. Mae is a snarky sarcastic 20 year old who recently dropped out of college for unknown reasons and returns to her small town of Possum Springs. It becomes quite clear that Mae doesn’t want to talk about her past and instead just wants to crash at her parent’s place, see her old friends and act like an irresponsible teenager. The problem is that everything in Possum Springs has changed while she was away. Her friends have grown up, have full-time jobs and plans for the future. Her parents are struggling with debt, stressed out of their minds and yet have to put a brave face in front of Mae. The town itself is transforming, Mae’s favorite restaurant is closed, people are leaving in droves and townsfolk are struggling to find jobs. Most of the game centers around Mae learning about what happened to Possum Springs as well as trying to find herself again. I mention “most of the game” because there is a separate plot thread involving the mystery of a severed arm that I think does a disservice to the story. To talk more about this plot and how it is handled would ruin the story. But to keep it brief, I found its execution done poorly and diluted the impact of the best parts of the game.

This will sound very weird but Night in the Woods plays a lot like the recent Persona games if they were only the social sim parts. Each day, you wander around town, talk to folks and play mini-games like a dungeon crawler named Demontower, stealing pretzels from a food stand or looking through a telescope. The day ends with Mae choosing which friend to hang out with. After that Mae stumbles upon a dream sequence where there is some light platforming where Mae needs to find four musicians to wake up. The final act is determined by which friend Mae hung out most. There is also a handy notepad which keeps track of every character Mae meets as well as drawings that is a rough representation of their identity.

Night in the Woods despite being a very small game has an excessive amount of loading screens. The game is not graphically intensive, yet there are loading screens between every level. The most egregious example I can remember is a window that Mae can sneak into by jumping on the rooftops. Once Mae reaches the window, there is a loading screen where you control Mae’s paws to open the window. And then there is another loading screen to enter the window. While it doesn’t sound bad on paper, imagine doing the same thing over 4-5 days. It’s kind of astonishing that the entire town of Possum Springs is only 5 levels large yet there is a need to have a loading screen between each of them. Even for an indie title, there is no excuse for this kind of technical deficiency. The game could have benefited from a quick travel system to bypass these cumbersome loads. I also had issues running the game in full screen because the game would suddenly lag and hitch. After consulting the Internet, uninstalling and installing multiple drivers, trying to play with/without a controller I could not figure out whether it was my PC doing this or the game itself. I eventually resorted to playing the game in windowed mode.

While it sounds like I’m dour of Night in the Woods, that is far from the truth. Night in the Woods manages to hit exceptionally hard especially if you are familiar with living in small-town Americana. The game talks about malls becoming deserted, young people leaving for cities and jobs becoming obsolete. The game also talks about the people who choose to stay in town, their mental state as well as their struggle for survival. I haven’t even gotten to talk about Mae and her story of being the first one in the family to go to college and dropping out due to psychological stresses. The parallels between Night in the Woods and real life are deliberate and their impact will hinge on your familiarity with these issues. Night in the Woods is not for everyone. This is not a game where you earn points or shoot people. This is also not a very happy game, despite its looks. It is a commentary about real life situations, which doesn’t sound very fun to play but is very important to experience.

Night in the Woods is extremely my shit, and I knew that it would be before even playing the game. I love adventure games - the more casual, the better! - and the animation style is absolutely gorgeous to me, to the point that halfway through, I was considering if I might one day get a Mae tattoo. But Night in the Woods' story of loneliness, uncertainty as to one's place in the world, love-hate relationship with one's hometown, struggling with maturity and a general sense of loss and malaise towards the world really drew me into a story that I found quite special.

I believe it's Mae's mother early on that says something along the lines of: life is about deciding who we want to spend the few hours a day we're given with, and that's a big part of Night in the Woods first three chapters. Even though I don't think there's any player control as to what people think about you, I tried my best to balance my time with friends in order of importance. If Bea said she was busy, I'd hang out with Gregg, even though I knew I had the option to hang out with either. I tried to take their lives into consideration, which I realize is kind of nonsense.

One of the Night in the Woods' greatest gifts is its sense of humor, as this is one of the funniest adventure games I've played since the old LucasArts days. The way everyone speaks here is hilarious, and I found the pauses and awkward glances during conversations to only heighten the brilliance of the writing. This is a game I plan on playing again solely so I can hear conversations I missed the first time around. There's so much to this script that I missed only playing this once and I can't wait to explore the town of Possum Springs again and see what else their is to discover.

