I’ve actually beaten Night in the Woods over a month ago. I just happened to get busy with other things to never return and give a proper little write-up about it. Also, I never finished a second play through of the the game. Which gives me a perfect little in for a summary of my feelings towards it:

I don’t know how I feel about Night in the Woods.

At first, I hated the thing. I was pretty certain after about an hour that I was just going to have fuel for a lengthy diatribe about how crap the game is. I often feel my rants are my best pieces, so that disgust was fuel to keep going. But a funny thing happened the more I played. I… actually started to like Night in the Woods. Then, just as I was preparing a more praiseworthy post (and one likely a bit more dull) a strange thing occurred. I began to hate it again.

So I am the perfect definition of ambivalence.

But teasing out my impressions and organizing them into a coherent whole is what has kept me from writing about the game until now. Thus, I apologize if this review is all over the place. Much like the game, I never really settled on something. Unlike the game, I’m not going to shove in random guitar hero gameplay or strange little mini-games to break up the main experience.

But first, what is Night in the Woods?

What I expected from Night in the Woods was this: a touching little indie story about a college dropout returning home and trying to find her place in a crumbling, backwater town in a life that has moved on from her glory high school days she’s never managed to let go. And, in a sense, that’s what Night in the Woods is about at all.

It is kind of funny, however, as I think the personal story is where Night in the Woods really shines. It’s not really a story that gets covered a lot. I can’t think of college dropouts being a large trope by any means. And there’s adeptness in relaying the sort of troubled life that lead Mae Borowski returning home with little explanation other than a cryptic “things didn’t work out” offered to her mom. Her attempts to reignite relationships from her past are met with middling results. Gregg is trying to save enough so he and his boyfriend can escape the dying town as fast as possible. Bea has given up on life’s aspirations to run her family hardware store though Mae’s carefree squandering of all the things Bea never had are a clearly driven wedge between the two.

And needless to say, Mae is a mess in general.

This gets me into my initial dislike of the game. I don’t like Mae. I think you’re supposed to like Mae. She is, after all, the protagonist of the story and everything is filtered through her eyes. She is, however, a failure and this is made explicit from the moment you begin. Now if she were just a loser, I could probably handle it. But she’s… so damn quirky. It’s annoying. I hate quippy and quirky writing. It feels like a shortcut from having to develop any depth of character. Mae spends most of her time holding pointless conversations about… I can’t even remember anymore because most quirky writing is focused so much on talking about something off the wall that there’s never any meat to the discussion. It’s vapid writing, meant to amuse and satiate for the moment but holds so little value that it’s gone the instant it finishes.

It’s the written equivalent of potato chips with the added bonus of consuming too much leaves you nauseous.

So, I didn’t care for Mae. I didn’t care for her pointless rebellions. I didn’t care for her personal mortification over her prom night with Ted or Ben or whoever. I really didn’t care about her nebulous reasons for giving up on her future.

Had she died in the end, I would have crowed this apathy as being a masterstroke of writing. That she did not suggests I was meant to have a greater personal connection to the self described anarchist than she ever truly earned.

But while I’m torn on Mae’s character herself, I felt the relationships she had were the strongest points of the game. I was coming around to Night in the Woods—not because Mae ever develops into anything more than the weird loser you politely put up with at a party because a mutual friend foists her on you to have a few moments for herself but because the people she interacts with have far better stories than she. I think it was the moment when you go to Jenny’s Field with your mom that I was sold on praising the game. The individuals that put up with Mae are saints in their patience but also far more profound individuals than your avatar into the world. Mae’s mom is clearly trying her best to give her daughter everything that she never had while also frustrated with the fact that Mae is a problem child to the core. But her love for her weird little offspring is so well communicated, and so naturally too, that it’s hard not to like her. Likewise, Bea and Angus are excellent foils for Mae’s absurdity with their calmer and more grounded outlook. There’s a lovely little moment with Angus when you’re watching the stars and listening to how he was abused as a child that is done with such honesty. Or when Bea is discussing her dead mother that really brings into stark contrast the events which shaped these characters wholly absent from Mae.

There’s a bit of irony in that the more muted and understated characters have better excuse to be wacky misanthropists than Mae. The game is designed to be played through multiple times so I haven’t fully uncovered all the little stories but it’s certainly the supporting cast that does the heavy lifting in the character department. Instead of fully developing the relationship with Bea I spent more of my time with Gregg – the wacky enabler and co-conspirator to Mae’s juvenile delinquency. It was… annoying. With touches of sentimentality when the two would have brief but stark realizations that they’re not still thirteen and acting like irresponsible shitheels isn’t the way to continue on in life.

