![]() ![]() Everyone’s trapped here in some sense or another, a feeling a great deal of younger folks in shitty situations are likely familiar with.īecause of when it was released, Night in the Woods also often feels of its time. Gregg, Mae’s best friend and partner in crime, worries about how his mental health might affect Angus, his boyfriend, and how to weigh this responsibility to another person against a firm sense of self. She resents Mae who seemingly forfeits her dreams of getting out without so much as a second thought. Bea, one of Mae’s friends, feels trapped by familial obligations even though she so badly wants to be anywhere else but the rotting husk of Possum Springs. I could throw a rock and hit some kind of personal note that Night in the Woods touches on in ways that speak to me. And if a fake duck could do it then so could I, dammit. Mallard isn’t a person, but in that sense it at least embodied the warmest aspect of personhood. In the midst of my own depressive episode and isolation, I think I needed to see that even when you’re out of touch or have outright disappeared from people’s sides, you’re still there in the hearts and minds of the folks you’ve touched. And even though it’s been kept away from anyone and everyone, it inspires the most unbridled joy from Mae to see it. Mallard, a parade float that Mae uniquely loved, is discovered in storage where it hasn’t seen the light of day in God knows how long. ![]() ![]() Depression can have quite the stranglehold, you know? And then I played Night in the Woods and met Mallard. I was all but worried that if I up and vanished no one would care, or worse, that I’d continue existing miserably and still go unnoticed and uncared for. Friends moved on to colleges far away, academic setbacks stalled me, and socially I was a ghost. When I was 20, I worried again that I’d be alone and forgotten. It’s a fear I’ve long struggled with, going so far as writing an essay about it when I was 16 that earned me a trip to the counselor’s office, and it’s one I’ve actually rarely seen in the games I play. It’s a game with anxieties about loneliness and being left behind, with this idea stretching as far as the game’s abandoned mall Fort Lucenne and the disappearance of Casey Hart, a childhood friend of Mae’s who vanishes without a trace before her return home. The one theme that particularly struck me is the fear of being forgotten, which permeates the town and its characters. Or the death of life as we knew it and how hard it is to hold onto good things. Night in the Woods is a chill and cute game, but it’s also a work that’s angry about countless things, like the institutions that promise people the world and turn their back on them or the ravenous corporations that eat up towns like Possum Springs and its people. All the while, she keeps trying to cling to some sense of life or stability that has passed her by. Mae’s friends have been moving on with their lives, finding adult jobs and progressing relationships. The town has continued on its decline and everyone who’s still there is caught in its gravitational pull and collapse. Mae, an aimless college dropout for whom things just didn’t work out, comes back to her small rust belt town looking for direction and instead finds that things have changed without her around. Night in the Woods came out five years ago this week and captured, for lack of a better term, a vibe. And all these years later, it still captures both my fears and hopes in brilliantly simple fashions. It’s a plucky little line from the opening of a game that turns out to have a lot to say about resilience and defying death, making Night in the Woods a deceptively heavy experience and one of the single most important things ever to me. She falls next to a small puddle and says a few simple words that have stuck with me longer than most others. As she hikes back, she jumps on the logs that fill a ditch where she played as a kid and they crack beneath her and the weight of years of negligence and rot. The bus station is empty because no one comes to Possum Springs. In the very beginning of Night in the Woods, the main character Mae hikes back home from the bus station on the outskirts of her hometown Possum Springs. ![]()
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