Night in the Woods - "Decent."

I am quite possibly the only millennial in the world who wants to have children before I’m in my thirties. I’m also a heterosexual man. And religious. So, this game and I have a complicated relationship. On the one hand, it provides some clever writing, good atmosphere, and funky music. On the other hand, it serves as a reminder that most people my age view traditional values of purity and delayed gratification as unnecessary evils. Considering how we, as people, are supposed to relate to Mae is not a good indicator of where society is going. Is it a good game, though?

…eh.

STORY

Guess what? You’re a small, adorably-drawn little cat girl called Mae who dropped out of college at the age of 20. You move back in with your parents in Possum Springs and hang out with some of your old high school friends. You get invited to a party and completely embarrass yourself (and I spoil that without any shame because anyone can see it coming from a mile away), and have a dream sequence where you destroy a modern art statue (which was referenced previously in the story) with a baseball bat.

            This is the first quarter of the story, and also the best part. When you’re just hanging out with your goofy friends and saying “hi” to your mom (who loves you very much) every morning, that’s where the game shines. Unfortunately, the game decides that it would much rather not be well-written and interesting for the last two quarters of the story.

            I’m about to stumble, blindly flailing my noodly arms into the realm of spoilers, so if you haven’t played the game, skip to the CHARACTERS section where I can spoil them for you instead.

            So, in the second quarter of the story, you start having dream sequences with dodgy platforming and framerate dips. You have to find four pillars, and each of these pillars adds an instrument to the background music. Once you find all of these four pillars, a scary-looking realistic animal thing will come out and be scary at you. You also get to be a part of the annual Harfest ceremony! This has some legitimately funny moments in it, but by this time I was getting sick of Mae’s character, so her quips grated on me more than they should have. By the end of the Harfest festival, a silhouetted man is shown knocking out an innocent and carrying them off, and you chase after them unsuccessfully.

            The fellow was wearing a trench coat and other concealing clothes. Now, what is the first thing that pops into your head when you think of that? “A strange cloaked man kidnapping a person in the dead of night in a town dripping with mystery.” I’d thought that the game would be smart enough to not go the most predictable and anticlimactic route possible, but I had too much faith in the writer’s capabilities.

Uh oh…we’ve reached part three in the story. This is where the game completely and utterly falls apart.

You meet God in a dream! Actually, you don’t. Or maybe you do. It would’ve been nice if the game let me know. In one of your dream sequences, you run into a giant non-anthropomorphic cat creature with big, glowy eyes. The bizarre and intentionally vague writing of the “Sky Cat” (which I’m just going to call “Bad” from now on) left me scratching my head as to the purpose of this encounter. What does Bad say to you? Well, just think like the absolute laziest writer in the history of the universe and it’ll be the first thing you think of.

            “Everything is meaningless and you aren’t special. Also if I am God, then I don’t care about any of you.”

            WOW. Solid work, Bethany Hockenberry and Scott Benson! You brought literally nothing new to the table! Bad says something else about how the universe is being forgotten and how the universe is also forgetting Mae…which doesn’t make sense, isn’t elaborated on, and doesn’t factor in to the main story whatsoever, so I decided to ignore it entirely. Here’s a tip for all you aspiring writers out there: If you’re going to write a story, actually make sure that people can follow it. People always laud Dark Souls for its vague storytelling, all the while forgetting that you are literally told what you have to do and what your place in the story is near the beginning(ish) of the game. If you don’t actually explain yourself, then you’ll just look pretentious and lazy.

            Eventually, Mae and her friends find a bunch of the cloaked figures near the mines, two of them chase after her, a gunshot is heard, and it cuts to black. I don’t know why the cloaked figures didn’t chase after her friends or if her buddies were just significantly faster, but that’s not important.

            What follows is the last quarter, and easily the most disappointing part of the game. Guess what? It’s a cult. Yup. That’s the big twist. This mysterious town that hosts a bunch of mysterious disappearances turns out to have a cult in it. Really breaking new ground. Also, they’re feeding an all-powerful deity by tossing sacrifices down a hole in the mines. This apparently keeps the town alive. Come on, Beth and Scott! This reads like a bad creepypasta. In fact, I think I’ve read this story multiple times, just with different characters.

