Night in the Woods

Night in the Woods

Switch - USA - 1st edition.

Developer Infinite Fall Publisher Finji, Playism Published 2017-02-21 Platforms iOS, Linux, Macintosh, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Switch, Windows, Xbox One Genres Adventure, Atmospheric, Exploration, Graphic adventure, Platformer Themes Adventure, Halloween, Horror, Psychological thriller Distribution Commercial

Night in the Woods is a platformer graphic adventure video game developed by Infinite Fall and published by Finji for Linux, Macintosh, PlayStation 4, and Windows on 2017-02-21, then released on several other platforms. It was programmed in Unity.

In the game, you play as Mae, an anti-authoritarian college dropout who returns to her small home town after two years to discover it has become a husk of its former inadequacy. Mae hopes to find her old friends and pick up where her life left off causing mischief and playing in her terrible band, but a lot of people have grown up or moved on. It seems as if nothing interesting is ever going to happen to her again until Mae and her friends find a severed arm in the street.

Personal

Own?	Yes. itch.io. I also own all the soundtracks on Bandcamp.
Won?	Yes. Main story and both supplements.
Finished	2024-10-24 - Main story / 2024-10-26 - Both supplements.

I had seen this game show up in various places on the Internet. After purchasing it in the Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality package on itch.io, I put it on my short list of games to play. However, it still took me several years to get to it.

Review

7	6	9	8	7

Best Version: Windows

Good

• The game has fantastic art. The 2D environments manage to have a lot of style and ambiance with plenty of background characters, scampering animals, leaves and plants, etc. to make it feel real. I like the character design in particular and the large variety of animation for the characters, like how Mae's scarred ear twitches, how her eyes move to face nearby characters, how she dances, and the wavy animations of Mae's limbs while she jumps or walks along fences. The only thing I don't care for is how the walking animation isn't tied the to character's movement speed.
• The game has really nice ambient music composed by Alec Holowka.
• The game brings up some serious issues like smalls towns turning into the rust belt, children having to look after their parents, dropping out of school, and religious beliefs. Some of the dialogue and situations are funny and/or interesting, some are even a bit scary which fits the game's Halloween theme.
• I didn't initially care for the rhythm and Rogue-lite minigames, but, as I played the game more, they started to grow on me. They kind of make the world feel a bit more real, and, practicing the bass made me feel as though I was a teen again alone in my room.
• There are several moments that get quite scary and dark which really makes the game interesting.
• The dream sequences, though a bit boring with finding the four musicians each time, always have a nice payoff with the creepy giant monsters.
• I enjoyed the notebook doodles, and seeing them all one last time at the end was very nice.

Bad

• I don't care for how new dialogue keeps popping up in the same spot after you finish talking to someone. Though I appreciate how the developers are giving the player the option to not continue the conversation, I would prefer they just tell me what I need to know and cut the fluff.
• When faced with a multiple options, you first have to page through them all, then page back to the one you want. This was the down side of having the selection fit within the speech bubble, but I think it might have been better to just show all the conversation options at once and let the player pick the one they wanted.
• There is a lot of uninteresting dialogue, and I felt like a lot of the choices I was making didn't affect the story at all. Many times all of the options were just different ways to say the same thing. The only options that seemed to matter to the story were which person to hang out with each day.
• Most of the minigames are not enjoyable, typically because they're far too easy (shop-lifting, runner), but also sometimes because they don't work as a game, like the Harfest play you have to guess the next lines without the script Mae is supposed to have access to.
• The reveal near the end, that Possum Springs has a secret society which has been sacrificing people to an ancient underground evil in order to keep the city bustling, is pretty played-out. I would have liked a new variation on it. And, the part where the cult members describe their cult in detail only to let Mae and her friends just go free in the mine while they're all still down there isn't very believable.
• I wish there would have been more closure to the game. About ten people are stranded in the mine to starve to death in the dark, one of whom knows Mae well enough to identify her by her voice, but, the next day, nobody in town even hints that people might be missing. The only thing I noticed was one of the barflies wasn't there, but that was it. It would have been more interesting to see some people you had been talking to for the past week who seemed perfectly normal were suddenly gone, indicating that they were part of the cult. Also, while you successfully trap the cult members underground, the ancient evil living in the pit which has been infiltrating Mae's psyche wasn't defeated, so what's going to happen to her? Also, the tattoo on the severed arm never really comes up again.
• Mae is attracted to two different people in the game, but, unless its part of something I missed, nothing comes about from either of them. It would have been nice if they developed this more.

Ugly

• The exploration aspect of the game causes it to be a bit of a walking simulator. Each day, if you want to be sure not to miss anything, you have to traverse the entire town, but the majority of the town is empty, many people don't say anything, and, a lot of those who do speak, don't offer anything useful. As more of the town is opened up later in the game, you have even more empty space to traverse. Most of the dialogue isn't necessary, but there is no way to be sure. For someone like me who wants the full experience, all that walking creates a lot of downtime. The pretty scenery helps, but not enough to eliminate boredom later in the game.

Media

Box Art

• 

  Box - Switch - USA.

• 

  Box - Switch - USA - Collector's Edition.

• 

  Title Card - Good Old Games - World.

• 

  Title Card - Humble Bundle - World.

• 

  Title Card - PlayStation - World.

• 

  Title Card - Steam - World.

• 

  Title Card - Windows - World.

Videos

Trailer.

Trailer - Xbox Launch.

Longplay - Windows.

Longplay - PS4.

Longplay - Windows - Expansion - Longest Night.

Longplay - Windows - Expansion - Lost Constellation.

Representation

Strong female character?	Pass	Mae and Bea are both strong. To a lesser extent, Mae's mother and a couple other women.
Bechdel test?	Pass	Mae talks with Bea, her mother, and a couple other women about a variety of topics.
Strong person of color character?	Fail	Since all of the characters are animals, race isn't brought up.
Queer character?	Pass	Gregg and Angus are boyfriends. Mae is bisexual.

Technical

• The saved game is stored in .\Users\%username%\AppData\LocalLow\Infinite Fall\Night in the Woods
• Configuration is stored in HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Infinite Fall\Night in the Woods

Expansions

Two supplements were released for Night in the Woods while the main game was in development: Longest Night and Lost Constellation. Longest Night sees Mae, Bea, Gregg, and Angus sitting around a campfire while looking at the stars. The player must make constellations from the stars and Angus will describe what they are and the group talks about them. It's a pretty simple connection video game whose mechanic is reused briefly in the main game. I like how each constellation has its own timbre which lets you know which start are related, and the mythology is pretty interesting.

Lost Constellation is a more complicated game in the same platformer graphic adventure style as Night in the Woods. It puts you in control of Adina Astra, an astronomer who is trying to get through a haunted forest in order to find something important in the frozen lake beyond. In the process of the game, you speak to several people, throw snowballs, try to win the favor of the forest god, and build multiple snowmen. The game has nice music, great graphics, some funny dialogue, and some interesting mechanics.

Links