#there can only be artificially made (which has happened via dark reality mirror) so there IS like an AU version but like

[dan-crimes]

The idea of a dating sim for my characters (as like a one off thing) is a very fun/funny idea to me and like I kinda. Y'know what I could just like make it a storyline for them to be on a dating show together then I could just fuckin do that cuz like I got tons of random fun ideas for potential stories and I just like throwing them all into my main comic idea :P

[gaming-rabbot]

Rabbot Reviews: Night in the Woods

Painfully relatable, wonderfully colorful, delightfully charming, and exasperatingly existential.

Imagine a much tamer BoJack Horseman, with a colorful flourish and sense of nostalgia reminiscent of Hotline Miami, mixed with the millennial Scooby-Doo gang vibe of Oxenfree. Also imagine if Life is Strange felt less artificial with its blatant farce of an attempt at understanding hip kid lingo, and that Firewatch actually bothered going somewhere with its thriller esque setup and plot hooks.

That’s a jumbled mess of words, but also a perfect descriptor for the subject of this review: Night in the Woods.

Night in the Woods stars the unassuming Mae Borrowski, a 20 year old college dropout who has returned to her podunk, middle-of-nowhere, boring town, where nothing good ever happened to anybody, least of all Mae.

Upon return, she’s met with passive-aggression spiced concern from parents who honestly just want to know what their only child is going through, and friends who all either already have or are in the process of growing up and moving on in life. Thus, her return meant to ease her back into the comforts of nostalgia and something resembling normalcy only seem to cause her more anxiety and strife.

Also the crushingly slow and depressing realization that life has no meaning and nothing we do in the universe actually matters. But hey, one thing at a time, right guys?

Last call for a (mild) spoiler warning.

The very first thing to note is that Night in the Woods is a certain type of game. And if you grit your teeth and practically feel your blood boil at the very thought of this type of game, first I might suggest seeing a doctor, but second and more importantly, NitW more than likely will not change your mind about this type of game.

I am referring, of course, to the ever-fun and totally-never-controversial-topic, the walking simulator. Where things like failure states scarcely show their faces, and gameplay mostly takes a backseat to narrative.

And by backseat, this sometimes means a bus. A very long bus.

I’ve talked about it before, but nobody reads my reviews, so I’ll say it again: I personally have absolutely no qualm nor quibble with the existence of this new and befuddling genre of video game. At least, not at face value. When the only thing a game is properly offering is a narrative, then I won’t hold that against the game, so long as said narrative can deliver. Not like Firewatch or Life is Strange, where the lack of an actual game further hampers the lack of a good or wholly competent story.

Besides, variety is the spice of life, my friend, despite what certain YouTube personalities will tell you. And a diverse offering of games means a diverse offering of self-proclaimed “gamers,” which goes on to mean the industry can only grow and get better as a whole with market expansion. You know, the only good part of capitalism; more media getting produced to the point where that incredibly niche thing you always wanted to see get made, well, finally getting made.

You know the one.

More to the point, I ask that narrative heavy games deliver. And deliver Night in the Woods did, with a fairly agreeable amount of competence.

It is at this point in the review, where the review has yet to actually begin, that I’d like to announce that I had been looking forward to this game for three years, ever since I first laid eyes on the Kickstarter trailer.

(Which, by the way, this game was funded via Kickstarter, so take that extra tidbit for what you will. I know it’s a touchy subject after things like Mighty No. 9.)

After which point, however, the game experienced something like three or four release delays, which speaks to me of a dev team possibly severely underestimating how long it takes to actually make a game. Or overestimating their own capabilities? Who knows.

Part of me worries that I can’t be objective, though. The game seemed to have won my heart long before I’d ever get to see a finished product. Could I have been blinded by my bias?

No. The answer is no.

Almost entirely for those aforementioned, nigh-constant release delays. Couple that with Infinite Falls putting out not one, but two mini games set in universe, instead of, oh I don’t know, the game people paid them to make? In an ounce of fairness, I’ve come to retroactively appreciate said mini games, as they do add to the lore.

And I’m a sucker for lore.

Perhaps I’m being petty, and somehow retroactively less petty, but my bias and unconditional love and goodwill slowly faded in direct relation to every year after the originally announced release date I had to wait. And as I sat down to start, and even as I completed the game, I asked myself: was it worth the wait?

