My several years late review of Night in the Woods

Night in the Woods exist in that categories of games that are on an edge between being an interactive story experience and an actual game. You play as the character “Mae”, a girl coming back to her suburban hometown after dropping out of college her sophomore year. Going through the game you’ll pick dialog choices and make decisions that will guide the story in a handful of directions. The most “game-like” elements of Night in the Woods are probably the small mini-games triggered at different points of the story. Whether it is a Guitar Hero-esque mini-game while Mae plays a bit of bass with her highschool band mates, or a stealth game where you have to steal pins from an off-brand Hot Topic while trapeezing around the mall with an old friend, there are a multitude of small experiences that tie together the larger game. These serve as a way to keep the player active, interested, and engaged as the bigger story unfolds. For these reasons, Night in the Woods could be classified somewhere between an adventure game and a visual novel.

Who exactly the game is made for is a little unclear, but that appears fairly intentional. Naturally, someone who dropped out of college could relate to the main character in an immediately identifiable way, but the story is not restricted to those people. Anyone who has returned to somewhere they called home after being gone a while could easily see themselves in the plethora of colorful characters. The sadness of knowing that old friends have moved on with their lives, and the nostalgia of old haunts. This is a game about the characters though, and not the players. The player is there to experience this returning journey along with Mae, not to take control. In that sense, this game could be seen as a form of artistic catharsis for both the creators and the player. Watch and participate as Mae flounders in realizing that the relationships she had in highschool were not what she thought she was, and cry inwardly to yourself as you remember your own similar experiences.

The goal of this game is to experience one of two main branching story arks where Mae will either come to terms with a good friend creating a life for himself, changing in a good way, but in a way that keeps him from being the dependable stand-by friend that Mae always goofed off with. The other story-line involves Mae re-kindling a friendship as she realizes that she has some maturing of her own to do in the face of her friends already having “grown up”. This goal is achieved through picking dialog options and going to various places in the town at certain times, and the two major branching storylines allow for some modicum of replay-ability. The aforementioned mini-games add some flair, and there are unique mini-games to each story, but the primary goal is still accomplished by these story choices.

Night in the Woods is a good example of story-centric game design. Dialog choices heavily influence the later outcomes, making good use of the concept of “indirect actions” where the player has consequences to actions they may not have seen. There is little skill or strategy in the game (unless the player has a specific outcome in mind), it is designed much more to be something to be absorbed, not mastered. The game’s characters are all different animals, although primarily cats, alligators, cats, foxes, and the like. This abstract art paired with very believable dialog allows the player to more easily insert themselves into the world. The two strongest game-design tools in use in Night in the Woods are obviously the theme and the storytelling, as we have already discussed.

Let’s try and condense what Night in the Woods is. At it’s heart, it is a story about coming home, learning that just because you’re legally an adult does not mean that you’ve actually grown up. Mae and her friends exist in a fictional world that could easily be anyone’s hometown, while the art has a feeling of authenticity to it, staying simple but reveling in the “suburban-ness” of it all. The game’s art is incredibly consistent, invoking a paper cut-out vibe with strong contrast and subdued colors. You as the player can run, jump, and interact with Mae, and most importantly talk to others. Night in the Woods feels like an adventure game, but it also feels like home.

This article was written as part as my Game Design class at CU Boulder

Related posts:

Hey everyone this is my first blog post, I should probably start with some stuff about me. My name is Michael Matalavage, I am studying Media & Strategic Communications at Iona College. I am very…

Some look for God for redemption while others look for gratitude but some just look with skeptical belief- skeptical because they are unsure and a belief because they were told to do so. If we go…

I bet you know what I mean: I’m talking about those moments when you’ve tried everything you can possibly think of, you’ve run out of ideas, your caffeine supply is running low, your eyes are…