This game was pretty good. I really struggled with the first half or so of it, I think because I had trouble relating to Mae and didn’t enjoy acting out her naive and erratic behavior through the gameplay. I guess I got annoyed because what I wanted to be doing was learning more about Mae and why she dropped out of college, but she refused to talk about it to anybody. I wanted to figure out what sort of supernatural stuff was going on in her dreams, but she wanted to like, shoplift. It grated on me for some reason, which feels kind of silly to admit because it’s not like I went in to Night in the Woods expecting some sort of RPG experience where my decisions affected the outcome. I warmed up to it, though, after Mae’s friends started to call her out on her shit and she opened up to them and matured a bit, which was all very well written. The writing is all excellent, with a setting and characters that all feel very three-dimensional and familiar. Night in the Woods is very about the vibes and it conveys those vibes very effectively. I didn’t drop out of college like Mae, but I definitely related to the like, ennui, of returning to your hometown after being away for a while, and you see your old friends and find that things have changed in your absence. In addition to being “good” the writing is also hilarious (see feature image). On the other hand, I didn’t enjoy the gameplay very much. Night in the Woods is basically a jacked up visual novel with some mediocre platforming and microgame bits, and I didn’t find it that engaging. Maybe games that are this story heavy just aren’t my thing. If the visual and audio parts of the game didn’t contribute so much to the experience I might have preferred this as a book, honestly. At any rate, it was an overall good experience and I’m glad I stuck with it.
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