A Commentary on Night in the Woods

A lot of the works that I create are inspired by the works that I find myself gravitated to. One such work is an indie narrative-driven video game called Night in the Woods. It was published in 2017 by Finji Studios, and developed by Infinite Fall, a studio founded by Alec Holowka and Scott Benson. It takes place in a fictional town, Possum Springs, and follows a semi-linear narrative of Mae Borowski, 23 years old and a recent college dropout, and her endeavors returning to the small mining town in decline after some years away in college. Many things have changed, friends and family alike. 

The game is episodic in manner, separated into multiple acts/chapters, and each chapter is in turn separated into individual day sequences. Each day, there is something new to be done, you are given the option of to explore the town of Possum Springs and the goings-on throughout, at the end of each day, there is usually a narrative sequence, which concludes the day, and the cycle repeats.A big part of the narrative involves the fomentation of an unknown evil, something mysterious that lurks within the nooks and crannies of the dilapidated and slowly consumed mining town, in a way that foils the natural state of decay of many of these small town throughout the declining rust belt. Starting off small, mentioned and hinted at here and there in small details that the player may overlook, and growing more prominent as the days go on.

Although the big overarching plot involves this unknown evil, I believed the biggest and most salient part of the game involved the camp flavor text that each NPC had to offer as you explored Possum springs each day. Although the town was small, there was much to be done, and much to be explored in the 2d platformer-esque gameplay. 

Stylistically, the game is right up my alley, everything has a look of paper mache. All the characters are cutesy anthropomorphized animals, which is left up to interpretation whether the depiction is literal or otherwise representational of dysphoria.

I played Night in the Woods in the midst of the Pandemic, and there was something to takeaway from playing it during that time. The various premises of the game were very real and tangible. The characters of the game deal with very personal issues, like mental illness, abuse, trauma, and growth. By the time I emerged from the long isolation during the pandemic and returned to the greater world, everything was so very different, far flung from the time when I was a freshman. I was bereaved to discover how different I was, how different the people I knew were, and how different everything around us was. Many of the faces I knew were foreign to me, people had grown, gotten jobs .Some people had grown distant from me, while others had grown closer.  I felt like I had significantly changed from the time when I set off for home in the spring of 2019. I could look back at photos from my departure that looked like a different person. In this recollection of the world around me, the fallout of everything that transgressed, I clung to many of the themes and messages from playing Night in the Woods. From my own experiences, I felt inspired to detail a lot of the nuances of my own life into my own creative works inspired by small pieces such as this.