I’m delving deeper into “Must be at least a little literate with a keyboard” games with this one, as well as increasing the necessary time requirement to play tenfold. Or, to put it another way, Infinite Fall’s Night in the Woods is a twenty-hour game requiring arrow keys for one hand, Z X and C in the other, the coordination to time button presses to jump higher, not to mention the rhythm sections which have their own special keys if you’re playing on a computer. Like with my post on The Beginner’s Guide, I go into this one with no small amount of trepidation, but let’s see what happens.
It’s possible to frame Night in the Woods’ narrative as a sort of parallel to Catcher in the Rye. They’re both coming of age stories about young adults running away from school, they both take place around a holiday (Christmas for Catcher, Halloween for Night), and they both carry this odd sense of nostalgia for simpler times.
Of course, to directly compare Night and Catcher is a detriment to both of them. The people who really like Catcher probably aren’t fans of being compared to a video game about a cat girl anyway, but I still like the comparison here as it still is a good introduction to the story Night in the Woods is trying to tell. Mae Borowski, when not playing video games into the wee hours of the night or sleeping in until after noon, is just as lost as Holden Caulfield.
But while Holden had a whole Big Apple to wander around, Mae only has her small coal-mining hometown of Possum Springs. In a sense, Possum Springs is its own character in Night in the Woods, with every member of its small population having its own little story to explore over the course of the game. That’s the biggest draw I find the game has, that you can speak to anyone, or at least listen in on their conversation. From Selmers the poet who sits on their porch for want of anything else to do espousing rhyming couplets as Mae walks past, to Pastor Kate who sometimes doesn’t believe the gospel she is preaching, to Rosa, the old woman by the pierogi stand who was friends with Mae’s grandfather, there’s no shortage of things to do.
The game itself encourages this sort of playstyle as well. All the story-progression events are located on the other side of town from Mae’s house, which means that along the way Mae will almost certainly find something to do. This is where a large majority of the game’s runtime comes from; it would probably be a five-hour game without it.
The comparison I made three weeks ago to Richard Scarry’s Busytown is obvious. It’s a bunch of anthropomorphic animals that all know everybody else in town (for better or for worse, it should be noted). Comparisons to Upstream Color are slightly less obvious, but both are still about finding an identity after having the previous one destroyed -- about holding onto whatever and whoever you can in the face of adversity.
The last comparison I made was to H.P. Lovecraft, which does require a bit of explaining. Some of it has to do with spoilers to specific plot points (though perhaps even mentioning that such a plot point exists is a spoiler in and of itself), but the one connection I can draw without those is on the topic of dreams:
I love dreams as a writing device. I love how slightly disparate from reality they are, which means the author gets to do just about whatever they want with them. Of course Mae doesn’t have dreams where she’s naked during a test she didn’t study for; the first dream sequence, for example, is her wailing on anything and everything she can find with a pipe. But as the dreams go on, they slowly become even more disconnected from reality.
H.P. Lovecraft often wrote about a dream world. The first of this “Dream Cycle,” a short story called Polaris, is about a man who constantly visits the same imaginary city, overshadowed by the titular star, until he believes his own life to be the dream. These two aren’t directly comparable -- while Mae doesn’t always have a firm grasp on reality, she’s pretty sure her dreams are still dreams -- but Night in the Woods still makes use of Lovecraft's uncaring universe and dreamlike worlds.
There’s a conversation near the end of the game between Mae and one of her friends named Angus. They’re both sitting at the top of a hill looking at the stars and talking about Angus’ upbringing (clichés are tools, kids), and near the end, Angus says, “I believe in a universe that doesn’t care and people that do.” Or again consider Pastor K, whose entire subplot revolves around continuing to try to do good, to try to do her job, even, despite constant doubts.
The tagline for Night in the Woods is “At the end of everything, hold onto anything,” and I think that is very apt. Whether literally or figuratively, the characters in Night in the Woods are having their worlds pulled apart at the seams, and it’s all they can do to try to stay together.
Like I said, it’s a huge time investment, but you really should play this game.
-F
Next time: A book about a film about a labyrinth in a house.
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