Which brings me to some of the flaws I had with this game. Night in the Woods is told through chapters, but there's no way to go back and play over sections again. I'd especially love to play chapters where I'm given an option to hang out with one of two people and see what I missed, instead of having to play the entire game over again to see the variations.

While a large theme of Night in the Woods is frustrations with one's hometown, I did feel like playing the same area of the game over and over was almost too repetitive. I felt like I had to make sure to meet the same people, explore the same area to see if anything had changed and just see what slight variations were made from day-to-day. I'm not entirely sure how, but I wish the game had found a better way to explore this town, without feeling like you're just doing the same things every day.

I also find that Night in the Woods puts far too much weight in the fourth chapter, a segment which has to explain all the mysterious, weird, personal and psychological aspects of this game, and I don't know that it all comes together all that well. The entire chapter mostly feels like a giant info dump, much of which doesn't make a ton of sense. And while I know the more mystical problems are tied into Mae's personal problems, I never quite felt like the game found a great way to combine these two aspects into a story that 100% worked for me.

But even with these problems I have with the ending, I can't wait to play Night in the Woods again, and I'm even planning on buying the eventual Limited Run Games physical copy, if it ever comes out. I also can't wait to see where the developer Infinite Fall goes from here, as I imagine they'll only improve as storytellers. Night in the Woods is like 80% a great game for me, and I can't wait to see what they do when they get to 100%.

Night in the Woods is not a great adventure game. It is however, a fantastic piece of art that brings its story too close to my home for comfort, and has given me an experience that I can't in good faith criticize to that great an extent, despite how heavily flawed it is.

It's defined by its aesthetic generally, the cozy but melancholic autumn colors that bleed through the characters and storyline, circling around nostalgic wants of a past that has left or decayed long ago. Each of the characters presented struggle with their own way of finding a future for themselves, or even their identity. Bea tries to find a place to belong as well as deal with her own struggles, and Gregg and Angus ponder in their own way about where their future should go. It's unfortunately not paced as well as it could (the fact that it's awfully presented that you can only complete one of the character stories at a time is shitty), but each of them are told with such powerfully lifelike dialogue and very natural prose.

The story allows the characters and the town to grow and be further fleshed out as you walk up as Mae, the titular disgruntled and tortured MC. It fumbles over itself in the last act, and honestly leaves this game with a super unsatisfying end, but retroactively I can somehow tolerate that. Because, even despite the story fucking up and failing to capitalize on Mae's arc, it left me with enough heartwrenching stories to ponder over and feel strongly attached to each of the characters here.

I should also mention that NitW also offers a super good retro game to play as well in-universe, with Demontower. It's actually a rather competent 2d action game, with some good enemy and boss design. It came as a big surprise to me that even if you're bored of the gameplay, you have something legitimately fun to play rather than just to read.

Overall, despite its incredibly flawed structure and end, I can't recommend Night in the Woods enough if my description of what the game is about even slightly piques your interest. It's an incredible journey that encapsulates the mental struggle of growing up, depression, and dealing with changing times during economic crisis. (8.5/10)

finished NitW the other day and it still sticks with me, largely in the context of other games i've played recently, chiefly rdr2. i think part of what i loved the most about NitW was that it placed me in the shoes of a character whose motivations often felt foreign to me (despite being highly relatable) and forced me to choose actions i was not really all that into, but did so in an incredibly believable way. In contrast to RDR2 that i've already described largely as a slog after chapter 3, it didn't take too long to "inhabit" the character of mae, to live her daily life, to explore everything out there and see things through even if i would have mostly done things much much differently.

likewise, the pacing and structure of the game really sells the idea of mae's life overall: days come and go, you have a couple of things you look forward to every few days, you hang out, you're largely aimless, you still go about things and just keep on carrying on. where rdr2's "life simulator" felt like it was pushing me to experience a certain rhythm of life undercut by a weird inevitability, NitW begins with a weird feeling and lets you drop into a sort of daily cadence to make sense of it all.

sort of incredibly, i felt a strong kinship with the surrounding cast. they're all fleshed out incredibly well, not just in explicit story, but in their self-consistent motivations and actions.

probably the one gripe i have with the switch release is that the loading screen goes for ilke a second and a half too long. it really cuts into the groove you sometimes hit. beyond that, great story that deeply explores motifs from Gone Home and Edith Finch but in a more playful and somewhat less contrived way. love both those games, but NitW is really on some other level even though it shares lots of dna with them.

Night in the Woods is a game that can (and will) be perceived as a painfully repetitive experience. At the same time, it's an engrossing, superbly well-written story, set in a world that's feels authentic, full of unique characters that truly sell you the illusion that that world exists, that its town and its citizens could ring very close to your own home (save for the anthropomorphic beings, that is).

