It helped me realise I shouldn’t be so hard on myself when days don’t go as planned. Maybe you didn’t change the world, or achieve everything you wanted, but you got through the day and that’s enough. Night in the Woods says a lot for the small victories in life. There’s courage in getting through the day when you feel like you can’t. When everything just seemed to get worse, the thought of facing a new day seemed overwhelming - impossible, even. This sense of progression felt inconspicuously encouraging.
By setting up the game with a day by day format, it instills the feeling that getting through each day is a victory, a way to get to the next point. From stupid knife fights with Gregg to heart-to-hearts with Angus, and college parties with Bea, some days stand out more than others - just as they do in real-life. Throughout, Mae tries to avoid facing up to the reason she returned home by dodging her parents questions and running about recklessly along power cables and rooftops. Night in the Woods is wrapped up in a series of days. Little did I know it would actually help me finally confront them. Maybe, I thought, Night in the Woods would give me a moment’s reprieve from my troubles. As someone who had grown up on a healthy diet of consoles over the years, games had become my ultimate comfort. My only escape from those unrelenting days were games. From my own experience, it’s marred by uncertainty, self-doubt and anxiety. But not enough is said about how difficult young adulthood is. You’re young, in your prime, and the whole world is at your feet. Since entering my 20s I’d been told again and again these will be the best years of my life. My friends were few and far between, the unwarranted guilt of still burdening my family would never leave me, and after years of trying, hope was running dry.
I hadn’t gotten any closer to my dream of writing for a living, and all I had to my name was a part-time job. When I came to Night in the Woods last year, I was 24 and still living at home. Happiness was like some unobtainable quest item and my inner demons were keeping it from my reach. My self-loathing was making me desperately unhappy, and I couldn’t quiet the voice in my head telling me I was a waste of space. After graduating from university, I spent my days going from one panic attack to the next, in a dead-end sea of job application rejections.
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