Night in the woods

Hear'e hear'e, there's a new game in market! Well to me is quite new, but that's not the case now. 

The name of the new game is 'night in the woods'.

The game is about a cat in her 20's and she is visiting her home after she was dropped out from college. Mae, an only child, has returned home to Possum Springs, where times have changed since the closing of its coal mines. Now living in her parents' attic, she uncovers a dark mystery that leads her into the nearby woods. Mae's friends include Bea, a cigarette-smoking alligator; Mae's best friend Gregg, a fox; and Gregg's boyfriend, a bear named Angus. Paste describes the themes covered as "mental illness, depression, the stagnancy of the middle and lower classes, and the slow death of small town America."

But the bulk of the experience isn’t so overtly monumental. It’s a quiet game, woven from small scenes between friends enjoying each other, hurting each other, reconciling and attempting to move forward with what remains.These scenes are, without exception, written beautifully. Even when the dialogue veers too cutesy, it feels true to a group of characters straddling a gap between adult and childhood that seems precipitously wide these days.Those characters are the game’s biggest strength. They’re all damaged in different ways, but in very believable, understandable ways, ways we’re all damaged. But each of these anthropomorphized animals also have more heart, depth and decency than most games boast in their entire human cast.Oddly, the one character I wouldn’t extend that last compliment to is Mae, Night in the Woods’ feline protagonist. She is often selfish, cruel, self-absorbed and destructive in ways that may be believable and relatable but rarely ever pleasant. Mae is somewhat redeemed by a childlike joy in simple pleasures, a streak of loyalty to her friends and some late-game realizations about her own failings, but only somewhat.After a scene where Mae belittles her parents for working for years so they could afford to send her to the college that she had just bailed on, I found it pretty difficult to re-engage with her. But I’m also a parent and feel a lot further from Mae’s side of the kitchen table than I used to.

It’s a bold choice to center a game on an unlikable character, and it’s an effective way of highlighting the virtues of the supporting cast. But the behavior of those other characters towards Mae, the way they work to preserve their relationships with her, makes me wonder if the game’s developers were fully aware of how grating their hero can sometimes come across.