43) Night in the Woods (2017)

In 2013, Alec Holowka and Scott Benson started a Kickstarter for a 2D adventure game focusing on a character who returns to their hometown and finds that their old friends have grown in their own directions. The project was fully funded in only 26 hours, and within a month had achieved 400% funding. Despite this, the decision was made to not keep adding stretch goals to the project, because while that may have resulted in additional backers, it could easily have led to scope creep, a problem that a lot of games, especially crowd sourced games, suffer from. Before the eventual 2017 release of the full game, two smaller supplemental games were released. Longest Night in 2013 and Lost Constellation in 2014 serve as free bonus, promotional material that are included as side stories in the full release.

Night in the Woods puts us in the role of Mae, a young woman who drops out of college and decides to return to her hometown of Possum Springs, which is heavily inspired by towns in the American Rust Belt. She moves back in with her parents, choosing to live in the attic, and initially evades talking about her feelings or her decision to drop out of college. We spend the first few days exploring the small town that, since leaving for college, has remained largely the same, but with enough changes to feel slightly alien to our protagonist. We also get the chance to reconnect with Mae's high school friends who have grown and changed Mae's absence.

The town has a unique charm to it, perfectly capturing the vibe of a small town that rarely changes despite the world around it. As someone who grew up in such a town, I instantly connected with how the closure of a grocery store, the Food Donkey, and the opening of a convenience store, the Snack Falcon, seem like pretty big news. At the outset, Mae's attempts to hang out and reconnect with her old friends seems fun and innocent enough, with her friends being excited and eager to partake in the same activities they used to. It quickly becomes apparent that, though Mae moved away on her own, she actually has the least life experience, and her friends have grown without her.

In addition to exploring the small town, we find ourselves with a number of mysteries to uncover, with some of them relating to Mae herself. We aren't initially told why Mae dropped out of college, nor are we privy to all the ways our friends' lives have changed. As we proceed, we learn that some people are resentful that Mae left, and others are resentful that she returned. In this way, the characters and setting feel painfully real, and it nails the awkward feeling of trying to reconnect with people you, for all intents and purposes, abandoned. You try to relive the experiences of youth, but find that you're essentially a stranger in your own home.

Beyond the nostalgic melancholy, we also slowly unravel a strange mystery in the town that begins, rather ominously, with the discovery of a severed arm. In addition, Mae finds herself having strange dreams that show the decline in her mental health. As we proceed, the mystery deepens as we learn more about the town, how our friends have changed, and about all of the problems that have led Mae to where she is today. We're given a degree of agency, deciding which of our friends to spend our time with, which allows for a certain degree of replayability, as it's impossible to see everything in one go.

Night in the Woods is a beautifully crafted story that uses it's simple, approachable artstyle to address some deeply human emotions. While I do feel as though the story, specifically the larger mystery of the town, gets a bit out of hand, the underlying message and themes are incredibly solid. Despite being portrayed as anthropomorphic animals, the characters have a rich humanity to them that is a joy to see. For anyone who's ever felt listless in life or just had a yearning to return to simpler times, Night in the Woods is a phenomenal experience that serves as a reminder that life goes on and that not having all the answers is not only okay, but generally how the world works. It invites you to play at your pace, and sometimes that's all we need.