Night in the Woods is one of my favorite games and means so much to me. The soundtrack is amazing and I'm so happy to own some of it on vinyl. I thought the quality was great and I love the artwork on it.

Spoilers for Night in the Woods follow.When I was a kid, my mom took my sister and I on a few bus trips. She’d get kind of antsy and want to leave town for a bit, and because she was a single mother, she didn’t exactly have the resources to take us too far or anything–not that I minded, as I was just glad to be going anywhere, really. Gran turismo 7. Hanging out at the bus depot, waiting for our Greyhound to be ready was, strangely enough, one of my favorite things to do. There was something about the liminality of it all; everyone was either coming or going, their minds focused on where they were going or where they had come from, not really thinking about the space they were currently occupying.In that way, I felt somewhat invisible. I was, after all, just a little kid. Nobody paid attention to me. They were all busy doing something else.

I’d sit and I’d watch as a busload of people, weary from their travels, file into and then out of the depot. I’d watch as hopeful folks gathered by the door, anxiously waiting for their trips to be underway.Night in the Woods begins in this exact liminal space: a bus depot.

Mae, an anthropomorphic cat and the protagonist of our story, has left college to return to her hometown of Possum Springs. It’s unclear as to why she’s returning, and we’re left to wonder why throughout nearly the entirety of the game. Whereas many games often shy away or even outright reject the notion of liminality, Night in the Woods revels in it. More than that, it absolutely flourishes in the liminal space it creates for itself.The game is broken up into a few chapters, and each of those chapters is broken up into a few days. Within each day, you’re given the option to hang out with some of Mae’s old childhood friend group: Bea, an alligator who always has a cigarette hanging out of her mouth, and/or Gregg, a very punk fox who rocks a leather jacket. Later on, Mae is offered the opportunity to hang out with Gregg’s partner, Angus, a dapperly dressed sensitive bear with somewhat hipster-like sensibilities.The activities you can do with each of them can vary, and you’re really only able to experience so many over the course of one play-through. With Gregg, the options usually revolve around doing some sort of crime (criiiiiiiiiimes), like smashing fluorescent bulbs with a baseball bat, stealing then re-building a freaky old animatronic robot, or a knife fight.From a gameplay standpoint, each of these interactions can be thought of as a mini-game, little tasks you just happen to do while hanging out with Gregg.

His story is intertwined with the things you do while hanging out. He lets slip that he’s moving away from their hometown with his partner, Angus.

At one point a few hours into, I almost attempted to weasel my way out of doing the review.Thank goodness I wasn’t successful, or I would have missed one of the most moving game narratives I’ve ever experienced. I enjoyed Night in the Woods a lot more once I stopped waiting for the game to start.From the moment 20-year-old Mae arrives in the dilapidated mining town she calls home (having inexplicably bailed on college) I was impatient to get to the real meat of the story.Sure, it was pleasant enough watching Mae leap around Possum Springs, chatting up friends like Bea, a squandered genius stuck managing her dad’s store, or Gregg, an up-for-anything anarchist that clashes beautifully with his boyfriend, the more buttoned down Angus. I even found myself repeatedly chatting up the more ancillary (yet surprisingly well-realized) denizens of the town, something I don’t normally go in for.But all the while, there was a nagging impatience for the real game to start, the big earth-shattering moment that sets the narrative to a sprint. But Night in the Woods seemed maddeningly content to just keep ambling.There is a connecting narrative in Night in the Woods and rest assured: It goes to some fucking places. Existential terror, the nature of God, the terrible burden of being a human, it’s goes to all the places.But the bulk of the experience isn’t so overtly monumental. It’s a quiet game, woven from small scenes between friends enjoying each other, hurting each other, reconciling and attempting to move forward with what remains.These scenes are, without exception, written beautifully.

Even when the dialogue veers too cutesy, it feels true to a group of characters straddling a gap between adult and childhood that seems precipitously wide these days.Those characters are the game’s biggest strength. They’re all damaged in different ways, but in very believable, understandable ways, ways we’re all damaged. But each of these anthropomorphized animals also have more heart, depth and decency than most games boast in their entire human cast. Oddly, the one character I wouldn’t extend that last compliment to is Mae, Night in the Woods’ feline protagonist. She is often selfish, cruel, self-absorbed and destructive in ways that may be believable and relatable but rarely ever pleasant.

Mae is somewhat redeemed by a childlike joy in simple pleasures, a streak of loyalty to her friends and some late-game realizations about her own failings, but only somewhat.After a scene where Mae belittles her parents for working for years so they could afford to send her to the college that she had just bailed on, I found it pretty difficult to re-engage with her. But I’m also a parent and feel a lot further from Mae’s side of the kitchen table than I used to.It’s a bold choice to center a game on an unlikable character, and it’s an effective way of highlighting the virtues of the supporting cast. But the behavior of those other characters towards Mae, the way they work to preserve their relationships with her, makes me wonder if the game’s developers were fully aware of how grating their hero can sometimes come across.I realize I’ve largely focused on the narrative of Night in the Woods, but only because there’s not much to discuss from a mechanical perspective. It’s sort of a platformer, and you’ll spend a lot of time leaping from rooftop to rooftop. There are some one-off minigames, and a few that you’ll return to like shoplifting and playing bass in Mae and Co.’s band.The minigames are perfectly adequate, but getting around the world often slows down the pace of a game that isn’t exactly hurtling along to begin with. Mae also does some platforming in her sleep, and these dream sequences in particular are dull, especially late in the game when the story starts to pick up momentum. They’re nice to look at and (like the rest of the game) beautifully orchestrated, but still dull.The gamier aspects of Night in the Woods aren’t its strength, but it does make good use of being interactive.

The fact that you can largely choose which characters you want to interact with - and how frequently - gives the connections you build a more personal feeling. Perhaps it’s the fact that you’ve searched them out, as opposed to having them forced on you.In fact, much of Night in the Woods is preoccupied with just that question: What are we forced into and what can we choose for ourselves? There are no pat, easy solutions to that query contained within. But the answers that are unearthed are terrible, beautiful and achingly humane in a way that brought me to tears more than once.