by Jack Dotson
Nightmare Eyes
Night in the Woods (2017) is a single-player indie-adventure game developed by Infinite Fall in which players are expected to explore Possum Springs, a small Rust Belt community now long past its prime. The game’s protagonist is Mae Borowski, a college dropout returning home to reconnect with friends after suffering a dissociative episode. The goal is to progress through each day while following the main storyline, which typically follows Mae’s three closest friends: Bea, Gregg, and Angus. Certain objectives must be reached in order to progress: specific characters must be spoken with, people must be visited, certain areas must be explored. However, new dialogue options will be made available with the many other citizens of Possum Springs daily. These interactions are completely optional and have little to no bearing on the overall story.
Night in the Woods has been lauded by many in the video game community for its representation of mental disorders depicted through its characters. Initial observations of these characters and how they demonstrate such disorders are often superficial, with very little analysis being dedicated to how exactly the game addresses mental illness. It is made abundantly clear that, prior to the events of Night in the Woods, Mae suffered from acute derealization—an incident in her youth caused her to brutally disfigure one of her classmates in what the town has quietly dubbed “The Incident” (see Video 1). In spite of years of counseling, Mae relapsed into an episode of fear once away at college, too paralyzed to leave her room in the fear that everything would spontaneously lose meaning again. Her return home is initially unexplained, but eventually Mae admits that it was to find something familiar, something which resembles more to her than just meaningless shapes.
The way which the game presents this road of recovery is subtle, so much so that for many it scarcely even appears as such. There is something to be said about the structure of the game, the way it offers but rarely ever requires the player to more closely interact with other characters ,not just once but on a daily basis. Night in the Woods depicts a journey of escaping dissociative trauma through optional dialogue, which requires determined persistence and a commitment to actively participating in the world around the player. By offering a number of additional side quests initiated by voluntarily opening dialogue with characters, this game simulates a path of recovery from an episode of dissociation, a journey of finding meaning in the world at large.
Gregg Rules, Okay?
Early in the game, players are given the choice of hanging out with either Gregg or Bea several times in addition to that day’s normal activities. This is one of those mandatory objectives that players are required to complete; it is not optional like dialogue between most other characters, though the player can only choose to be with one character at a time. Four such missions are made available throughout the game, and players can choose to switch between the two friends at any given point, though this dynamic brings up a harsh reality, that Mae is unable to commit to both; everyone can’t be happy, and some will be neglected, if only for a while.
Committing to being with either of the two characters for all four days does have some payoffs, however. Early missions are fairly lighthearted: Mae can either mess around at the mall with Bea or steal an abandoned car’s battery with Gregg to power the remains of a forgotten supermarket’s animatronic mascot. The longer the player stays with either, however, the more complicated and emotionally naked their interactions become.
Reaching the fourth and final mission for either Bea or Gregg is only attainable if Mae has spent the majority of her time with them; who the player spends their final adventure with depends on who they have dedicated the most attention to. Either character will only truly open up about what troubles them once Mae has demonstrated that she can be trusted with those feelings – actually listening to those problems requires both her and the player to be grounded in the reality which they are presented with.
From his introduction, Gregg is shown to be a tremendously fun-loving and often scatterbrained character. He works at the town’s newly opened supermarket, having been unable to go away for college, and is often found goofing off from his duties, sometimes even implicating Mae. His first mission, as previously stated, involves salvaging the battery from a car wreck for reasons which he declines to give at first, an ordeal which he lovingly refers to simply as “crimes.” Subsequent missions involve stealing a broken supermarket mascot only to reassemble it with said battery and leave it operating in the middle of the woods. The absurd nature of his mid-day activities makes his third and fourth missions that much more poignant, as it’s revealed that he has been struggling to make sense of his relationship with Angus and understand his own worth as a partner.
The solemn moment together is sudden, but it is also a telling one. Gregg and Mae are shown to be good friends well before the events of the game, though they are never so emotionally honest with one another as they are here (see Image 1). This interaction, then, is an antithesis to the battles Mae has been fighting. It requires her to actively engage with the people around her and to appreciate the world outside of her own head; while the mission itself may not be altogether optional, it does require some commitment to reach this point. The scene asks Mae to become an active member of the world around her and understand something vitally important about one of her closest friends, that Gregg might not actually be okay.
Come At Me, You Demons
Upon completing her first few days in Possum Springs, Mae will open her college laptop only to find that it has become infected with malware, rendering the device entirely unusable. After embarking on a short quest to find help, Mae eventually finds help in Angus, whom she has yet to meet in earnest. Angus agrees to not only fix the laptop, but also to install a video game that Mae has not played in years: Demontower. Their exchange is brief, but still Mae expresses her gratitude to Angus. She departs, and Demontower now becomes accessible as a playable minigame at the end of each day.
