Night in the Woods

Night in the Woods is a story-driven adventure game from Infinite Fall, a small team led by Alec Holowka, Scott Benson and Bethany Hockenberry. You play Mae Borowski, a cat who has dropped out of college and returned to her crumbling former mining town of Possum Springs to resume her aimless former life. The friends she left behind have grown and changed without her, the town itself feels different than she remembers, and the woods at the edge of town hold something that very much wants to remain in the dark.

The game is paced around the rhythms of a small town and the people in it. Most of your days involve walking around Possum Springs, talking to characters, climbing across roofs and powerlines (Mae is a cat — high places are her playground), pursuing optional side activities, and gradually accumulating fragments of a larger picture. Each friend has their own arc and only some of those arcs intersect with the central mystery, which the game treats as just one of several things Mae's life is currently dealing with.

The writing is unusually candid about depression, anxiety, post-industrial decline and the cost of leaving home — but the tone alternates lightness and weight rather than sitting permanently in either. The art style is bright and angular, the soundtrack moves between gentle indie folk and stranger ambient passages, and the supernatural thread building through the autumn nights eventually demands a reckoning that the game delivers on its own terms rather than the genre's. The result is one of the most distinctive narrative games of the last decade, and one of the most personal.