At its core, Night in the Woods plays like a side-scroller, set in the town of Possum Springs. You play as Mae Borowski, a 20-year-old young adult with a very, very troubled past and personality. Also, she's a cat. Every character in this world is personified by an animal. Anyway: she returns to her parents' place after dropping out from school, and tries to reconnect with some old friends. This is where the game drops you off: in the middle of an uncertain period of Mae's life. Why'd she drop out of college? What's next for her now? These are the sort of things you'll try to figure out as you play.

Truth be told, there's not much you can do in this world besides jumping around and talking with people. A mini-game is thrown in every once in a while, but the meat of the game can be summed up like this: you wake up, run around town, talk with a bunch of people, come home, sleep, and repeat. As such, it's easy to understand how this gameplay loop might be off-putting to some people.

It's in the interaction with these people and their stories where the beauty of this game lies. In essence, your enjoyment of the game largely depends on how invested you are in its characters and their struggles. Aside from some... let's call it mystic elements that crop up around midway through the game, this is a story that's heavily grounded on the mundane, everyday lives of everyday people, dealing with their everyday problems, worries, as well as their everyday hobbies and escapades. The brilliant dialogue, writing, and the meaningful interactions you have with every character you encounter somewhat make up for the overall repetitiveness of the game.

In the end, while Night in the Woods might not be for everyone, it's uniqueness is undeniable. While there's not much to do in the game's world, few games take a spin on the mundane - yet complex - aspects of the everyday life of a troubled young adult. And maybe that's why I found it so interesting.

Night in the Woods is one of the best video game experiences I've had in years. This game will be the yard stick against which I measure all the dreary, low-saturation, "story-rich" indie darlings that are crowding my queue. In the future I will eschew the star-rating system entirely and instead grade games based on what percentage of each I enjoyed as much as Night in the Woods.

The comparison is a bit unfair to dreary, low-saturation, "story-rich" indie darlings. Night in the Woods is not trying to be dreary and the game is brimming with colour. However, the rich story sometimes requires the player to proceed drearily through a dimly lit environment, and, when it does, Night in the Woods is altogether better at this aesthetic than all the Limbos and Typomans of the world--almost as if it is emotionally satisfying to provide the player with a feeling against which to contrast melancholy.

The comparison is unfair in other ways. Night in the Woods looks like a platformer but plays more like a visual novel. The player cannot fail to complete the game except by failing to play it. There are challenging gameplay elements if you want them, but these are optional. In most of the ways the game thinks of as important, it would be more fair to compare it to a season of a TV show.

And along this line, Night in the Woods still stacks up favourably. The characters all ooze personality. It is easy to believe in them, in their relationships to each other, and in their development and trajectories. The story is not complicated but is surreal enough to keep the player from guessing where it's all going. Every scene you play through has some purpose, either as a moment for the characters involved or to the development of the larger plot. Modern television sometimes forgets that each scene ought to serve some function now that run-times are virtually unrestricted, but this is death for a video game since the player always needs to be given some reason to be in the setting.

Night in the Woods is probably not for everyone, or even for me all the time. The sensibility of the characters is, perhaps, a little particular. I like 20-somethings who have non-stop in-jokes with each other and are hopeful about the future despite their burgeoning disillusionment with the institutions of modern society, but if that kind of dialogue grates on you then you're going to have a bad time. I found playing Night in the Woods to be relaxing. The fact that the game did not enforce any sort of minimum gameplay competence to progress was refreshing. It was a nice break from my own life. But if you're looking for satisfaction from defeating a challenging scenario, then this is not the place to find it.

The game is not that long--I see 10-12 hours quoted as the standard play time--but I'd recommend against binge-playing through it. Most of the game takes place across the same half dozen screens in town, and it can be repetitive to keep checking the same places over and over. This is also a "philosophical" game and for maximum effect you want to give yourself some space to absorb whatever you've just played through. I found completing one or two game-days per session was ideal.

I could entertain a few nitpicks. I feel the story drags a little bit around the 3/4 mark, when you know enough about all the characters to want to move quickly towards the conclusion but are still able to explore all over the town (but I should note that doing this exploration is totally optional; the player can always just choose to advance the main plot by speaking to the right person, and who to speak to is always perfectly clear). Conversely, there is a moment near the end of the game--difficult to discuss without spoilers, let's just say it's right after the events in the woods, when you're put back in Gregg and Angus' apartment--which I thought could have used a lot more space to land before resolving the thread. I have some mixed feelings about the way the story is wrapped up--the main plot has a whodunnit feeling to it which is not paid off. But my concerns about these things really stem from the fact that I cared a lot about the events leading up to the conclusion. You can't ask for more.

