Night In the Woods reflections

  I initially planned to replay the game entirely to have the best possible retrospective on it, but I don’t time to do that over the course of the break, so here’s what I’ve got:

Night in the Woods is a 2018 video game about anthropomorphic animals living in the decaying rust belt town of Possum Springs. It is probably the most character-driven video game I have played (yes, more so than Undertale or Deltarune) and it is functionally a Choose Your Own Adventure game with a traversable overworld and minigames. You play as Mae, an immature college dropout, well-intentioned force of chaos, and anthropomorphic cat who spends much of the game refusing to tell anyone, including the player, her legitimate reason from dropping out. Mae is at a very weird point in life, being a young adult who is too old to be a teen, but is functionally still treated as one, especially because she is still financially dependent on her parents. Over the course of the game, Mae matures somewhat, or at least realizes the consequences her actions can have. 

The game is funny, and sad, and has horror elements, but it’s principally about these four young adults in Possum Springs—the setting of the decaying rust belt town is fundamental to the story, and it serves almost as a character in itself. The game is good if you like existential horror, flawed protagonists, and finding little in-game secrets by exploring the town. It feels like every day there’s some new nook or cranny with a character to talk to, or hang out with, or a secret area that causes Mae to reminisce.You can go stargazing with Mae’s old teacher Mr Chazokov, and hear about your grandfather fighting the rich with his possible old flame, and end up on a random boat adventure where you get to collect weird junk, and you can hear your neighbour recite actually good poetry at the library.  

I would really recommend the game, but I also just want to talk more generally about more spoiler-y aspects, so I will include three non-spoiler screenshots I took from the game to serve as a break (I mean, I know no one is going to read this anyways, but if you are reading it you might already have heard of the game…).

Mae standing on a telephone wire in town.

Mae talking to Miss Rosa in the Trolley Tunnel

Mae talking to her friend Gregg at the Snack Falcon (fictional store chain) where he works. 

Let the spoilers commence! This is less a single cohesive essay than a bunch of thoughts.  

A disclaimer:

I am not the ideal player here. 

I am a fairly sheltered, naïve, somewhat immature middle-class kid who grew up in an English city, so I really do not know that much about coal towns, although I was in Leff US History, so I do know about things like company towns and scrip. The story, especially Bea’s story, touched me and made me more aware of the crushing mundanity of adulthood, and that not everyone has the same opportunities as I do. It might be different for you, or for someone more worldly or more mature, but I feel educated by Night in the Woods in a way that I don’t feel by other games, which isn’t to say that I should take it as an instructive primer on what living in a dying town is like, or what derealization is like, but I feel like the game was still educational, that people in this sort of situation can exist, and they have to keep going in the awful mundanity of it all. More broadly, I have no doubt that I’ll have fresh eyes for the game once I am older and more experienced, and, if I still have time to play games then (which I doubt I will), I’ll probably pick up on things I totally passed over playing as a teen.  

All of the main characters are so driven to escape Possum Springs (Gregg and Angus moving out, Bea’s desire to go to college, and her driving off to parties far away, and of course Die Anywhere Else, the assumption that Casey caught a train, the list goes on) but Mae needs to stay in Possum Springs for her own health’s sake. This ties her inextricably to the town, and it is what gives her the ability to sort of understand the cultists; neither she nor they can move on. 

Bea hangouts are the best. Many of them are more mundane than the hijinks and crimes Mae and Gregg get up to, but that grounding lends them credence, and it makes moments where you are able to do something, like making Bea laugh by discovering the mechanism behind the fountain that squirted people when they were kids, and then pretending to be God talking to her, feel that much more intense. The third hangout, where you are more or less stuck talking to her, unable to do anything material for her, gives you some inkling of an idea of how she must feel. I think playing through her route genuinely made me grow as a person, which is kind of a pathetic thing to say, but I do feel that way. 

