By Ekaterina Photis
The Void of Truth
Fate is a cunning entity. When caught at the junction of promise and disaster, fear has a way taking over as a survival instinct. Some cling to the crumbs of their past for dear life, hoping to be saved; others choose to stand up and save themselves. When one is so afraid of losing what truly matters to them, losing all else in order to protect it becomes simple. Otherwise, the void will not cease to tear you apart.
When thrust into the game of Night in the Woods, the player takes on a story of change and finding your way, even against odds. Created by the team Infinite Fall in 2017, Night in the Woods is a 2D side-scroll story adventure game following an anthropomorphic cat, Mae, who has just returned to her hometown of Possum Springs after suddenly dropping out of college. Its’ simple gameplay has the player running about town, prompting dialogue boxes, discovering the stubborn history of this Rust-Belt-inspired neighborhood as you go.
Though cute and cartoonish, the game’s darker art style nods to the thematic contrasts of a narrative filled with humor and sarcasm amidst the unfolding of real-life struggle and horror. With an incredibly story-focused and character-driven game, the player can make decisions that loosely affect the way that the story unfolds by guiding along different dialogue paths and relationships. But no matter the players’ choices, Mae is still ultimately pitted against the uncovering of sinister town secrets as they relate to the closing of the town’s coal mines and the heartbreaking disappearance of their close friend Casey.
In Mae’s plans to re-explore her childhood stomping grounds, it becomes immediately evident that much has changed; the whole town of Possum Springs simply exudes abandonment. The majority of its youth have dispersed in search of brighter prospects, leaving behind the town elders who linger like ghosts, clinging to familiar traditions in hopes of preserving the town’s memory. As once a thriving mining community bolstered by a strong union, Possum Springs is now bursting with murals, monuments, and memorials as testaments to its former vibrancy.
The characters’ dialogue surrounding the miners and their memory shows them immortalized almost as legends, heroes of the town’s most nostalgic and fixated-upon time in its history. However, in the passing couple of generations, as the mines closed, the glass factories failed, and the world changed, Possum Springs struggled to adapt. For however long it’s been able to stay afloat, the town has begun to spiral into financial struggle, and as Mae returns, she is shocked by the reality of how much has changed in her absence. Businesses have died out, people have left, and what remains of the town youth are a group of bored, frustrated emo kids hanging out in tunnels and playing with garbage (see Images 1 and 2). Night in the Woods is laden with themes of death, ghosts, and the eldritch horrors that lurk beneath (and above) the town surface, each serving as a whimsical motif for a deep, terminally diseased economic system. Night in the Woods draws these cultural and religious connections from America’s Rust Belt as a parallel thought-line to the distant lack of economic control in the face of impoverishment, and it calls players to take a look at what truly is lacking in community, what truly is The Hole at the Center of Everything.
The Unsuspecting Protagonist
When Mae returns home, her excitement to return to everything she had done as a kid is palpable. She climbs powerlines, hangs out with friends, goes to band practice, and lets the stress of college melt away as she immerses herself back into her comfort zone of childhood. Except, it’s not quite like her childhood anymore. Something is weird—her best friend Gregg is. . . working? Full-time? And so are the rest of her bandmates, Bea and Angus? This simply doesn’t do for Mae, as she continues to roll her eyes at any mention of school or work. While it’s clear to the player that something has driven Mae away from school, no amount of prompting from her mother or her friends will have Mae open up about her struggles grasping reality. Instead, a more befitting day for Mae looks like running about the town, talking to everyone, and trying to find something that catches her attention or a friend willing to go on an adventure (see Image 3).
Mae’s non-adult-conforming tendencies have made her an interesting sponge for town intel that simultaneously isn’t taken seriously by anyone. While there is a clear divide between the adults and the youth of the town, Mae is somehow stuck in the middle of it all. Everyone exists in their own spheres, everyone a recluse, and Mae picks up on the town context in pieces. On her first day back with her friends, she learns of the disappearance of her old friend Casey, a recent mystery that is otherwise completely non-evident in Possum Springs, seldom one missing person poster at the downtown bulletin. The people in town seem so disturbingly unmoved by this with no real effort being put forth to find him. Those who would care seem content assuming that Casey hopped a train to better pastures. That is, however, until Halloween night when Mae witnesses the shadow of a kidnapping, assuming the culprit to be a ghost. After being stopped in pursuit of this ghost by Mae’s police officer aunt, her aunt is at best apathetic and at worst annoyed with Mae. Her demands do nothing to quell Mae’s concern, so players spend most of the game looking and sounding crazy in an effort to find someone who believes her. Though players understand Mae’s perspective, her long line of immaturity makes it easy for people to dismiss her new superstitious fixation.
