About an hour into Night in the Woods, a modern adventure game from a small team called Infinite Fall, Mae Borowski reuintes with her high school bandmates for practice. Since she’d left for college, their drummer—Casey—had disappeared, and their guitarist and singer, Gregg and Angus, had recruited another old classmate named Bea to take both his parts and Mae’s absent basslines. Now, after dropping out and returning to her economically-depressed hometown, Mae picks up her bass and tries to strum out the part to a song—written while she was gone—called “Die Anywhere Else.”
It’s those small moments that allow Night in the Woods to capture a place, a moment, an atmosphere, better than any game I’ve ever played. And rather than focus on one of its many subjects—its small-town Americana setting, its touches of Gothic literature and cosmic horror, its main character’s struggles with mental illness—it deftly weaves every single thread together into a stunning portrait of a homecoming in modern America, elevated by its brushes with the supernatural yet grounded in its focus on characters and their relationships. Its tagline reads: “at the end of everything, hold onto anything,” and over its eight-or-so hours of dialogue-building, platforming, and puzzle-solving, Night in the Woods engages with both the necessity, and the danger, of that idea. And that all begins with Mae’s homecoming to her storied yet dying hometown of Possum Springs.
If Possum Springs has a single analog in modern American fiction, it would be the town of Lakeside from Neil Gaiman’s American Gods. And in fact, Night in the Woods in general carries more than a hint of Gaiman’s work—eerie yet captivating, grounded yet always with another mystery up its sleeve, the game creates the same expressive and immersive atmosphere that makes novels like American Gods and Stardust so captivating. Yet here, it marries that atmosphere with a setting yanked straight from the national dialogue—a small, working-class town overtaken by automation and destroyed by the march of technology, filled with people just trying their best to get by. Yet at the same time, the game’s characters never feel one-note—even the ones that only appear sparingly over its week or so of plot. Selmers, an aspiring poets, gives Mae simple rhymes every day from her front step. Then, late in the game at their library, she unleashes a stunning piece titled “There’s No Reception in Possum Springs,” condemning those who’ve stolen her dreams. Here’s the ending:
“Money is access / access to politicians / waiting for us to die / lead in our water / alcohol and painkillers / replace my job with an app / replace my dreams of a house and a yard / with a couch in the basement / ‘The future is yours!’ / … / some night i will catch a bus out to the west coast / And burn their silicon city / to the ground.”
At that moment, after hours spent wandering through the streets and rooftops of a once-prosperous town, its decay and loss permeating even the game’s brightest moments, that poem hit like a gut-punch. Moments like that—moments of rebellion, of anger, of contemplation and longing—are what give Night in the Woods its fire: what allow the game to weave true authenticity and power into its images of Rust Belt America and the struggling, working-class people that call it home. For a game that styles its characters as woodland animals—cats, bears, foxes, birds, mice, crocodiles, dogs—it understands the dynamics of its setting better than any of the overblown thinkpiece written on that post-industrial crescent over the past year.
But that—its art style—is where the game begins its ironclad commitment to its main character and the conflicts, struggles, and privileges that govern her life. Mae Borowski is twenty years old when she returns to Possum Springs—arriving at the bus station late at night to find only an old janitor fixing the broken doors. Her parents had mixed up the date; instead of picking her up that night, they’d thought she’d be coming home the next. So instead of a comfortable ride home, she takes a shortcut through the woods that surround the town—tutorializing the game’s platforming mechanics—and finds a place far different than the home she’d left.
That the game conceptualizes those changes—her friends now have jobs they have to take care of, her town’s old stores and restaurants have shuttered for the final time—in the design of its characters is a brilliant yet understated touch. It never explains its characters’ animal representations, but it doesn’t have to; its beautiful, geometric art and simple character designs are just one more piece of that omnipresent, overpowering atmosphere, matching the strangeness of returning home with the subtle oddness of seeing animals in the place of people. The game’s music drives that atmosphere as well—from the songs Mae and her friends play at band practice to the pieces that accompany any of Night in the Woods’ many minigames or challenges, they all give the town a joint sense of novelty and familiarity. At first encounter, Possum Springs is strange; by the end, you know its streets and buildings like the back of your hand.