Gregg does have the briefest character arc in that sense, especially when he realizes that Mae is a bad influence on him and it’s more important for him and Angus to get out of Possum Springs than it is that he and Mae smash flourescent lightbulbs behind his work when he’s supposed to be manning the cash register. So my low tolerance for Night in the Woods quirk is compounded by the fact that I accidentally focused on the quirkiest route through the plot.

In my defence, however, Gregg was presented as Mae’s best friend.

At any rate, while the game is starting to take off with its character developments, it’s also laying the groundwork for it’s final disappointing note.

Well, that’s not true, that groundwork is there from the beginning, you just don’t notice it immediately because it is pretty subtle until your second play through.

I guess this is my spoiler warning.

Surprise! Night in the Woods is a Lovecraft story!

There’s a direct parallel to be drawn between Night in the Woods and True Detective. You can read how much I detest True Detective in the archives here but suffice to say that I wasn’t a fan of character drama with a side of super undercooked cosmic horror. In that regard, I would say Night in the Woods is more successful in interweaving its cosmic horror into its identity. There is the whole underlying theme of Mae’s country hometown slowly rotting away. All the little stories from townsfolk and the history it has gone through all lead to this inevitable and unavoidable rot that will suck in anyone that comes near it. And, of course, there’s the weird visions Mae has at night. They start as innocuous seeming dreams that eventually end with a conversation with some silhouette of a massive cat.

But since everyone is a furry in the game, I’m assuming the shape of the cat is meant to be meaningless.

Thus, it isn’t really surprising when you run into the midnight cult in the bottom of the abandoned mine. You’ve been subtly primed to expect some sort of supernatural or nefarious aspect to the whole “ghost” event that Mae spends the latter half of the game obsessed over. So I wasn’t surprised to discover a nondescript secret society of country townsfolk kidnapping people to sacrifice to their Black Goat in order to maintain order and prosperity to their dying towns. I had predicted that after a couple of days and the conversations about Mae’s missing friend Casey.

I was disappointed with how disappointing that mystery is, however. The supernatural abilities of the cult leader are mostly there to explain such pressing questions like “how could he jump over a fence.” And you mostly stumble into the cult rather than truly digging into unearthing their existence and motivation. It’s there, especially in the old newspaper clippings, but it all feels like an aside more than anything else.

So clearly the focus is meant to be on Mae if it’s not the plot. But Mae doesn’t actually grow from this experience. When the gang confront the cult at the bottom of the mine, at Mae’s “lowest point” in the story, Mae herself is just a little woozy from being shot and disoriented from the Black Goat singing at her. There’s a build up that is entirely wasted at the reveal. And the gang’s resolution to the conflict is to literally kick the cult leader down a hole when he refuses to let them leave then drop some dynamite in the old well hoping that resolves the problem. It feels… rushed and under cooked. Like they needed a conclusion to the story though the story was pretty meandering and skimp in the first place.

I’m really disappointed that the solution wasn’t to willingly sacrifice Mae to the Black Goat in the hopes that it would end the cycle (possibly fuelled by the fact I simply wanted to pitch Mae down the pit – but at least it would make her life have value). As it stands, there’s no earned catharsis here. The cult even let the kids going knowing that the truth would sound too outlandish to really threaten their plans. So to have the confrontation with the cult leader shortly after as they’re trying to exit is even more forced. Thus the game even robs the alternative promise of horror that the youths, despite knowing the truth, are powerless to stop the evil cult because they don’t know their identities and no one would believe them.

There’s a happy ending but it’s as hollow as Mae’s character.

My final point of complaint is that I’m not even sure if Mae’s character flaw – ostensibly uncontrollable rage – is in part fuelled by the Lovecraftian horror or not. I’m normally a big fan of ambiguity but there wasn’t really anything to suggest that was the case and it was more a sense I got from trying to pull some meaning from all the cosmic horror elements than anything else. Perhaps if that were the case then there remained the argument that Mae’s insanity was assured just as strongly as Possum Spring’s decay but Mae even admits she feels so much better after dropping tons of dynamite and potentially murdering three fifths of the town the night before.

And that no one seems to notice a large chunk of the adult population missing the next day is pretty bizarre.

Thus, I’d say Night in the Woods is a peculiar beast. It’s one of those few experiences with both a weak beginning and a weak end but a strong middle. Generally speaking you want the opposite: to start and end with a bang. Most video games, at the very least, manage a strong start and middle and flop on the end.

Night in the Woods will make you question your purchase, let you fall in love with the game then make you regret the whole experience at the very end. Much like Mae’s drinking party in the woods that one night.