Night In The Woods and the Horror of the Familiar (Patreon)

When I was a little kid I distinctly remember once, finding a toy I had had when I was an even littler kid. I don’t remember what age I was but I can infer that information because of my reaction - because I burst into tears. I clocked, in a real sense, looking at that thing from my past, that I had a past, and that meant I was getting older, and that meant I wasn’t ever going to experience this thing in the same way again. I’m talking about my like, 4 year old self, so this isn’t a transcription of my conscious thoughts at the time, it’s a lengthy explanation of the overwhelming feelings I felt.

Kurt Vonnegut has a book called Deadeye Dick. The protagonist is a lonely middle aged man who never had the opportunity to make friends in his hometown - the town he still lives in - because of a shooting accident that happened when he was a teenager. The locals all call him “deadeye dick” or at least they used to. Nowadays he mostly just imagines that they do. Everywhere he goes he knows people must be saying it behind his back.

At one point in the book he travels to New York, gets far away from his little town, and just for a little while, he isn’t deadeye dick any more. I think anyone who had rumours about them spread at that point in life, but to some degree everyone, understands this feeling. It’s that feeling that when you come home the only person you can be is the person you are there. This feeling that the physical place won’t let you be anyone but the person you used to be no matter how much your life has changed. You’re still just “deadeye dick”.

I can’t help but try to explain Night In The Woods in terms of other things, and there’s a good reason for that. It’s because Night In The Woods is familiar. This game instantly has the feeling of something you’ve seen before. The animation, the design, the dialogue and the characters and the score, all of it feels so known - so familiar. Parts of it are just perfect little pieces of known… stuff, put together in such a way as to make them unfamiliar. Look at the video store. It’s called Video Outpost “Too”. This is commented on repeatedly in the game - that doesn’t make any sense. At the same time though, it sounds like something, and you just for the life of you can’t quite place what.

The rhythm of the town after you come home is so perfectly familiar and at the same time, alien. The shops are different but the war memorials are still there. “We love our war monuments in Possum Springs” of course, because we love to hold on to the past - especially a past that no one remembers because everyone from it is dead, so nobody can question it, it can never change. You go out each day, seeing your mum in the morning. You come home every night and see your dad. When you see them together before the party it’s noticeably different. Before that they’re never together - just disparate, familiar elements. Nostalgic and alien. 

The characters have so much personality, but no voices. Their words have to be read in your head, in your voice, making them familiar, but at the same time making you use your voice to read other people’s words. Familiar and unfamiliar.

Early in the game Mae has to play a song she doesn’t know with her band. While you’re focusing on playing chords you don’t know, you feel Mae’s unease. When you get one wrong the visual reaction of the game communicates that horrible feeling we all know too well, of trying to go along with a song and realising too late you don’t know it as well as you thought. And while you’re focusing so hard on trying to get it right, you probably don’t even notice the lyrics, singing about how you should do anything you can to get out of this town before it’s too late, singing literally “die anywhere but here”.

The reveal of information about the character you’re playing as feeds into this as well. You get hints of something going on with Mae, something in her past, but you don’t know what. It’s weird to play as a character you don’t know everything about. It’s weird for the same reason it’s weird to have to read all the dialogue. This character should be the most familiar thing in the game to you, but there’s still something that separates player and character from each other. The same element, but stronger, is at play when Mae is drunk. You select an appropriate phrase, the one you feel is most helpful to make up for your fuckup, but the words that actually come out of Mae’s mouth aren’t what you chose.

I’ve only ever seen one film, and that’s Hereditary - or at least if I’ve ever seen any other films I can’t remember because I’m too afraid. A huge part of what’s scary in Hereditary is the slow realisation that the people most familiar to you, your family, might not not be who you think. The idea that you might not know your family is scary, because if you don’t know them you’d really be alone, and if you’re alone you have to confront the fact that you’re going to die at some point.

There are forces pushing in opposite directions in this game. It’s not just that you need to get out and go somewhere else - die anywhere but here - but there’s this force holding you there. While telling you off Aunt Molly tells you “The world isn’t out there somewhere. It’s here.” but at the same time, Mae says “We never had a chance here, but I can’t go anywhere else.” while also saying that the College founder statue was “just shapes” which meant that she must have been suffering dissociative episodes in college from the stress. There is an external force and an internal one. That’s why I think it’s most apt to describe it as a gravitational pull. It feels like something is standing in your way and stopping you, but also pulling at you from the inside. The force of desire, the need to get out, is pushing you forwards, but the force of doubt and limitation and fear is pulling you back. 

Grace from What’s So Great About That pointed out that a good amount of significant parts of the game make you run from right to left, which for us in the west reads as going backwards. In your nightmare however, you are running from left to right. The outside world, and college, and that other life, that’s going forwards. Possum Springs, and returning home, and exploring the past, that’s going backwards. 

That’s the horror of the game. The familiar way, the way home, the way to the known and comfortable - is wrong.