Night in the Woods
Like it or not, darkness is coming
$19.99 Developer Infinite Fall, nightinthewoods.com Requirements OS X 10.8 or later
Night in the Woods opens with mysteries: Why did Mae Borowski, a dark blue anthropomorphic cat with a ragged right ear, burn out of college? Why does she keep having nightmares? And who dropped something grisly outside the Clik-Clak Diner at the edge of town?
Answering these questions requires spending plenty of time with (and as) Mae, which isn’t always a pleasant proposition: She’s brash, naive, and feckless, with a knack for saying exactly the wrong thing to her eternally patient friends and family. Still, Mae is incisively written and believable, and Night in the Woods draws its strength from her flaws and her redemption.
Structurally, Night in the Woods operates on a day and night schedule, autumnal afternoons stretching into spooky dusk. Every morning, Mae chats with her church receptionist mother before heading into town; when her hijinks are complete, she watches TV with her butcher father before bed. Then there are your friends: Gregg, a hyperactive fox who works at a bodega called the Snack Falcon, and Bea, a surly crocodile stuck running her father’s hardware store. Night in the Woods is hauntingly pretty and written with sharp, heartfelt dialog that both indulges Mae and her friends’ sardonic imaginations, and captures her parents’ rural vernacular.
Night in the Woods’ pacing is languid and relaxed. Since Mae has no job, she spends the bulk of her time exploring historic Possum Springs, an aging, deindustrialized Appalachian town. Mae wiles away the hours chatting with neighbors, putt-putt golfing, stargazing, getting into knife fights, playing bass guitar, feeding rats, and investigating local ghost stories. Rudimentary jumping and running help Mae find Possum Springs’ most elusive nooks and crannies, but Night in the Woods is a narrative adventure at heart.
The cumulative effect of these scenes and conversations is that Mae starts to grow up as Possum Springs and its citizens become fully realized. It is, like so many others, a small town in decline, dotted with closed storefronts and haunted by abandoned mines and mills. Night in the Woods explores poverty honestly and earnestly, without ever feeling voyeuristic. Instead, it focuses on the personal: the Borowskis’ bad debt, Mr. Santello’s deepening depression, the doe working nights at the video rental so that her mother can watch her newborn.
Night in the Woods’ strong suits are its dialog and characterization, but it falters by cramming too much of its whodunit into the last quarter, often through exposition. The day-night cycle is partly to blame, too: speaking to each character every day eventually feels like a chore, even when it leads to a funny quip or poignant anecdote. The relative lack of action may also grate.
the bottom line. Funny, nostalgic, and melancholy, Night in the Woods is a coming of age story that recognizes that “of age” is a more nebulous and precarious concept than it was a generation ago.