LogFAQs > #933217911

#12





Years of release: 2017 (PC/PS4/XB1), 2018 (Switch)
Beaten?: Just the Bea path. Sorry Gregg, one day

It's a crisp autumn day, and somehow, I'm back at my old community college. I'm wearing my Seahawks hoodie and a pair of shorts unseasonable for the weather; my hair is slightly disheveled and my backpack strung along behind me by a single strap as I race up the stairs of the main building and into the library. At the counter, I impatiently ask the librarian if there's a book club meeting here today; she hesitantly replies yes, confused by the urgency of my question, but she doesn't know about the news I'm about to break to those unsuspecting literature snobs. I run past towering shelves of books too tall to reach their highest levels, bothering some people quietly studying for a science test, and I burst forth into the room where the book club is being held, the door dramatically swinging open and hitting the wall. A confused and frightened hush falls over the dozen people in the room, looking up from their copies of whatever dumb novel they were reading before I arrived and changed their lives forever.

"GUYS, THIS IS IMPORTANT," I shout excitedly in between labored breaths. "VIDEO GAMES ARE NOW ALSO ART."

And then I show them Night in the Woods, the whole thing. I show them its stunning art, its gorgeous music, its loveable characters, the way it uses an interactive medium to seamlessly blend all these features together, but most of all I show them its story. They see this story, a postmodern reflection on millennial depression and a requiem for the inevitable decay of lower and middle class America; they see its themes, and oh, how much they love their themes. They see all of these things and they fall to their knees, immediately and intuitively understanding that I am right. Their books are all bullshit, now. I have decisively won the war, and video games are, now and forever, officially Art.

Then I wake up, and I wonder why the hell I chose to frame the opening paragraphs of this writeup as a dream that I never had, and I wonder if I should start over. It's okay, I decide. I also frequently do not understand the ways in which Night in the Woods chooses to frame its story, I question the choices it makes, but I admire that it made those choices, and the best way I can honor it is to make some questionable choices myself.

There are narrative-driven video games that I like more than Night in the Woods, but I don't know if there are any that I would consider more important, more urgent, more relevant to the current time than this one. NitW is a game that probably hits something close to home for most people here; for me, it hit rather close indeed. Most games focus on gameplay challenges, but Night in the Woods is an emotional challenge. The game is at once easy to play and get wrapped up in, but also at times very difficult to continue, not for the events of the story itself but for the way they reflect back on my own life and the lives of people around me. At the time, I didn't know if it was hurting or healing to have a game dig this deeply into a wound, and looking back on it now I still don't know. Night in the Woods is a difficult game to grapple with.

But it's all okay, because NitW washes it all down with a heavy dose of warmth. At the same time as it's a cold bucket of water all over my head, it is also a warm, cozy blanket next to the fireplace with which I can nurse myself back to health from my hypothermia. This game ranks as high as it does because I realized that this game is going to stick with me for a long, long time, because its world feels so alive with the real, lived experiences of its writers, beautiful and moving in all the strangest ways, melancholy and thoughtful all while having a goofy smile on its face. I will want to return to this world someday to play through the story path that I did not see the first time, but I still need to give it some time to really recover. I hope that the game's final act will make more sense to me the second time I play the game.

Let's not forget the most important lesson here, however: aside from the cheapest frozen pizzas in the store that barely register as food, and some kind of freaky ass pizza that's topped with caviar and gold leaf or some shit, all pizza is Good As Hell.