Night in the Woods

I believe in a universe that doesn't care, and people that do.

my early years as a teen was spent with my best friend, playing this game at her house for hours. Now we have two kids and are married, and on our anniversary in a week were going to spend time together replaying this masterpiece of nostalgia.

Truly a life changing experience for me. I come back every few years for a fresh playthough, and each time I walk away relating to different characters and with a new perspective. If you want to fall in love with an atmospheric game that wears its heart on its sleeve, this is the one.

This game is so important to me. It has permanently increased my standards for writing in video games, which is unfortunate because I have never found another game like it. It's hard to describe everything that makes this game so perfect.
I hope someday something this good gets made again. Until then, I'll just be replaying NITW every October forever.

“I believe in a universe that doesn't care and people who do.” -Angus Delaney
A quote that stayed with me reminded me that even if the universe is possibly meaningless and we have no purpose in the grand scheme of everything, the people around us make it matter. We matter.

Even in a universe that doesn’t care, we matter because we care.

amazing game 10/10 art, music, dialogue, characters, etc

I've known about this game for a really long time, and every time someone tells me to play it, I think, "I should, huh?" and then just kind of never do. I live my life, do my daily things. Go with it. Then, I finally decide to buy the game. And, just like that, magically, everything in the game's premise lines up with mine (except the whole - you know). But, everything else? All too familiar. All too real. All too relatable. Leaving. Coming back. Bad job. Giving up. Growing up. Seeing people leave. Worries. Numbers. And... it just felt like, this game 'waited' for me to be ready to play it. Probably just a coincidence, but to me, that's something magical. I definitely recommend this game. I wouldn't be typing this out if I didn't. It gets you thinking. It doesn't matter if you learn anything from it. It doesn't matter if it changes or doesn't change your life. It happened, you played it, something something something. It's just a part of you now, and well, I think, that's what it's supposed to be.

The best way to describe my experience playing this game is like taking out the laundry while knowing the world is slowly ending.
You're placed in a world that's painfully mundane, a small town in the middle of nowhere. You spend your days mucking about with your friends, listening to the gossip of strangers on the street and going to bed every evening, in the same room, in the same house. It's a place where nothing happens, but where something is just wrong.
At first it's your character's feelings of aimlessness as she tries to navigate being an adult. Then comes the realization that the people you talk to have buried their desperation, dreams and fears in those mundane conversations you have with them. And finally at the heart of everything there hides a quiet horror. That everything you know is slipping away, has already slipped away, and you're just wandering around aimlessly because knowing the very fact that everything will one day end has shattered your world into meaningless shapes.
You walk through the same streets everyday, talk to the same people. But the woods in the distance, always there, remind you that the old shops you knew have closed, the days are getting shorter as the leaves begin to fall, and that every passing minute is gone.
The main character spends the story chasing a ghost. That ghost, I think, isn't there to haunt the past or the future. It's just a part of the human desire to hold on to a time that seemed safe, to hold back the rot and decay of the abyss from a cherished place. In the end she finds it in a hole in the middle of the woods. But that hole isn't just in the woods, it's inside her, in the town, in the center of everything. A bottomless void slowly expanding to swallow the entire world.
The game doesn't tell you how to defeat the bottomless hole.
Instead, it's just the protagonist and her friends surviving, because she decided in the moment the abyss took hold that she is still alive, and that was enough.
Because At the end of everything, hold on to anything