Why You Should Play “The Night In The Woods”

Lots of people do seasonal traditions to really feel the transition from one season to another. For some, it’s watching Harry Potter around Christmas time; for others, it’s replaying a beloved seasonal video game. Although “Night in the Woods” came out in 2017, this indie game for Switch and PC is still a beloved favorite for fall time. 

The short description of “Night in the Woods:” 

Part one: Cute! Little animals in the fall!

Part two: Wait, what the fuck!

Part three: Oh Jesus, what the FUCK?!

The story follows Mae Borowski, a recent college dropout who is moving back to her hometown of Possum Springs right in time for fall only to find that a lot has changed in her absence.

Mae is a well-known punk and menace for climbing on buildings and power lines, but also trying to be free of a mysterious incident in her past that she does not want to talk about, which ended with a kid in the hospital. 

Feeling aimless, Mae tries to reconnect with old friends only to find they are working full time in the small town. Not only that but one of her friends, Casey, has been reported missing for months. The first act of the game seems to encompass the depression of the lower and middle classes and the death of small-town America as corporations take over what were once homey shops. 

Mae finds mysterious things going on in her hometown while the others work: from a mysterious severed arm outside the diner to a hooded figure who seems to be taking someone, she urges her friends to join her in investigating. 

As Mae looks into the town’s dark past with the closed-down mines and the terrible secrets it hides, she also starts to have mysterious and vivid dreams.

These take on an otherworldly feel and show a representation of her mental health deteriorating with each dream. Yet, while the dreams seem random and dissociated from reality, they seem to be related to her investigation of the hooded figures. 

Eventually, Mae opens up about her mental illness, which has caused her to dissociate from reality, seeing everything and even people as “just shapes,” which became worse when she was away in college. This, in tandem with her increasingly absurd and upsetting dreams, leads her to believe that something is going on in the town that is deeper than what they have seen so far. 

“The Night in the Woods” has our protagonist exploring haunted houses, old graveyards, and eventually abandoned mines in search of what secrets they harbor. It starts to become more real as the group is attacked by hooded figures, but they press on in the hopes that they can find answers both to Mae’s other-worldly visions and what happened to their missing friend Casey. 

While Night in the Woods doesn’t rely on traditional body horror, violence, or jump scares that most horror games do, it is a perfect mystery to solve every fall. Night in the Woods takes a look at a subgenre of horror often overlooked: Cosmic Horror. 

Cosmic Horror is a more psychological type of scare that considers the place of all of humanity in the cold vastness of space.

Does anything we do really matter? Will we ever be capable of truly understanding? Are humans anything more than just bacteria under the lens of an uncaring god whose vastness cannot be comprehended? Cosmic horror often challenges our sense of what is reality and what is not real. Some have said that Cosmic Horror holds onto the idea that what we consider reality is actually a thin skin over a truth so alien, that merely attempting to understand it would cause madness, hallmarked by the idea of our own cosmic insignificance. 

It is clear that Mae Borowski is suffering through this cosmic torment as she struggles to come to grips with how she sees the world, but also how she perceives herself and the world that she lives in, eventually having difficulty parsing out the difference between her dreams and reality. Something ancient and powerful sleeps within Possum Springs, and only she is capable of seeing how it communicates through mysterious extra-planar visions. 

When you play “Night in the Woods,” you get a wonderful chance to explore the darker themes of mental illness, the decline of rural America, and the aimless feeling of starting to grow up and grow apart. All the while, you get an incredible story set in a colorful fall backdrop filled with mini-games while solving a mystery. 

The best part about “Night in the Woods” is that it has great value when you replay it, as you know more about Mae’s backstory when you start it again next fall and see people still apprehensive about her return from college. Further, it’s great to replay because there are multiple storylines you can follow. Will you catch up with your closest friend, or try to mend things with a friend who got more distant? This scenic and emotional game holds up well to the test of time, and I love the easy chemistry between a small punk like Mae and her rag-tag team who want to commit crimes and eat pizza, not expecting to uncover a yawning portal beneath the town to unfathomable madness. 

Featured image via Polina Tankilevitch on Pexels