LogFAQs > #897935316

16. Night in the Woods
When I finished college, coming home for good was pretty effin weird. Living with parents again was awful. It suddenly felt a little awkward with at least one good group of friends I used to hang out with all the time, and it was weird that almost every food place closed at 11 or midnight and not 3 am. And even after college, I wasn't 100% sure what I was going to do with my life.

So Night in the Woods spoke to me in a lot of ways. It's about a... cat thing that drops out of college and heads home. She works on reconnecting with her old friends, her parents, and her community. Her parents are having financial troubles, her friends have grown up way faster than she has, and something is a little off.

The gameplay is simple. This is basically a light platformer, where you go around and talk to people, and decided which of your main friends to hang out with that day. That is it. You have the main storyline about your friendships, but by exploring the town each day, there are several mini-storylines that play out over the course of the game.

"Unlocking" all those stories could be pretty annoying though. You move pretty slow, and have to take some pretty windy paths to get everywhere in town. The game takes places over like 2 weeks or so, so you end up doing the same exact things 10+ times to talk to each person in town. Sometimes I wonder if I would have enjoyed the game a bit more if I had just went straight to the main storyline stuff of the day.

The game tries to mix it up a bit with an arcade game, and a guitar hero type mini game, but they both fall very flat, and are not fun to play.

While the main storyline is pretty simple, I thought it was a pretty cool and at times, powerful exploration of small town life, and the uncertainty and awkwardness that comes when you are at this transition from kid to adult in life. It ends up taking some... shocking and weird twists that I ended up not being a huge fan of. The story goes off in a direction that seems mostly unrelated that everything that happened before, and I just didn't love it. It doesn't really end satisfyingly at all with all the crazy stuff that just happened either. I'm sure there are some people that dove deep into trying to unpack everything that happened, but the twist kind of killed it for me. I enjoyed the more "human" parts of the game for sure, and I think there were a lot of way more logical ways they could have wrapped things up.
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I call girls "girlies".