Another thing I really like about the game is the spirituality aspect. The game repeatedly questions if God has abandoned us or does not care, usually offering the existence of Possum Springs’ decay and suffering as evidence. This is why I like Bea’s first hangout, Old Gods of the Fort Lucenne Mall, so much. Bea talks about thinking that God was up in the part of the mall that turns out to control the water fountain. When you find out what’s actually up there, it could seem like a reveal of no faith, but Mae is able to use the revelation to make Bea, who has been pretty downbeat the entire hangout, laugh. This ties back to what Angus says in his hangout, about believing in “a universe that doesn’t care, and people who do.”

The question of god is also raised by the thryy wyrd tyyns, and of course during the meeting with the Sky Cat. The Sky Cat is one of my favorite scenes in the whole game. I always look forwards to playing it. It’s so trippy, you expect answers, which you then don’t get. It’s disturbing and surreal and there is nothing else like it.  It makes me feel cold and awful. You are small and the music is wrong and “now I am closing the sky” and there is the sensation of everything ending and something larger than yourself which you will never completely know (see also: the mysterious Janitor, who might be able to teleport and is around to foreshadow during the play at the close of act 2). If you talk to Pastor K the day after dreaming of the Sky Cat, she tries to be supportive by being honest, because she’s a good person and she tries hard, but that honesty is exactly what Mae doesn’t want to hear. If the pastor herself can’t go a week without questioning her faith, then what god is there? The whole thing is pretty bleak and open-ended, but the conclusion of clinging to the people around you, because they are there, is of course the central idea of the game: “At the end of everything, hold on to anything.” 

Of course, this question of faith works pretty well with the cosmic horror elements, and it again makes us consider the question posed by the wyrd tyyns: the meeting with the Sky Cat seems to suggest that God is “uncaring but distant,” but if we interpret the horror in the mine to be a deity of some sort as well, then does it qualify as “roaming and vicious?” It certainly can’t roam, and as far as we know, there isn’t even certain knowledge that the sacrifices the cultists make to them work, although anything that can root Mae to the spot and commune with her in unknowable tongues while awake definitely has power. However, it does seem to be subservient in power to the Sky Cat, which would again push us towards the notion of an uncaring but distant God. 

Another message from the game seems to be that privilege is relative: Mae still has a easier life than Bea and Lori M. (who we can think of in some sense as still being a Bea young enough to have faith in Mae, although like present-day Bea her mother is already dead, she is similarly of lower social class and she is goth/emo) but Mae is still a first generation college student from a dying small town with undiagnosed mental health issues, and her father had past issues with alcoholism that may have caused him to abuse her and her mother. 

Mae vs Holden/Esther:

Mae, like Esther and Holden, ends up dropping out of school for mental-health related reasons (Derealization). Unlike Holden or Esther, she is not going to get a second chance to go to college. She made her hole and now she needs to sleep in it. There will be consequences that she cannot ignore the way she wants to, even as she is offered the option to claim she will “Never” die in shaky, intentional, harshly meant words, that can seem either like “badassery,” or denial, or incomprehension of her own mortality. Mae has fallen like Holden risked, the game taking place in Fall and a segment literally being called “The Long Fall.” Mae’s lack of second chance versus Holden can be explained more broadly as a phenomenon of the two characters’ different social classes, but Esther also had a second chance: in this case, we can argue that Mae’s arcs, whether she hangs out with Bea or with Gregg, force her to take accountability and eventually think about telling her parents why she came home. If Mae were able to “just” go back to college afterwards, then it might not only be unrealistic, but also make her arc seem less genuine by lessening the consequences. 

Much like The Catcher in the Rye, there isn’t some magical happy ending for Mae; the story ends with Mae preparing to tell her family why she came home from college. After this, she will probably have to get a job, something that is difficult in Possum springs. If you befriend Bea, you can’t magically “save” her from her tyrannical father, and you spend much of the time trying and utterly failing to be a good friend to her due to the gap between Bea and Mae’s maturity levels and living circumstances. However, Bea and Mae will plan to have a road trip together if they become each other’s “best available friends.” This won’t fix anything long term, but it gives them both something to look forward to and something to make existence more bearable, and if that isn’t “at the end of everything, hold on to anything” then I don’t know what is. Mae’s kind of sucky, but she cares, and she’s there. She is part of Bea’s anything.