I did not grow up in a small town but my parents had a house just outside of one that we’d go to on the weekends. In many ways Night in the Woods captures the rhythms of that kind of American community, where people actually do know their neighbors’ names and the things that seem truly important are the local happenings around your neighborhood, rather than whatever’s going on in some city hundreds of miles away or in another country across an ocean.

Night in the Woods unfurls like a literary novel, set in a very particular community with a specific set of characters, and focused more on showing the player what those characters feel and who they are than on telling a strong or urgent story. Night in the Woods doesn’t have the graphical fidelity or scope of an open world game, but it paints an emotional sense of place stronger than any video game I have played before, and makes Possum Springs feel like a living, lived in, small city.

I would say that was Night in the Woods’ greatest strength but it’s really its second greatest, behind the music, which is just phenomenal, and ahead of its third and fourth greatest strengths, the visual style and the characters.

At its core Night in the Woods is kind of like a 2D walking simulator, with some light platforming and very light puzzle elements, and a ton of charm. The writing is (mostly) sharp, the visuals are fantastic, and it’s the kind of game that includes both an overhead dungeon action game as a game within a game AND a well-polished rhythm minigame that is both fun and challenging, and marred only by the fact that you are somehow expected to read the subtitled lyrics and respond to a very fast note highway simultaneously, which I could not do.

In some ways Night in the Woods seems like it was strongly influenced by Ron Gilbert’s “The Cave," being a mostly narrative experience with some light platforming and more repetition than you’d like (the game uses repetition thematically, to create a sense of place and familiarity, but it also requires traversing the same easy areas again and again, especially if you want to do the game’s side-stories.) In others it seems almost like a visual novel, with lots of text, a few key choices that lock out other options, and very little gameplay.

That’s not to say that Night in the Woods doesn’t feel original, because it does. The striking art style does a lot to make the game stand out, since few games use these kinds of clean illustrations and bold colors, but even more than that Night in the Woods stands out from the way its writing hews closer to an independent film about a group of friends in a crumbling town than the traditional video game stories about adventure and violence. This is a story about characters who feel real and grounded, despite being anthropomorphic animals, and their experiences in a (mostly) normal situation in a (mostly) normal place. Mae Borowski, the protagonist, is a fantastic, layered character. She’s brave and strong, yes, but she’s also petulant, selfish, stubborn, self-doubting, and real. She is a step forward in relatable video game protagonists and while I didn’t always agree with what she did or the choices she made I always felt connected to her and her story.

Night in the Woods also engages with very adult themes, ranging from love and sexuality to the pain of growing up, being unpopular, the economic decline of the American middle class, how much it sucks to do a job you hate, and a lot of other important, interesting material. Most games that try to be about something real are ABOUT it in a way that's too focused to feel subtle and real. This is one of the reasons I didn't like Gone Home, because it was so focused on what was going on with the sister character that it shortchanged everything else in the family's life, pushing it to the periphery. Firewatch gets around this by moving its characters out to a national park, where their relationship is literally the only thing they have going on, but that's a bit of sleight-of-hand that Night in the Woods doesn't need. It is confident enough to tell a story about people and let the themes emerge more organically.

So why, if I like so much about Night in the Woods, do I say that it is less than the sum of its parts? Some of it is due to pacing problems caused by the fact that you have to check a lot of areas on the map for every day in the game, often to find there's nothing there, and I also have some other minor complaints (some of the minigames aren’t very engaging; after you finish the game you can either resume from right AT the end or you can clear your save but you can’t do a new-game+ or pick a chapter to play again, which this game SORELY needs.) Mostly though, the game is betrayed by its ending, which is, if not objectively terrible, than at least of far lesser quality than what came before it (I am specifically talking about the part BEFORE the epilogue.) The ending undercuts everything that has come before it and is a very confusing choice from a game that doesn’t make many false steps in its first three quarters.

I need to get more spoilery to explain specifics.

The fact that Night in the Woods botches the landing doesn’t take away from the good, even great, elements. It is still a beautiful game, Possum Springs is still a wonderful place to visit, and that soundtrack is one of the best I’ve ever heard. It is also a game that handles very mature themes very well, and I sincerely hope that future games learn from how Night in the Woods tells its story, at least until the end.

Some good games can be really ruined by a bad ending or a story that proves ultimately incoherent, but Night in the Woods is not such a game. For one thing it is longer than most games in this style; I think I probably put in about 10 hours (doing lots of side stuff and probably 2 hours playing Demontower, the game within a game). For another it’s fairly modular, broken into acts and chapters, and some of those self-contained stories are just gems.

You also cannot ruin beautiful art and great music through bad storytelling.

