For this week’s passion blog, I’m going to be covering a game that’s super close to my heart, Night in the Woods. This game stars anthropomorphic cat Mae Borowski (the animal stuff is not touched upon nor is it a part of the game beyond aesthetics, they just have the appearances of animals), who drops out of college, comes home, and struggles to reconnect with friends and family and get back into daily life of the rust belt town that she left behind, all while dealing with mysterious disappearances that may or not be cult-related. Not everything is as it used to be, and as she revisits old memories, she discovers that people are moving on around her.
FUN RATING: 5/5. Man, I love this game. There’s so many fun things you can do, like stealing pierogis to feed baby rats (this is a minigame! It’s super fun and the baby rats are adorable), running around the town of Possum Springs and talking to everyone to get new drawings in Mae’s journal, finding new constellations through “dark stars” in Mae’s neighbor’s telescope and hearing the stories behind them, playing a dungeon crawler on her laptop, the Guitar Hero-based minigame… there’s so much you can do in a given day in this game. Time sort of progresses, but you can do as much as you want before either going home and sleeping or hanging out with Mae’s friends Gregg and Bea, which progresses the story as well. Gregg’s Mae’s best friend from high school who she hasn’t seen in ages, and Bea is in Gregg’s band- her and Mae used to be best friends as kids, but some things happened and they stopped talking. You can choose to reconnect with either of them, and will maintain a friendship with the other character as well, even if for a given day you didn’t choose to hang out with that character.
EASE RATING: 3/5. The main storyline is pretty much impossible to fail, but you can screw up playing the bass at band practice, choose “wrong” dialogue in some important scenes for Gregg and Bea’s storylines, and you can suck miserably at the dungeon crawler game, Demontower. If you want to get achievements for finishing this and getting the true ending, it’s pretty much unavoidable. Especially if you want to get all of the notebook drawings, which is another achievement on Steam. It starts off pretty easy, but the more you progress in Demontower the harder it gets, and you lose health really easily. The enemies get more skilled, as well, and generally you just die a lot. This one specifically made me have to put the game down and go do something else a couple times, just because it’s so frustrating- it’s caused many people to ragequit it. But if you don’t end up playing Demontower, and you are either fantastic at Guitar Hero-style games or just don’t care how you do, this game isn’t too difficult. It all depends on how much you want to complete in the game.
REPLAYABILITY RATING: 4/5. There’s a whole lot of different paths you can take in this game. Whether it’s how you choose to investigate the mysterious cult after witnessing the disappearance of someone during Halloween, befriending Gregg or Bea, or getting to know the side characters Lori and Germ (a mouse and bird respectively, who you can encounter around town and hang out with- you can get achievements from this), you can really do whatever you want in this story. If you want to speed through and focus only on the main plot, you’re totally free to do so. If you want to spend ages looking around town and trying to get all the achievements and notebook drawings, you can do that too. I typically fall in the latter category, just because no matter how many times I play, I really love this game and want to revisit everything it has to offer. Getting all the achievements also requires multiple playthroughs, so that’s an added incentive to play again.
OVERALL: The true reason I really love this game, despite the colorful and well-done cast of main and supporting characters, is that I really empathized with Mae upon first playing the game. I first played the game my sophomore year of high school, feeling similarly adrift in life. I had just gotten broken up with, I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do after school, I was struggling with mental illness, and I felt like the world was moving on without me. I saw my feelings reflected back at me in this game through Mae, and I loved the aesthetics of the game. Possum Springs feels a lot like my hometown, where everyone I knew wanted to get out of it but inevitably seems to end up staying in the area regardless, just because it’s so hard to leave. Mae’s character was incredible, even if I typically love making my own character and their backstory. I felt like it was me playing through the game, even if Mae was her own person with her own story to tell. There’s so much lore around the game, and there’s related games that you can access through the main one. While the characters may be cute anthropomorphic animals, this game also deals with heavy concepts of mental illness, family problems, and grieving. I thought that these were all portrayed in a realistic, believable way, and made the characters seem more “human”- although the story was focused on Mae, you learn about the circumstances of the other characters as you get to know them- things that Mae has missed out on while she was gone, and things she just didn’t notice until things come to light. Overall, this is one of my favorite games of all time, and it has always spoken to me. I’d recommend it to almost anyone (unless you mostly play first person shooter games, then I don’t know if it’s up your alley). I originally got a bootleg of the game off a friend, and bought it around my senior year of high school (and the Switch game my freshman year of college respectively, just because it was on sale and I’m a sucker for NITW), so I don’t have many of the achievements, but I’m working my way through a Switch playthrough along with getting the Steam achievements.
