revisiting night in the woods
Night in the Woods is about going home. Your hometown is not a great place: the first non-family person you talk to on your return is that specific kind of small town asshole who thinks he's being polite because he doesn't actually use a slur when talking to you, the town's economy is dying a slow death, everyone we know is trapped in a job they hate. But it's home, and that will have to be enough.
The protagonist, Mae, has dropped out of college due to mental illness--some form of dissociative disorder--and here we have the driving force of this story. The world is awful; we are trapped in our broken brain; we are trying to go back to where everything is safe and familiar, but the town is different, our friends are different, we are different. And as we try to find something normal, something to anchor us, everything starts to fall apart. And the way out is not to go home, to search for the familiar. The way out, as always, is each other.
There are so many sad and beautiful moments in this game. I appreciate that it doesn't wrap things up neatly: there is a moment of respite, but no promise of lasting relief, no happily ever after, just hope for a better tomorrow. Some days--most days, lately--that's all we get.
The thing about this game is it's hard to talk about without spoilers. Not spoilers about the character beats that make up the heart of the game, but spoilers about the story's big climax, the thing that ties it all together.
There is a darkness at the heart of Possum Springs, what Mae calls "a death cult of dads". They have been, for years, sacrificing people who wouldn't be missed to an eldritch horror at the bottom of the old mines, what the title cards call "the hole at the center of everything"; in exchange, they say, they are given longevity, and the town gets to continue on much the way it always has. It is, on its face, a nihilistic bargain to maintain a shitty status quo at the cost of actual human lives. They are trying to tell us some lives matter less than others, and that makes it okay. They try to sell us the idea that this is a mercy.
No attempt is made in the text to portray these people as sympathetic. We don't get to know them; we don't see our protagonists tempted by the offer to join them; we don't mourn their (probable) deaths when they are killed in a mine collapse. So when Mae says she understands them, it's not because she thinks they might have a point, but because she has seen the heart of it. The god they worship is painted as a cosmic horror, but what it actually is is emptiness. It's void. The sort of hate that can make you think that killing off the undesirable is a moral good that can bring about the idyllic old world can only be born of giving into that emptiness.
Mae has seen that emptiness. I have, too. It's hard not to, these days, when it seems every day the news is worse and worse, but it is important to reject cynicism. We will always have each other; that will always be enough.
I wasn't sure if Night in the Woods would resonate so strongly in 2025 as it did in 2017--a story like this could easily be a snapshot of a moment that has long since passed, after all--but the story I found coming back to it this year feels just as fresh, just as important. There is still a hole at the center of everything--you can see it in the empty platitudes of the Democratic party, in the open hatred displayed by the Republicans--and the only way forward, as ever, is to hold onto each other.