            So, Mae and her friends leave after having a friendly chat with the murder cult, and one of the cultists decides to charge after them and try to…grab…Mae? I don’t know why, but it did provide one of the first quick time events in the game…so that was nice. After Mae and her friends brutally kill the man and ensure the slow, painful deaths of the cultists by destroying the only working elevator, stuff happens and Mae comes face to face with the cult deity thing.

           And that’s the only thing I was able to take away from that moment in the story. I honestly cannot tell you what happened or why Mae behaved the way she did. Later on, she says that it was her will to live that kept her from being devoured (or something?), but when she saw the deity she said that she was completely ready to die. Granted, she said that she’d die kicking and screaming, but she fully admitted that she was ready to die. So, why did she claim that she had a will to live? I’ll tell you why: Because the writers spent ninety-five percent of their time writing character development and realized that they had to have stakes and drama, so they threw all that character development in a bin for a basic, uninteresting, and confusing cult horror story climax.

           The final nail in the coffin for me was the fact that, throughout the game, there were cute little band practice segments where you’d play bass guitar along with some pretty stellar music. It didn’t really have anything to do with the rest of the game, but it was enjoyable and showed how each of the characters contributed to their little band. At the end, Mae’s friends wanted to have band practice again, and I thought I knew what was going to happen: You’d play the final song while the credits rolled. It would be a nice little sendoff that would represent the resolution of the plot. Everything’s back to normal, and things are alright.

But no! You want to know what happens?

            After a brief conversation, Mae and her friends say the word “decent” an uncomfortable number of times, and it immediately cuts to credits. My jaw dropped. I waited until the credits were over for some kind of post-credits scene that held the real ending, but I didn’t get that. It went straight to the main menu of the game, and I was left wondering why I spent seven hours playing it.

           I don’t want to be harsh on this game, because clearly a lot of work went into it. Sadly, Night in the Woods is in the unfortunate position of being a two-dimensional platforming Indie game on Steam. When I purchase and download one of these games, I’m not doing it for the gameplay. I’m doing it because I want a story-focused experience. To the Moon had tedious gameplay, but I didn’t care because the story and characters were so good. Doki Doki Literature Club’s only gameplay was waiting for the protagonist to say something stupid and occasionally making a choice, but it was such a good story with such memorable characters that I was able to forgive it for its slow pacing and dim-witted protagonist. Night in the Woods doesn’t have anything that I’d call an incredible story. It does have decent characters, however.

CHARACTERS

We’ll start with the main character that I liked the most and work our way down from there:

Bea

Is she interesting? No. No, she’s not. I could see her dead parent backstory coming a mile away. Is she likable? I guess. She’s the only main character in the game who behaves even remotely like a normal young adult. The sad backstory that accompanies her (while completely cliché) actually does significantly change her life. I’ve read dozens of books where, within the first two pages, the author decided to write that one of the protagonist’s parents either left them when they were little or died and they have little to no impact on the story itself. So, it’s good to see that the dead mom actually impacted her character rather than checked a box.

In addition to actually being a sympathetic character, she’s also the only young adult in the story (and, indeed, the universe) who’s even hinted at believing in God. Gotta love being treated like a minority when you’re actually part of a vast percentage of the population that has beliefs that shaped the very way civilized society evolved! BOY I love living in 2017!

She’s a decent comedic foil, but I grew tired of her after one of the party scenes (which I’ll leave out in case you still want to play this game).

Anthony

He’s both funny and adorable. And that’s it. The worst I can say about him is that he is (of course) an atheist, but there are legitimate reasons given for that.

Now, I feel the need to mention that I don’t hate atheists (unless they write comments on the Prince of Egypt soundtrack), but I feel like in this age of Rick and Morty, BoJack Horseman, and other cynical millennial-pandering TV shows that stopped being enjoyable to watch the minute they lost focus and mistakenly thought that we actually care about Beth and Jerry’s relationship, us Christians are drastically underrepresented. It’s gotten to the point where writing a Christian character who isn’t portrayed as either a money-hungry businessman, dumb redneck, or blissfully unaware character who just doesn’t know any better would be a new and inventive concept. That won’t stop some of you from blasting me with hate mail, but I’m a Christian on the Internet. At this point, I’m immune.

But yeah, Anthony’s character was serviceable but not really memorable. In fact, his name isn’t even Anthony. It’s Angus. I had to look his name up. That’s not a point in his favor.