Though some may interpret Mae’s daily childlike rituals about the town as symptoms of boredom or distraction, others will notice that Mae is lending her ear to the town’s quietest, nearly forgotten denizens. She listens to people who don’t have anyone to listen to them. Mae has a neighbor named Selmers, a poet who the player can choose to talk to every day. If players let her, she’ll recite a silly little poem that she’s recently come up with. If Mae talks to her enough, she’s eventually get to hear Selmers’ slam poem about how her entire generation lost their futures to the insatiable appetite of industry leaders in Silicon Valley. Beyond that, keeping a regular rapport with Selmers guarantees that, near the end of the game, when Mae herself is on the brink of death, Selmers will tell Mae’s parents how much she appreciated Mae listening to her (see Images 4, 5, and 6). Even if Mae didn’t hold up any traditional adult responsibilities, for her character and attentiveness to Selmers alone, Selmers admits it isn’t fair that Mae of all people should have the trouble she has, saying, “Where’s the God in that?”
Night in the Woods even begins with an interactive poem. The player understands it to be about the recent passing of Mae’s Granddad and the ghost stories he would quote from memory in his hospital bed. The players’ two quote options read as: “They went looking for the gods, / And died in lonely places” or “They feared death / So they ate the young.”
The Crux: When Civilization Considers You Obsolete
When traveling about the town, Mae sees the whole spectrum of hope spread around Possum Springs. Most of the current residents are people who either have no other options or are blindly holding out for a crumb of hope that the town will begin to restore to its former prosperity. Of the adults wrongly misguided in that faith is a group of bickering, opinionated, busybodies that function as the city council. Mae consistently runs into this little collective, arguing over the best methods of “catching the market’s attention” as if it has eyeballs so that they can bring businesses and jobs back to Possum Springs. This attitude drives the council to disapprove pushes of mutual aid for the struggling townsfolk in order for them to cling to the last bit of positive image the council thinks will save them, as if all people have to do to bring opportunity back to a dying community is be “worthy” of the market’s attention.
Mae sees this particular struggle between the city council and the church’s Pastor Kate, who is pushing to employ unused sections of the church to house those in need, like the friendly drifter living in the woods near the church named Bruce. The council ultimately shuts this down despite the pastor’s substantial action and consistent prayers. This is where we see the first battle between the community working together and the community working for whatever the market demands. What the council fails to consider is that the market is never going to afford the town any more notice than it already has. The market didn’t leave because the town’s people lost track of their own merits; the world simply moved on and left Possum Springs in its own dust.
Next to Mae’s neighbor Selmers is her old science teacher Mr. Chazokov. Every few days, the player has the option to climb up to the roof of his apartment complex to gaze at the constellations through his telescope and he will tell you all the moral lessons people have learned and placed in the sky (see Video 1).
It’s not surprising that Mae’s instincts would be blind to this interpretation as all of Possum Springs is being treated just the same as Sterling and have been led to think that’s normal. Mr. Chazakov is drawing a parallel here between the way religious knowledge was rendered obsolete by advancements in science to the way labor workers’ skills were rendered obsolete by manufacturing services. However, when paired with Simone the Fighter, Mae sees the strength a community can have in fighting the chokehold of oppression. When speaking to a woman named Rosa who knew Mae’s Grandfather, she reminisces that, “Back then there were places that brought us all together, the church and the union.” Both of these places (yet again parallelling action in theism with action in economics) served as hubs for the community where they would share common values. With the rise in agnosticism, the people have also raised their isolation from one another, creating such detached, miserable residents.
Soon into the game, Mae begins to have nightmare dream sequences every night, through which the player will have to navigate. Following her witness of a kidnapping, her nightmares will only get worse and worse, each of them culminating in world-ending horrors rising from the ground, out of Mae’s control. In her last nightmare, she speaks with a creature she, at first, assumes to be God (see Video 2).