Mm. Yeah, pretty much.

Okay, I should probably slow down. Maybe give some kind of buildup before spilling the final thoughts all out like that.

One of the first things you notice about Evening in the Forest, aside from how humorously long it takes to actually see all the characters in the woods at night time, is the screen constantly saturated with lots of orange, red, and brown. The fall colors are heavily emphasized, not merely because that’s the season the story takes place in, but the colors are exaggeratedly warm, so to match the cozy comforts the protagonist, Mae (remember Mae?), is seeking to feel deep down in her guts again.

But rather than that being the case, Mae’s hometown immediately feels cold and unfamiliar, which the game emphasizes by instead starting you off on the outskirts in the dead of night mostly by yourself. And the game world is introduced with lots of dark colors, mainly blues.

It’s easy to tell that color-play was set to be a key design aesthetic early in development.

This is matched and mirrored as even the primary cast are color coded in much the same way. Mae’s parents who forgot about her first night back are both dark, ash gray; cold. Gregg gives Mae the most excited welcome back of the crew, and he’s a ruddy orange; warm. Bea is distant at first, making undercutting jabs at Mae’s character, and she’s a muted teal; cold. Finally, Angus is friendly enough, if a tad mellow, and he’s the brown bear (who’s also a bear, ha (bam, super funny, original joke)); yeah, pretty warm.

The next to overkill levels of clear-cut color-play give the game a sort of story book vibe, which is further highlighted by the simple shapes that make up the models and the cartoonish proportions all the characters have; e.g., eyes make up a third of the real estate on any given face, which can sometimes be as tall or wide as the body it’s sitting on.

The bright, saturated, vivid colors of any given background, the color coding of warm and cold characters, the toony looks; it all drives home to evoke that very same feeling of familiarity and nostalgia Mae is seeking at the start of the game. As though to remind the player of simpler, more innocent times. It’s waking up on a Saturday morning at a young age to watch cartoons, that sort of thing. It’s the charming bait that demands your attention first. And the player, much like Mae, finds the hook a lot less charming with the panged stings of being proverbially stabbed by a cold and indifferent reality.

Reality tends to set in on this game like a sack of bricks. I found myself saying “that got a little too real there for a sec” so often, I figure it may as well be on the box.

(Well. You know. If the game had a box.)

It’s around this point, after the main cast is thoroughly introduced, that the game starts to really pick up. The pacing is solid enough; I never felt complacent, like I was waiting for the next bit of plot to happen. It’s slow exactly when and where it needs to feel slow. And for the rest of the time, the game is throwing sudden Guitar Hero segments at you.

When chatting with a friend about this, he admitted he found Mae’s movement speed plodding and felt it dragged the pacing down too much. It’s not something that bothered me, but I can see where there’s a case for it.

Here’s where the more “gamey,” for lack of a better term, side of the game comes in. At various intervals, the game will introduce a brand new mini game with its own self-contained set of mechanics. There’s a lot of variety here, and for the most part, they never outstay their welcome.

The only properly recurring one is the bass-playing segment. And though it’s possible to fail these (very possible in the case of the Pumpkin Head Guy song), the game will carry on regardless. In a way, Night in the Woods does actually have failure states, but the player doesn’t lose any progress when it happens.

Then the gang finds a severed arm!

Around that part, though, the game introduces a game within the game, in the form of a game on Mae’s laptop by the name of Demontower. And what a pleasant surprise, it’s a decent all around top down slash and dash, action affair. The amount of effort that went into it is shocking, considering it could’ve easily just been a cute little one-off gag. But no, it’s a completely legitimate game, with a full tale, its own set of mechanics, and several decently challenging boss fights punctuating each randomized level.

It’s the kind of thing I’d pay maybe ten bucks for (usd), but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t feel the value of my purchase with NitW go up a bit, considering there’s basically two games for the price of one here. Plus it might just placate one who finds dialogue heavy games dull. Who knows, but it’s a stellar addition either way.

I also adore that the developers wasted no opportunity to try and enhance their story, as they even worked symbolism relevant to the story at hand into the miniature side game on Mae’s laptop. The very first boss of any Demontower run looks remarkably like a certain muted teal gothic gator girl.