But Mae has her own problems as well—a history of depression and derealization that’s slowly revealed through dialogue and conversations with her friends and family. At its core, Night in the Woods isn’t a platformer or a collection of minigames—it’s a beautiful collision of text-based adventure games and their modern, point-and-click counterparts, with dialogue so perfectly tuned and detailed that it feels ripped directly from life itself. And through that dialogue—through the game’s many conversations and character moments—Mae reveals a struggle with herself that comes across as achingly painful and real. There’s a moment very late—in the full throes of the game’s final moments—when, overcome with feelings of worthlessness and doubt, she leaves her friends’ apartment and, barely able to walk, heads out into the woods alone. Her complete surprise when she sees them walk up behind her—there to take her back, to protect her from the horrors that they’ve witnessed on the edge of town—feels utterly natural to me; it’s another small moment, nestled inside a much larger one, that captures exactly what it feels like when your perception of the world turns against you. I wrote a couple of weeks ago about how Doki Doki Literature Club represents depression; well, Night in the Woods delivers an even more nuanced and human image of mental illness and the struggles that accompany it, and it does so through the smallest of moments.
Of course, Mae’s friends have their struggles too—and in many aspects, she’s by far the most privileged among them. Gregg and Angus, a fox and a bear who began their relationship soon after Mae left for college, are trying to save enough money to move out of Possum Springs for a larger, more prosperous city—and they’re doing so while grappling with their own deep problems and histories. Meanwhile Bea—who’d been preparing to go to college along with Mae—had had to remain home and take over her family business after her mother died of cancer. Early in the game, with Mae drunk and disconsolate in the back of her car, Bea lays out to Mae everything she’s had swing her way over the course of her life—two loving, healthy parents, a stable home, and a chance to leave and escape that she’d seemingly thrown away. There are no easy answers in Night in the Woods—no avenues to immediate absolution. All of its characters wear their histories not on their sleeves, but in their language, their jobs, their daily lives. From those with extensive screen-time to those with the smallest parts—even the two men who stand outside the bar every day, discussing the local football team, until one of them leaves for a new job in the city—they all feel realized and human, representative of a people coping with the reality that their world has collapsed into dust.
But what makes Night in the Woods truly ambitious is its commitment to engage with all angles of that setting—to avoid both the romanticization and condenmnation that have risen thick throughout popular culture over the past year. The game’s late-emerging plot, of unsolved murder and a seemingly impossible kidnapping at their autumn festival that only Mae witnesses, builds into an arc thick with cosmic horror: a genre that might seem unsuited for such a grounded story yet ends up fitting perfectly. Mae’s dreams, of strange, astral coal towns and railways set to the music of a ghostly quartet, culminate with a plotline that I won’t spoil, but that presents the flipside of small-town Americana: the nativism, hate, and disregard that arises in the wake of economic struggle. At the end of everything, some hold onto friends, some hold onto family, some hold onto religion, and some hold onto the past. And that final choice—the need to reinvigorate a past that never was and that never again will be—defines the final hour of Night in the Woods, delivering a strange yet powerful resolution to its story of post-industrial America and the people who call it home.
In the end, Night in the Woods understands both the virtues and the downfalls of the characters it conjures to life. Beyond its focus on economic disenfranchisement and mental illness, it acknowledges the complicated role of belief and religion in modern America, presenting a pastor who only wants to help her community yet finds herself walled off by an obstinate town council. It explores family dynamics in a way that understands both the potential pain and pathos inherent in familial relationships, and it investigates labor politics in ways both cognizant and inquisitive of the histories surrounding those movements. And more than anything, it revels in the tiny, inexplicable moments that define us—why we are the way we are, and why we do the things we do. It finds endless wonder in human interaction, in dialogue and music and the little discoveries hiding behind unopened doors. It is, without a doubt, the best-written game I’ve ever played—carrying in its dialogue moments of humor, joy, sorrow, longing, anguish, and peace. Its dialogue, beyond all other descriptors, is completely, irrepressibly human.
About halfway through, during a play put on by Bea during the town’s autumn festival, a character reads the line: “We begin and we end, at night, in the woods. But that is not the whole of the story.” Above all else, Night in the Woods understands both the limits and potential of storytelling, and the result is an utterly singular experience—something far more powerful than a little game about small-town America should have any right to be.
Sunset Over Ithaca 