Update Two Hundred and Forty-One: 13 October 2018

☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆

This month’s Spooktober theme gave me the push I needed to dive back into my ‘To Revisit’ pile and finish off Night in the Woods.

It originally came out February 2017, and I played it within a week of launch, and… it didn’t gel with me the first time around. I liked it, sure, I knew it was a good game, yeah, but I was too close to the main character - both young gals who left college to move back to our respective childhood homes, directionless and more than a little lost, both struggling with mental health - to really enjoy it. Beyond that, I had been in love with the Kickstarter trailer since I saw it three years prior - and, just like I do with EVERY James Bond credit sequence, I take the small taste of what it presents and run with it, imagining wildly what it could possibly be and hyping myself up for THAT. When it’s inevitably NOT that (how can it be?) I struggled with handling my disappointment. It took me most of the game to shake it off and just let the game be what it was, and my experience was still affected by it.

A year and a half of distance, though, has done wonders. Playing it again (with the free Weird Autumn update included) has been nothing less than a joy. Everything is better than I remember - jokes land better, the characters are deeper, the town feels bigger. I missed a LOT of shit the first time around, and finding it all has been a pleasure. I don’t typically do repeat playthroughs in quick succession, but I wanted to do it this time to truly wrap the game up. (I, unfortunately, can’t 100% clear it - the Demontower minigame is just too difficult for me to do. I just did everything else)

I’m able to relate to Mae still, just not as closely - I see where she’s at and see where she has still to go, and being kind to and empathize with her allows me to do the same to my younger self who had been too close to her. Her relationships with her friends, her parents, and different people in the town are really well done and interesting to follow through, and the whole game has a really unique atmosphere - nostalgia for something you were promised but never actually had. The themes the game explores - of dying towns, of adult responsibilities, of worlds out of your control and what you do despite or because of them - are affecting and pitch-perfectly handled. This game gave me the crystallization of my belief system - “I believe in a universe that doesn’t care and in people who do” - how can I not love it to death?

Are there still things in it that don’t work so well? Yeah, sure. The ending is stiiill a little bit of a let down, still a touch ‘well, that just happened’, falling a little short of the magnificent build up. For how beautiful the animations were, I wished there were more of them - there’s only a handful of expression animations in conversation, and it makes some really intense conversations fall a little flat, or read a little confusing, because the characters are standing and blinking like they always are.

Please, pick this game up! It’s certainly the season to play it.

Next up: Spooktober continues!

See you soon!