But, and here’s the kicker: this boss doesn’t do anything, and dies in one hit.

Surely it’s a reference to Bea’s semi-combative nature toward Mae at the start, and how easily that folds away when she remembers their shared history. It’s a really unnecessary metaphor they didn’t have to include, but it stuck with me that they even did. Although, in the interest of fairness, I feel I must admit it’s not exactly subtle.

In fact, it’s about as subtle as that severed arm I mentioned earlier, then stopped talking about.

I did this to draw comparison the somewhat noticeable lull between traumatic and supernatural events. Because while I said the story beats in of themselves never felt too far apart, I have to admit, again in fairness, that it seems to take a good while for the payoff of things like this. I will say though, payoff does come in due time, and NitW more or less sticks the landing well enough.

Take the backstory of Mae beating a kid’s face in with a metal bat during her little league game, for example.

To be perfectly frank, I figured the game would never have any kind of payoff for this at all. This or the actual reason why Mae came home from college. The cynic in me is alive and well, and I fully believed the writers would take the easy route and leave it all up to the imagination. But no, they actually explain it all, and explain it fairly well.

Mae has a mental thing where she rarely loses touch with reality, seeing only basic shapes where actual things and people are supposed to be. And a statue at college made up of basic shapes caused a mental relapse in her psyche, sending her spiraling into extremely self-destructive habits she couldn’t break herself out of. I’m certain there’s a proper term for this, but I’m not well read enough to know what it might be.

Effort like that put into creating a solid trunk for the rest of the story to branch off of is grand. And a relief, after dealing with games like Firewatch, where the backstory is so inconsequential, it’s picked out of a seemingly random assortment of vague synopses so as to snugly slot in any old referential dialogue between the bread of real plot.

In that regard, Dusk in the Trees fits nicely on the same shelf of Oxenfree.

Now that I think of it, both games are on that same shelf for a lot of similarities; the gaggle of young adults having complex relationships filled with strife and friction, the overt metaphor of them struggling to deal with supernatural elements where said supernature stands in for the responsible adulthood they’re on the precipice of, branching dialogue options used to explore character relations, the heavy and pervasive sense of nostalgia on the air like so many flitting dust particles in an old abandoned barn at sunset, etc.

Not that I mind having a couple eerily similar games, though. They’re a couple of the only games I’ve ever been able to relate to on such a deeply emotional and personal level. And I feel like that’s kind of the big foundation at the bottom of it all; relatability and realness to keep you grounded amidst all the severed arms, and ghost stories, and murder cults.

Whenever I watched Mae talk to her mom, I felt twinges of chills. Because I could almost swear I’d had those exact conversations with my own mother. We snark at each other in much of the same sarcastic way Mae and her mom do. I’ve even felt similar pressure Mae has about her education and how she’s going to handle the entire rest of her life.

It… hurts. It actually sort of hurts just how relatable this all is.

When walking down the main drag through Possum Springs (the ingame town), deja vu washed over me time and again. The urban decay of old businesses that never seem to last, the new franchised ones that seemingly cropped up from nowhere, the random animal people walking by who remarkably resemble random human people I’ve walked by in my own small, nothing special hometown; it all felt entirely too familiar.

It’s truly astounding how a game where the main character dreams about meeting god, and it’s not absolutely clear whether it actually happened, somehow managed to feel this real to life.

I’ve often commented on how relatability is not the end-all, be-all of good storytelling, let alone good character building. Though it does help, it’s better when the characters are this fun, charming, and sincere. And I feel like the writers really nailed that aspect, instead of relying on all the chest clutching of players like me who felt they’ve been there before.

Whatever smaller qualms I have with the story at large, I can’t deny how hard Infinite Falls got me to fall madly in love with this cast.

This game found me at I feel the perfect time in my life. It’s the angsty teen to young adult adventure I always wanted to see in a video game. This is my “that incredibly niche thing you always wanted to see get made, finally getting made.” And if you’re anything like me, then the story will resonate with you too.

Honestly, I can’t recommend this game enough. It’s not as perfect as I make it sound; there are a few grammar mistakes and a couple graphical issues. But if you can look past that, and gameplay ultimately not being the point, you’ll find a pretty solid, genuine-feeling story.