Love this piece! The idea that ‘in retrospect, bad times seem to lack a concrete beginning’ is I think very strong. At the end of everything, hold onto anything-and it is always the end. In this light, Night in the Woods’ tagline becomes ever more urgent. Their roots go back decades, centuries-the past cascading down into the present, the present becoming the past.
While it is true that disasters never really end, Night in the Woods reminds us that they never really begin, either. The governments that failed to heed the warnings, the ways we’ve been taught to think about each other. It’s an understandable impulse, but to do so is to ignore how we got here and why the pandemic still rages on today. There’s a desire to view the year either as aberration or threshold, to separate the time before COVID-19 from the now. Similarly, the phrase “the new normal” has been repeated ad infinitum in the UK government’s messaging about the virus. The awfulness of 2020 has become something of a cultural touchstone-a scapegoat for the varied political and personal horrors we find ourselves living through. The true tragedy, though, is that the halcyon past does not exist. Neither Mae nor the cultists can return to the blissful past they imagine. Even its origin story, referenced by the lead cultist in the final confrontation, features a poisoned spring. What we see of the town’s past suggests violent upheaval and widespread worker exploitation. The kidnappings have been going on for years. 4 What stands out to me, though, is that there is no origin point for Possum Springs’ troubles. The connection between Mae’s misplaced nostalgia and the cult’s desire to return to the town’s heyday has been widely commented on-the game is deeply concerned with what happens when you try too hard to recapture what’s long gone. They claim that doing this will ensure the town’s prosperity. A group of the town’s elders-“a buncha old boys doing their damnedest to protect their own and their neighbors”-abduct society’s most vulnerable to feed them to the beast. Your carefully planned routine is shattered.Īt the end of the game, you discover there is a pit deep in the town’s mines that houses a Lovecraftian horror. Your plans are cancelled, your life is thrown awry. Only the endgame doesn’t wait-the scripted events leading up to it trigger after you’ve investigated only two things. In the language of videogames, it’s clear what this means: when you’ve done all three, the endgame will begin. You are given three potential clues to investigate in any order you choose. The restless, doomscroll-esque quality of the gameplay fits this model, too: the events belong to the past, but the expression to the now.Ībout two-thirds of the way through Night in the Woods, Mae investigates a kidnapping she witnessed. Looking back, though, it gains a sinister significance: the present stains the past. The growing horror in Night in the Woods is far more solid and palpable than anything I experienced before lockdown an occasionally mentioned news story, a small-but-growing number of cases. Sprinkle that with a growing sense of dread-a severed arm, an abundance of ghost stories, frequent nightmares-and you have something that more resembles early March 2020.
Playing Night in the Woods in lockdown, though, just walking through a busy street and hanging out with friends, felt like the height of escapism. It’s easy to find parallels here with the pandemic experience: stagnation, limitation, flattened routine, “doomscrolling.” 3 Take your pick.
You may learn that examining things or speaking to people multiple times sometimes nets you new information-from then on, you click things repeatedly. From a gameplay perspective, this means you spend much of your time walking around, looking for new content.
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