The exact structure of Demontower as a minigame is interesting in that it reinforces the idea of choice which permeates Night in the Woods. Its gameplay consists mostly of clearing floors of enemies to find a key, which unlocks the floor’s boss area and allows the player to progress further up the tower. Apart from the action of playing the minigame itself being completely voluntary, Demontower integrates additional aspects of optionality in how players are expected to complete it. For starters, each floor does not need to be entirely emptied of enemies before progressing; the player needs only to find each floor’s key before ascending, eliminating only those enemies which actively stand in their way. The game even possesses an optional secret ending the player can achieve by completing a secret code right before the final boss, a code which is given in pieces at the beginning of certain levels.
The gameplay offered in Demontower is far from the most interesting aspect of its optionality, however. After completing the seventh day, quite some time after the first encounter with Angus, he finally asks Mae about her progress with the video game and if she had beaten it (see Image 2). The conversation is rather banal, especially since it is a completely missable exchange passed before a session of band practice with other characters, but it also changes depending on the player’s progress with Demontower. The dialogue between them can vary from admitting that the player has hardly even touched Demontower since finding it to surprising Angus with news about the secret ending. Reaching that secret ending opens up the conversation further, with Angus going so far as to offer installing more games like Demontower. It ends on a rather touching note, with Mae informing Angus that he is, in fact, a good guy.
This brief but decisive interaction with Angus is pivotal to Mae’s character for a number of reasons. For one, it validates her efforts in completing Demontower, even if that accomplishment is relatively small compared to the many other things she could be doing. More importantly, however, it greatly supports an argument that Mae is trying to be better. Video game addiction has long been understood as a method of escapism; significant research has been conducted to suggest that delving into those worlds of unreality may very well serve as a dangerous coping mechanism to avoiding real-life struggles. By taking her experience with Demontower and channeling it into a way of bonding with Angus, Mae proves that she is able to overcome that temptation, that she is able to enjoy distractions while still remaining grounded and present in the real world. In a way, Mae successfully slays her own demons.
That’s a Whoppah!
One of the longer optional missions offered by Night in the Woods involves talking with Mae’s father, Stan, upon returning home at the end of each day. The action can quickly become one of the many routines which the game encourages players to develop, providing a comfortable way to end each evening. These interactions with Stan are often limited to banter about the day’s activities and Stan’s struggle with finding meaning in his blue-collar job. Exploring the Borowski home reveals something more interesting, however. In the crawl space of the second floor, Mae can encounter a number of boxes blocking entry to the attic, boxes which she immediately deduces were left behind by her father. Refusing to move them herself, Mae decides to bring it to Stan: a simple task which quickly becomes a war of attrition.
If the player chooses to continue their nightly exchanges with Stan for several days, their efforts arerewarded with the briefest hint that he might be inclined to move the boxes. He will, that is, if Mae agrees to watch television with him. Persevering and enjoying several more nights of Stan’s favorite show, “Garbo and Malloy,” eventually leads Stan to relent and offer to clear the attic. Nightly conversations with Stan will still be available, but the original mission is complete; the way is now open.
What follows is perhaps the most demanding puzzle the game offers, not necessarily due to the difficulty of the task but because of the meaning which the player must derive from it. At the end of the attic space the player will encounter a safe, the code for which is hidden in a bookshelf of the Borowski home. Within this safe, for reasons initially impossible to discern, lies a single tooth. Mae herself admits that the discovery is a rather odd one; the player, in a similar manner, is left wondering over the hassle to find this small obscure object (see Images 3-6).
The beauty of this discovery is that it manages to tie in the true meaning of the tooth with Mae’s relationship with her grandfather and, in a way, Stan. Progressing well into the game will eventually lead the player on a mandatory mission to a library with Bea, where they will be tasked with navigating microfilm in search of an obituary. Hidden among the documents is a small, perfectly avoidable story concerning the miners of Possum Springs. The story relays how workers on strike once resorted to knocking out the teeth of their foreman, with each man claiming a tooth as a prize. Given the fact that Mae’s family has a history in the mines, her tooth is likely one such artifact. In a bizarre, roundabout way, this tooth and the trouble which the player goes through to find it represent a way of family bonding unlike any other encountered in Night in the Woods. Mae’s determination to explore her house leads not only to a discovery about her own family history, but also an opportunity to catch up with her old man.
Works Cited
Fernández-Vara, Clara. Introduction to Game Analysis. Routledge, 2024.
Giardina, Alessandro, et al. “Problematic gaming, social withdrawal, and escapism: The compensatory-dissociative online gaming (C-dog) model.” Computers in Human Behavior, vol. 155, June 2024, p. 108187, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2024.108187.
“Infinite Fall Developed Games.” Giant Bomb, www.giantbomb.com/infinite-fall/3010-9499/developed/.
Law, James. “Night in the Woods and Representation of Mental Illness.” Medium, Medium, 15 Mar. 2018, medium.com/@jameslaw_68046/night-in-the-woods-and-representation-of-mental-illness-dbab9ef155c8.
Night in the Woods, Infinite Fall (2017)
Night in the Woods, www.nightinthewoods.com/.
“Secret Lab.” Secret Lab, secretlab.games/. Slim, Primm. “Talking to and sleeping with Bea on the couch – night in the woods.” YouTube, 23 Apr. 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XS6uh00n08A.