This conversation begins to break Mae. Not only is she now questioning her existence and everything she has known, but she can’t even manage to find anyone who is able to understand her. To find answers to this nightmare, Mae tries to speak with Pastor Kate. If anyone could convince her that this was no God for Mae to be concerned with, she believed it would be a Pastor. However, the conversation turns sour when Pastor Kate admits that even her own faith in God waivers; she experiences doubt just like anyone else. For Mae, this is maddening and concerning: How could she get up and preach that God is real every week if she wasn’t even sure? To this, the pastor expresses that she sees her job more as a service to the community than a requirement of unwavering faith. Mae is unhappy with this answer and leaves somewhat worse off than before.
After this, in the game’s final chapter, Mae decides to travel to the abandoned mines herself and figure out the answers to this ghost kidnapper and these god nightmares. With her friends joining her, they travel at night, into the woods, only to discover the hideout of a cult who have been sacrificing the towns young, including their friend Casey, to an eldritch god named The Black Goat for generations (see Video 3).
The cult’s bases are simply riddled with irony: they want to save the children, yet they sacrifice them; they want to hold their town afloat, yet they destroy the ones who would be its legacy; they worship this god, yet they mobilize together only for the destruction it creates. Just as the way the city council bends to the markets will, the older generation that makes up this cult would rather let this hole at the center of their community eat them all up before they consider working together or relying on each other. This cult claims to only purge the youth with no futures, yet they do nothing to set any of the youth up for better.
The antipathy between the town elders and the youth only grows and cracks under these forms of idolization. Not only do the youth’s sufferings fall short in the cult’s eyes, but the youth are put to blame for their failings as well. The cult’s worship and sacrifices do nothing for the community as a whole – it only makes its members themselves feel safe. They blindly follow a god with no form of their interests in mind, somehow believing that it should pay them mind in return, yet they ignore their own neighbors, values, and assets to mobilize for good amongst them. Just as the opening poem quotes, not only do they fear their own death so badly that they eat their young, but they are also desperately looking for the gods and still dying in lonely places. It’s an empty battle to fight alone. These sacrifices give the cult an illusion of control and importance when really this chasm holding The Black Goat represents that uncontrollable spiral in search of being saved. They believe it feeds them, yet it eats away at them. Much like the city council’s views of the market, they turn to whatever autonomous force they can in hopes that appeasing it will return their good fortune; but there is no special ritual or strategy that will garner the arbitrary attention of these forces without looking to aid the suffering of their own people. This blind complacency is exactly where religion loses its meaning. Their faith is no longer bringing them together or providing explanations of comfort: their faith is suffocating them and distancing their values further from what will save them.
The Salvation: How Do You Fix a Broken Society?
At the start of Mae’s endeavor to uncover proof of the ghost kidnapper, the player can go on 2 of 3 expeditions with Gregg, Angus, or Bea. If you go with Angus and hike to the peak of the mountain trail, Angus will open up to Mae about his childhood while they look to the constellations (see Video 4).
What players see from Angus is that there is still a path to solace and spiritual fulfillment for youth, even once they’ve been horribly wronged and abandoned. Even if that peace comes from deflating religion itself, Angus has still found a way to understand that his community is what is most important to believe in. In its own backwards way, faith still brought him back to his people, just not in the traditional sense of communing at church. Angus shines light to all the fictionalized ways we create meaning, but he chooses to focus on the people who created those stories in the first place, not the omnipotent beings we think are behind them. Religious faith is not about complacency and hoping to be worthy of change; it is about believing in the thing that can give you the strength to push on and to push forward. For Angus, that’s Gregg. For some, it can even be a symbol that reminds us that it’s not up to any powerful beings to care if we don’t care ourselves.
Before Mae’s encounter with the cult, the player has the opportunity to guide Mae into the church library to take a catnap and take her mind off of the ghostly horrors that have been haunting her. The music turns tender, the soft light shines through the window, and just as she dozes off, the ghost of her Granddad will appear across the room. Kindly and silently, he will approach Mae on the couch and sit with her for as long as the player allows, signaling a comfortable rest spot for both Mae and the player to ease their hearts. This reassuring meeting shows a glimmer of hope that the youth have not yet entirely been abandoned by the elders. Mae’s closeness with her Grandad and his presence with her serves to be the hope that lingers in spite of the hole at the center of everything (See Video 5).
If players explore the Borowski house enough, they will find an old crawlspace to the basement that Mae discovers contains a safe belonging to her late Grandad. Inside his safe, Mae finds a tooth. Being both odd and compelling, Mae decides to hold onto it. It’s not until Mae begins her ghost investigations that the player has the possibility to stumble upon an article that seems to explain Grandad’s ownership of this strange family heirloom (see Image 7).