I'm moving on for now, but I fully intend to come back to Night in the Woods in the future to see how other possibilities play out depending on who you hang out with and to revisit the story with the benefit of knowing where it all goes.

Played on the Switch.

I went into this game with no expectations and not knowing what it was even about. I found it absolutely enjoyable. The graphics are so charming and the use of colors was mesmerizing. The only thing better was the games music and audio that are a treat for the ears and really creates atmosphere.

Playing this game reminds me a lot of what being young used to mean. There’s the thrill of adventure as you set out first time into the world, the unknown. A feeling I rarely feel now at 35. It reminds me of the feeling of kinship, being close knit in a group of friends and facing the world together. All of this evokes special feelings and memories that I have not experienced in ages and for that, this game is amazing.

Also with youth there are questions about life, the future and other unknowns. This is one part of youth I don’t miss and I’m glad to have left those feelings behind.

In short this game transported me back in time emotionally. I don’t think there are many games that can do that.

There is going to be some high bias with this review for sure - for someone who grew up in a small town and had bittersweet feelings about leaving everything behind and ending up coming back, Night in the Woods touches in a place no game has really gotten down yet. The characters make you laugh, feel sad, feel warm, and there's a strong connection to even everyday activities.

That definitely comes in handy, because otherwise Night in the Woods would be a bore. The game is certainly repetitive, having our main character Mae wake up constantly in a town she left behind with problems of her own and problems with her friends. It's all done lovingly and with enough dialogue and little action segments and mini-games behind every corner to keep it from anything but boring.

Things definitely get spooky and surreal, and the plot goes into sufficiently interesting story by the latter half. The game is pretty much talking and messing around with whatever you can, with a strong amount of nonlinearity, with people to hang out with, places to discover, and people to meet regularly.

For an adventure game, it's definitely less on the abstract puzzle side and more just looking for secrets and doing a bit of action, neither of which overstays their welcome and the former definitely compelling enough to make this game even more of a treat.

I'm still waiting out this year of 2017, but Night in the Woods is definitely one of the best adventure games of the year, and few touched my heart the way it has. It really does feel like coming home.

I had a chance to spend a couple hours playing Night in the Woods last night. And it is already exceeding every expectation I had for it. It is wonderfully designed and thoroughly enjoyable. Although it's is a point and click adventure game at heart, it is also much more.

Set in the small home town the protagonist Mae, the game centers on her story as a recent college dropout. Beginning with a return to her home town of Possum Springs, to her family and her high school friends, Mae's story delves into themes such as local unemployment, crumbling industrial, civil and regional infrastructure, and the general malaise of a young woman not quite sure of her next move in life. The game is beautifully designed and animated, providing a softer edge to some of the main themes of the game.

Night in the Woods provides more than a simple point and click adventure, with the incorporation of mini-games that fit with the themes and actions of the game (mild spoilers ahead). One of the first is a Guitar Hero style rhythm game, as Mae picks up her base for a band practice with her friends for the first time since leaving home. Now I suck at Rhythm games, so I found it a bit difficult. Others might find it a breeze. Nonetheless, it was a fun and interesting way to incorporate story with game play mechanics (Update: it looks like Kotaku has a write up on the rhythm game).

Another mini game takes the form of a dungeon rogue-like on Mae's laptop called Demon Tower.

Last night I spent about an hour playing Night in the Woods proper. And then I spent at least another hour or more playing Demon Tower. You start on the first level, clearing out the floor, searching for a key, and fighting a level boss. I made it four or five levels before I forced myself to take a break for the evening. Demon Tower is very simple. You are limited to one attack, one dash (with cooldown) and nine units of health. As you progress in defeating level bosses you gain an extra unit of dash (you can see in the image above that I have five units of dash by my fourth or fifth level). However you also loose a unit of health, lowering the total overall number of times you can take a hit. Also as you progress, enemies gain additional attack abilities, from armor to the ability to fire multiple projectiles. The game clearly borrows from other games like Hyper Light Drifter, Titan Souls and so on. It'f fun and pretty addictive, and I can't wait to jump back in. All this, and it's merely a mini-game within the main game.

I am thoroughly enjoying Night in the Woods. There is an overarching storyline that is already intriguing and hints at a potential mystery to unravel. I am excited to see what the rest of the game has in store and what other mini-games await me as I continue. I feel pretty confident in saying, even this early into it, that this game is well worth picking up.