But if Night in the Woods had chosen to stick to the things it was doing so well and had wrapped up in a way I found satisfying I would probably count it as one of my favorite games of all time. As it is I consider it a flawed masterpiece; aesthetically beautiful and a strong step forward for video game storytelling, but with a big glaring issue that makes the whole package less compelling than the elements that make it up.

Hard to get deep without spoilers but I have a nuanced disagreement with it being a *botched/bad ending* since there are basically two common conclusions. One of such benefits a lot more from the ending than the other.

It seems to me that the real issue was that the two parts are wildly disconnected from one another. And if the two were overlapped better, they both would feel important.

@uh20: I think I understand what you're saying, and I agree that the bigger issue than the ending itself is the way it doesn't fit with the rest of the story, but I think even if the game did more to set that ending up it would not have been good. It feels disjointed, contrived, and the dialog is, frankly, weaker than it is in most of the game.

I think you may have edited your post, which previously said you couldn't fully explain yourself without spoilers. The comments at Giantbomb allow for spoiler tags (you can see them on the lower left of the comment toolbar) so I'd love to read whatever specific comments you have, and you can use the spoiler tags to make sure that nobody who doesn't want to see spoilers gets...spoiled.

I loved this game and would put it as one of my favorites in recent memory, but I agree that the ending certainly hurts the game's momentum and makes me a little less enthusiastic about the game than I want to be.

Regardless, I agree that despite the ending, Night in the Woods is a great game with a lot of memorable moments, both poignant and funny.

This is a well thought and thorough write up. I just finished the game moments ago and similarly I am so very conflicted

I agree with most of your points, particularly the ending being underwhelming and detracting from the rest of the game.

Mae's such an arsehole but I love her.

I feel like we somehow saw completely different endings.

@elmorales94:

Ending spoilers follow:

About the ending:

That said, I do think they did a solid job with the choices they decided to go with.

@bigsocrates:

All perfectly valid points. I'm not necessarily trying to dispute you-- more just trying to share my interpretation of the ending. The devs have been fairly candid in recognizing that both interpretations have can be valid, and I very much appreciate that this game leaves enough room for both of these vastly different conclusions to be drawn. I've just adopted this interpretation for myself because it is a better thematic fit, as well as a more interesting narrative direction. But to each their own.

@gunslingerpanda: 100% I feel the game didn't earn that ending. It was all over the map and then BAM! the ending was out of another freaking game completely...

I really needed this game. It came out at a time that I also felt like Mae, very disjointed and confused. I thought it was very cathartic. I hope to finish it soon.

As has been said by others in spoiler terms, don't take the ending so literally. This was a fantastic game that did a good job at covering the seemingly impossible - the feeling of being in a broken mental state that you cannot fix. Depression quest is the only other game that's done as well. What occurred in the story outside of the 'norm' helped to provide tension and drama to a dying town.

@oueddy: I don't really understand your comment. Don't take the ending literally? I didn't like it, either tonally or as a plot twist. It doesn't matter if it actually occurred within the game or was some weird delusion. It wasn't well done and didn't fit with the rest of the game.

I will say that 3 weeks after finishing the game, having given it time to settle, I agree even more with what I wrote. I have a lot of pleasant memories from individual episodes in the game and I think the art, music, and characters were spectacular, but the whole thing doesn't really fit together as a whole in my memory. It's inconsistent, not just with the ending but in other pieces, and its best parts are the vignettes of small town life. Not that there's anything super wrong with that. I still really liked the game! I just wish it fit together a bit tighter.

I don't expect to change whether you liked it or not, that's not possible, just explain my thoughts!

If it hadnt had more thrilling and seemingly supernatural thematic elements to it, would there have actually been anything worth playing for? I agree it was a fantastic slice of small town life, but its pacing was pretty darn slow (as you mentioned!) and without something to latch onto, it would have been a struggle to keep going. Did you ever watch or play Deadly Premonition and wish it'd just been about driving round town? What about Virginia or Firewatch (which you mentioned)? There's enough examples of similar mysteries to solve and Virginia used jump cuts and warped imagery to show the experience of an LSD trip that similarly did not 'fit' with the rest of the game.

@oueddy: I'm not criticizing that there were supernatural elements, I'm criticizing the specific elements that were in the game, and how the ending was handled. I think the game actually would have been fine without them, since they don't really surface towards the end anyway and the best parts of the game were the town/character moments, but the issue is with execution, not concept. The way it was done was bad. The ending was bad, both because it was clunky in itself and because it didn't fit with the rest of the game.

Also, Deadly Premonition with no supernatural elements and especially no long stupid ghost shooting sequences sounds great. The parts of that game that are good are the Twin Peaksy townfolks and Agent Morgan talking to Zach. The whole actual plot of the game? Meh. And the ghost shooting sequences were the worst part.