As a descendant of this strangely virtuous cult, players gleam that Mae comes from a line of people who care about their values as a community of workers. Though through gruesome means, the symbol of this strange but true history stands as a key, a vow that has been locked away, protected, and forgotten about by Possum Springs. In Mae’s bored exploration, she has now unearthed it and unearthed all of Possum Springs along her journey. The cult of The Black Goat is ultimately left for dead in a collapsing of the mine, creating a fresh slate of hope in a strangely casual epilogue. Mae wakes up only slightly more refreshed than recent after her harrowing night in the woods, and after promising her mom to come back for dinner, she heads to band practice. As Mae steps out of the house, with the first snow bringing autumn to an end, she first talks with her dad about work (see Video 6).
Mae’s passing of this tooth is her resurging the cycle of the community standing up for themselves. No matter how oppressive the workplace, Mae’s new lease on life has her ready to “breathe fire” for the values of the people. Her dad admits what he knows to be right: that they need a union, that they need to re-emulate the strengths that workers used to have. Even if it seems impossible, he finds the will in the support of his daughter, his late father, and his co-workers who are begging for hope just the same. Together, like Simone the Fighter, they can enter the flames with the tooth as their symbol of power. Real sustainable change starts at a grassroots level; and all the characters of Night in the Woods who are caught in this mess of powerful forces can begin to find the strength amongst each other, to finally reform what it means to be someone in this town.
The End of Everything
Night in the Woods and its representation of America’s Rust Belt paints the markets economic power to being akin to that of an apathetic god. Religion and economics play off of each other, sending the characters down a spiral that has them losing sight of the need to band together as townsfolk and care for one another. The people of Possum Springs have gotten so used to being forgotten that they began to block the world out themselves, surviving off of hopelessness and bitterness. Most townsfolk don’t care to talk to one another, so Mae’s engaged presence and abundance of free time has shaken up the town’s norms.
Players learn so much from Mae about the stubborn troubles in town, as well as the people who give it a bit of hope. For a town filled with reminders of how the miners once succeeded, the town has done little to support those wanting to continue those practices of protection for the people. While fear has driven many in the older generation to desperate means of worship, this game shows how unproductive their methods are without the piece of community. Be it the cult or be it the city council, they are encouraging stagnancy in Possum Springs while simultaneously sabotaging any chance of opportunity that’s left.
Though Mae can’t quite make sense of it yet, her return to her hometown is undoubtedly the inspirational seed that returns the moment of power to the people. With Pastor Kate, we see a religious figure keeping her focus on serving the congregation, not God. With Mr. Chazakov, the state of the town’s education seems to be one of provoking thought in one’s actions and learning from the history we have in front of us. From her father, Mae sees the breaking point of frustration in the workforce as they garner the confidence to picket for their rights. And from Mae herself – from her friends and neighbors – we see the small ways that everyone serves society: through poems; through conversation; through taking responsibility, even when it’s hard; and through recognizing the importance other people have in your life. Community is the skeleton key, not the market, not complacent worship – but action with your fellows. Through Mae, Possum Springs has been given the chance to have true faith, faith in anything that will give them the strength to push on and punch back for the good of their friends and families. As the game’s tagline says, “At the end of everything, hold onto anything.”
WORKS CITED
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goodcowgames. “Night in the Woods (PS4) – Dusk Stars, Sterling the Seer and Simone the Fighter.” YouTube, 24 Sept. 2023, youtu.be/cgRwNnEiUMk?si=xp3hYZ68FMLJdE5M.
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Oliva, Ricardo. “Night in the Woods: Meeting God?” YouTube, YouTube, 26 Nov. 2018, www.youtube.com/watch?v=fNs_sdEfcuk.
Saas, Dawn. “‘night in the Woods’ Is Soulful, Empathetic, and Too Real.” VICE, 2 Mar. 2017, www.vice.com/en/article/nz5vzm/night-in-the-woods-is-soulful-empathetic-and-too-real.
Seaid, Hassan. “Night in the Woods-Angus Tells Mae about His Childhood.” YouTube, 6 Sept. 2019, youtu.be/kjZvbu8mPvg?si=5HT9hD7oxyfCpCRI.
Tiger, Ancient. “Night in the Woods Cult Ending.” YouTube, 6 Dec. 2020, youtu.be/PEA8IJRnnvA?si=pmomUBR5YmzLQGYM&t=998.
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