#His poetry made me think Of Selmers

[starfall-isle]

I love you Espio. Poet of the century

[oodlyenough]

also i finished night in the woods

so! here are some thoughts, with some spoilers for the end of the game so beware:

this game felt very millennial to me. not in a bad way (or a good way per se), just in a way where it felt like all the major themes targetted a specific audience: the existential and economic anxiety, the mental health issues, the sexuality... not that those things are unique to millennials but they are i would say touchstones of the ~millennial experience

i liked all the characters a lot. i was somewhat frustrated that i had to choose who to hang out with rather than being able to interact more with all of them, but i suppose that’s where you get replay value. i spent most of my nights with bea, because any time a video game asks me to choose between a male character and a female character i am going to choose the woman, #misandry etc, but i did really like gregg and his relationship with mae and would’ve liked to see more of it/him as well as bea. i thought the character writing was very good, everyone flawed in their own ways but believable and sympathetic. there were a few good emotional suckerpunches.

anyway, the game had a lot to say, and i think it mostly said it all in creative and interesting ways. i really liked the one conversation about faith that mae has with the pastor, where the pastor admits she doesn’t always believe in god, and mae accuses her of being a fraud and the pastor defends herself. i also though the scene where mae essentially chooses between suicide and living was compellingly done. the convo between bea and mae about bea’s desire to go to college but feeling stuck in her responsibility to her father was very sad and very good. i loved the stargazing scenes. even selmers’ crazy poem at the poetry reading was really good.

i am not totally sure if all the pieces came together in the end. i was expecting something bleaker, and was sort of relieved that it ended with mae and her friends having pizza, but i was left with a feeling of “that’s it? what now?”

in some ways, i suppose the end of the game was fitting -- as bea very aptly puts it a group of angry dads trying to keep the town stagnant in a longing for a past that never existed in the first place. it certainly felt politically and socially relevant in the here and now, in 2017. but it was also a bit anticlimatic as a video game, imo, where i am accustomed to, if not big battles of some kind, at least moral choices or quandaries where my participation as a player feels like more than just a passive audience viewing a story.

if i have a big criticism it is the tediousness of many parts of the gameplay, where i am just mashing square (or x, or circle, because they all do the exact same thing) over and over to get through long scenes of dialogue that is well-written but not acted and therefore just left for me to read. i guess it’s close to the “visual novel” type games, but there’s a reason i don’t play visual novels tbh. even moments of the more interactive stuff, like mae’s nightmares where you have to go find the musicians, felt tedious to me after a while. i wanted the story to progress because i was invested in it but the mecahnics of getting through it often felt tiresome. in theory i’d like to replay because i’d like to see some of the stuff i missed and i’d like to hang out with gregg more and see his route, but the thought of having to actually do it feels ...exhausting. i suppose that’s where Lps come in, but generally speaking if i, a person who does not watch LPs, would rather watch one than replay your game, that’s probably not a resounding recommendation.

i suppose if i were trying to give it a star rating i’d go with like... 7/10. a good story i am happy to have experienced, but perhaps not the best game. contrast with something like what remains of edith finch, where i thought the vehicle of it being a game is absolutely what made the story, and the story on its own as a short story or a movie would not have been as compelling.