Gregg

“I like pizza, committing crimes, and being gay!”

He’s got some really funny lines in the first part of the game, and then he drops off the face of the earth. This is probably because you get to choose who you hang out with the most (either Gregg or Bea), and I chose Bea because Gregg literally told me that he would be committing crimes. In a brazen attempt to try to hold on to what little humanity my character had, I went with Bea. That didn’t turn out so well.

BUT!

…we’ll get to that later.

And, finally, the main character that I liked the least…

Mae

Yup, the protagonist of the story is the most unlikable scumbag in the entire game. I honestly do not know where to begin. I think I’ll go ahead and start at the first moment that I knew that I wasn’t going to like Mae.

Early on in the story, Mae gets invited to a little party out in the woods. Considering how Mae is a young, depressed college student who has issues with maturity (and, also, since she's FREAKIN' UNDERAGE), I knew that it would be a bad idea to drink alcohol. That’s just a recipe for the ol’ “I’mma get drunk, divulge personal information, and make a fool out of myself!... then hurl!” scene. Before I ended up doing just that very thing (because the game doesn’t like letting you make choices), Mae stated:

“I guess beer is just one of those horrible things adults to. Like doing taxes and having babies.”

See, Mae isn’t a millennial…she’s the millennial.

“Reproducing is such an old person thing. Not like a…successful living organism thing…”

“I’m sexually ambiguous because, in the millennial world, bisexual is the default.”

“My mom’s religious, therefore I can’t be religious or my friends will think that I’m immature for listening to my parents.”

 “I like pizza because it’s unhealthy and that’s awesome lol self-deprecating humor!”

                I could deal with Mae if she was just the cringey cynical millennial character, but here’s the thing: she’s completely unredeemable. Granted, she does have some funny lines in the first two hours or so, and her character design is absolutely pwecious, but she’s either a legitimately bad person or severely mentally unsound. I chose to hang out with Bea because I wanted to be around a character that I could at least kind of relate to. Remember how I said that I wanted to avoid committing crimes with Gregg? Well, it turns out that choosing to go with Bea was an even worse idea, because Mae encourages her to shoplift. Bea doesn’t even want to steal because she’s a good girl who’s been through a lot and she has at least an ounce of empathy for others and she’s not stupid. She does end up stealing something that she doesn’t need, and Mae talks like she’s the bully in an anti-drug PSA. “You’ve seriously never stolen anything before?”

            For Pete’s sake, the whole “shoplifting” scene should have been dropped. Mae’s character is written as the average millennial, and I highly doubt that being born in the nineties would turn an entire generation of people into thieves and losers. Then again, Mae doesn’t fit the role of just one character. She fills the role of four characters:

1.      Cringey college dropout who never grew up from high school and says “yeppers” unironically

2.      Anger Management Patient (there’s only one or two references to a past act and one present act that even slightly verifies this, so I’m not really going to count it even though Mae explicitly mentions that she has anger management issues)

3.      DIRTY THIEF

4.      War-torn psychic

Now, if you’re like me, you can see how two or three of these things could relate to each other. Rebelling against authority because you’re young and “screw you, mom!” is a well-known stereotype. That fourth one, however, might come as a shock to you. It certainly came as a shock to me, and as a result, I couldn’t take anything that War-Torn Psychic Mae said seriously.

Allow me to explain myself with spoilers:

If you remember what I said in the story section, near the last third of the game, Mae finds who she’s looking for and a couple of his pals run her off a cliff or something and leave her for dead. She then goes in and out of consciousness and tries to walk home before collapsing on the sidewalk. After that, her character makes a complete 180: She doesn’t make any jokes, she’s 100% certain on what she “has to do,” and her dialogue just reeks of last-minute writing. That’s more of a gripe about the story, however.

To conclude this list of reasons why 95% of millennials would like her, I’m going to mention the one thing that cemented her as my least favorite character in the entire game. Near the second half of the story, Mae walks downstairs and finds that her mom is a bit more reticent than usual. She asks what’s wrong and the mom brings up the fun fact that they put themselves through financial strife to get Mae to be the first of her family to get into college, just for Mae to decide that she wanted out of college because she just kinda felt uncomfortable. That’s not the worst part, however: She ends up smack-talking her mom in a way that seemed gratuitously out of character and mean-spirited. She ends up going on about how her mom was never able to leave Possum Springs and is trying to live her dreams through her, and I just wanted to smack her in the face. I don’t care if they made up later, her mom is a freakin’ saint and Mae treated her like garbage because she brought up the very real argument that Mae might be a complete and utter loser.

