The characters may not be real, but every word they spoke lifted off the screen and hit me in the chest. It’s that same feeling of being understood that I mentioned in my piece on anxiety that made this game feel so welcoming. We tend to play games to get away from our bogus mortgages, our lost loved ones, or missing pieces of ourselves, not embrace them- but that’s what I loved about Night in the Woods. Games don’t tend to do that primarily because it’s an incredibly bleak path to tread down.
Every character interaction in this game felt so real, and spoke to something either I’ve directly dealt with, or my friends or family have dealt with, and that’s not a path I’ve really seen many games venture down. Characters openly confront concepts like dealing with death, the inability to find stable work, getting screwed over on your mortgage, and what it’s like having to leave pieces of yourself behind once you have to start “growing up”. These are just the four main characters, and so long as you take the right opportunities in game, you can interact with even more characters in the town who face entirely unique problems of their own. Gregg and Angus are a gay couple who feel ostracized in the small town they grew up in, and work themselves to the bone in an attempt to move to a town with a more openly queer atmosphere- even if that means moving to a less than safe, but affordable, neighborhood to do so.
Bea has been forced to take over her family’s business upon her mother’s passing, unallowed to live the typical life of a college teen and burdened with financial troubles, instead of which boy she should date. Mae, the main character, struggles with a mental illness that caused her to drop out of college and now haunts her dreams, making every moment of her life a fight on its own. Night in the Woods is a game with a colorful cast of 20-something year old characters who all face different struggles with adulthood. It’s a game that not just “gets me”, but represents me, and the way many people I know feel- and does so in glorious fashion. Since its release on February 21, I’ve been completely enthralled by the world the game takes place in, its characters, and a story which seems to so closely mimic the stories of myself, my friends, and even my family. I’ve been talking about Night in the Woods for a while now, starting with my coverage of the supplemental games back in January, and I’ve been dying to talk about it even more.
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