I don't have time to write out a long thing about this, but I'll just say for my part, I think the ending is quite good. I enjoyed the way the more supernatural/spiritual elements of the story were lightly dusted throughout the story, and while it does take a sharp turn toward the end, I don't think it's unearned at all. It fits with the themes of the story, and it's not so over-the-top that it feels antithetical to the tone of what you've been playing up to that point.

Understand if it didn't resonate for you, but it hit me just about right. Then again, I'm a sucker for spooky weirdness and cosmic dread, so maybe I'm just predisposed to this sort of thing.

@alex: I can see see why you would like it for its "Spooky/weirdness cosmic dread" elements, but my criticism isn't exactly that it's unearned, it's more...logistics.

The death cult just doesn't seem to fit in with what we've been told in the game leading up to it. There's that one boy who has been missing for awhile, but otherwise there's not really a discussion of a rash of disappearances, and when Mae tries to find out if anyone disappeared after she witnesses the abduction she's told that no, everyone is accounted for. They paper this over by saying that the cult goes after "drifters" and people who won't be missed, but we actually see a drifter in the game, the guy who is camping behind the church, and the pastor is looking out for him so that doesn't fit with the town either. That whole arc also seems odd in light of the death cult...are the people who don't want to let him stay in the church supposed to be part of the cult? Are they an analog to it? The supernatural happenings described were just too big to be hidden away in such a small town.

Then there's the fact that Mae and friends basically wipe out the town's elite in the cave-in, which means that things are going to radically change, but instead of seeing that change or grappling with the implications they just go to band practice and freeze frame. This makes all the earlier stuff from the rest of the game seem pretty unimportant. I was super invested in Bea's struggle around whether to run her father's store, or go to college, and how to build a life for herself, but it turns out those decisions didn't matter because she's going to jail for killing the town elders, or being swallowed by a cosmic horror or whatever. The life she was trying to make just got upended but we don't see any of that, and it diminishes the importance of what came before, at least for me. And one of the things I liked about the game is that it made those real life tough decisions important, and a focus. We're never going to face a cosmic horror but most of us will have to decide how much to sacrifice to help someone we love, and how to balance our personal ambitions with our family's needs.

Finally, the metaphor of a cult of old men sacrificing young people to preserve the wealth and power of a town was just a little too on the nose for me. That's just a personal thing, but I felt like it was a groaner.

So I get what you're saying, and obviously I respect your opinion and the way the game resonated with you, but I'm still frustrated with how it ended. Though I don't want to be too negative. As I said in my original post I still really really liked the game.

Just gotta slip this in, me and my wife loved this game but we both kind of hated the death cult thing. Still it's memorable and well worth the time we put into it; I still think about this game almost every day and I feel my life is lacking a little something now that it's over. I just want to see more of those characters. I hope they're okay.

@bigsocrates: A couple of things. I'll put 'em in spoiler blocks for those who don't want the full discussion.

@alex: Well thanks for writing out exactly what I was going to come to this thread to write out. Probably in a better, more easily understandable way. All that's left for me to do is clarify one thing:

The kid who gets kidnapped at Harfest is from a place near Possum Springs (or it could be a district of the town, it's never exactly stated) called Mulvay. Mae asks the teens who hang out in the tunnel if anyone is missing, and one of them says someone they know online from Mulvay hasn't been heard from since Harfest. Mae then implies that Mulvay is a terrible place, and tells the teens that they shouldn't even drive through it when one of them suggests checking it out. This conversation is totally missable, but adds a lot of context to the kidnapping, Casey's disappearance, and the fanatic nature of the cult.

It makes sense that the cult would abduct someone from Mulvay. From Mae's description, it's generally populated by people the cult deem unnecessary for the "greater good", so to speak. They never really get into whether people are looking for the kid, but I like to assume that their parents would, like Casey's parents did for him. It's just that no one in Possum Springs itself really cares because of Mulvay's reputation, and therefore a wider search is never conducted (except of course, the search done by Aunt Mall Cop. But I have my suspicions about her...)

Great write up. Totally agree about the ending. I followed the game's development quite closely and knew there were supernatural elements going in and knowing that they were there and not revealed until the end of part two made the game seem like a bit of a slog, albeit a very enjoyable one thanks to the characters, art, music, dialogue and overall charm. But the way it ended I think I'd have preferred it to be a simple text adventure, devoid of supernatural elements and maybe ending with Mae choosing to leave or stay in Possum Springs. As the ghost stuff started to ramp up I thought it was a representation of Mae's mental state and anxiety and the scene of her and Gregg on the sofa was superb, even if it was breaking the fourth wall a little bit. But the cult actually being real and not just a physical and manifestation of her symptoms just meant that the landing fell completely flat. But the journey to it was nevertheless fantastic