…so yeah, I don’t like Mae and I don’t like cringey cynical millennials.

GAMEPLAY

            It’s good. I am sick to DEATH of sidescrolling platformers at this point and just wish that at least one Indie developer who wants to write intriguing characters and stories would think about hiring some 3D artists and programmers every now and then, but the gameplay is good. I’ve mentioned that the framerate drops noticeably in the dream sequences, but that might have just been because the computer I played it on was assembled by connecting a monitor with paper clips to a hamster wheel. The animations are good, and strangely reminiscent of an old TV program that ran when I was a kid called “Noggin.” It was basically Nick Junior (and it ended up being bought by Nickelodeon and renamed into Nick Junior anyway). So, seeing this fairly adult story being portrayed in the same animation style that gave me “Martha Speaks” and “Moose A. Moose,” was quite an amusing juxtaposition.

            There’s also the band practice segments where you have to press 1, 2, 3, and 4 in the right order along with the bass rhythm. If you don’t hit the numbers, then the game makes you FEEL it. The songs themselves are good in this part, but the difficulty can unexpectedly spike at certain points and it’s quite hard to play on-beat when messing up creates BIG RED FLASHES AND HORRIFIC NOISES that last for about two times as long as they need to. I always looked forward to these segments though, so it’s not a deal breaker.

            Overall, I’d say that the gameplay could have been better if it just focused on the dialogue rather than running through the city. The environments are basically the same throughout most of the game, and you have to run (slowly) through two different maps before you can reach one of your friends and advance the story. I’m glad that they didn’t just make it a visual novel, although you do have just about as much agency in the story as Mr. Clueless Protagonist from Doki Doki Literature Club.

            OH, I almost forgot! There’s an adorable minigame where you control Mae’s cartoonishly-drawn cat paw and grab items. This occurs throughout the story and is single-handedly the best part of the game. It makes the act of STEALING and being a DIRTY THIEF tolerable.

BEAR DENSITY

            There are bears in this game.

SOUNDTRACK

            I loved the soundtrack. In the band practice segments, the music the band plays is like if rock music made after 1999 was actually enjoyable to listen to. The dream sequence music was also pretty good, although I only thoroughly enjoyed the first couple of pieces that played.

GRAPHICS

            Like I said in the GAMEPLAY section: the graphics are highly reminiscent of TV programming for young kids, and it makes this story about a college dropout who willingly commits crimes because she’s an IDIOT much more visually hilarious. The animation on Mae is especially comedic. When her pupils contract, it’s one of the funniest things in the game. Besides that, the dream sequences (as well as a couple of other specific points) look beautiful.

            The one thing I’m most proud of this game for doing is NOT RELYING ON PIXELLY-BLEEP-BLOOP-RETRO GARBAGE. WE ARE DONE WITH THAT! THERE ARE TOO MANY LAZY 8-BIT ARCADE-ERA SIDESCROLLERS ON STEAM, AND WE AS A SOCIETY NEED TO STOP!

            …*ahem*…so yeah, the graphics are decent.

CONCLUSION

            Would I recommend this game to you? Well…considering how one fourth of the game is good, another fourth is boring, and the rest of it is bad…I can’t in good conscience recommend the full game.

            Granted, it did make me laugh excessively in the beginning, when it was just focusing on character development, but when the actual story starts to rear its head…the game suffers. I’m not upset that I played it, but I am massively disappointed in the ending. Its desire to keep the events of the climax as vague as possible ended up irritating me rather than intriguing me.

            Here’s what I propose you do: Buy the game on sale and play only the first two parts. THEN…go on reddit and search for the “nosleep” subreddit. Proceed to read one of the plethora of uninteresting stories with horrific pacing. It’s pretty much the exact same experience, only it won’t take four hours.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Characters: +1 ß Decent and occasionally funny

Story: -1 ß Eh

Gameplay: +1 ß HAND GRAB MINIGAME

Soundtrack: +1 ß Good music. Woohoo.

Graphics: +1 ß Not pixelated, good atmosphere

Bear density: +5

Final Score: 9/10.

I wouldn’t recommend the full game, especially not at full price.