playing night in the woods again

back when night in the woods came out in 2017, it grabbed me and wouldn’t let go. at the time i was 14, the same age as lori m., an eminently missable character. she is very nervous, loves horror movies, and crushes metal objects on the train tracks in her spare time. she’s not all that much like me, but back then i remember latching on to her a little bit just because, well, she was my age, and isn’t that something. being a socially anxious 14 year old with little to no friends tends to make you see yourself in whatever stories you can get. with that being said, i always did relate more to mae. i think most people this game really sticks with do.

i played it to death. i played both routes several times over, saw every interaction i could find, and got every achievement. (fewer than 1% of players had the all sketches achievement when i got it…) i loved its story, its characters, its poignant, sometimes very silly moments. but after playing it as many times as i did, i came to know it too well. i had focused only on completion, and by the time i truly completed it, the whole experience became hollow to me. there was nothing left to surprise or delight me in a game filled with delightful surprises (and not so delightful ones…). i never speedran it, merely achievement hunted. i tried to come back to it once in 2020, but i still just knew it too well to enjoy playing the game. or so i assume, anyway; iis can’t remember doing this very well. considering i knew each and every thing that happened in the game to an absurd level of detail by the time i was done playing it, though, it would make sense. back a couple (or… several) months ago, when i was still in college and still 19, i thought about night in the woods again, as often happens. i realized then that i would soon be out of college and living with my parents at 20 years old. my exact circumstances would be a little different from mae’s—mainly, i didn’t drop out–but they coincided just enough. so, i figured i could use my birthday as a cute little occasion to play this game i so loved again, in the hopes it had been long enough since i last played it that it would once again be fresh.

i forgot about this plan until half a month after my actual birthday. oh, well. to be fair, i had just gotten neutered, so it wasn’t on the top of my mind. but then, at some point i thought about night in the woods again, as i often do, and i remembered this cute little plan i had made. i initially had some trouble getting my controller to work with the game, which frustrated me quite a bit. this is very much a game to be played with a controller, with all those rumble effects it has. after an hour or two of fucking around, opening the game repeatedly only to find that i couldn’t navigate the menu, i switched to using proton to run the game and it worked without issue. oh, the joys of linux gaming. when i first opened the game, i was a little surprised to find it still in the middle of a playthrough. i shouldn’t have been, since i started the game with a button named “continue,” but in that moment i had completely forgotten about my last failed attempt to return to this game. i found myself at the start of the scene in the library with bea giving her quip about it’s job mural, which was apparently where i had given up in despair. i promptly reset the game, and as mae came home, so did i. i doubt i’ve ever felt as much nostalgia as i did arriving at that bus station again after so many years. my hope was confirmed: it had been long enough for me to enjoy it again. i knew the broad strokes of the story, but i had forgotten enough of the details for it to surprise me. at several moments, i realized i had forgotten how to do something, or how the next part of the story would go, and i relished that feeling. it felt like finding something i thought i had lost forever.

playing through the game again, the magic was there again. the game was able, once again, to affect me. before, when i would play through it, it got to the point where none of the details of the story mattered as much as progressing through it. in the search for the things i hadn’t yet seen, those things you see every time you play through the game lost their power over me. but i had forgotten them. i would enter scenes without a solid memory of the exact events and set pieces within them. i would recall them when i encountered them, sure, but that is a very different thing from already knowing they’ll be there. throughout my life, i haven’t often reread things. when i was a kid, i just didn’t really see the point. i’ve gained an appreciation for the practice since then, but it still isn’t something i do all too commonly. the best stories read just as well, if not better, with foreknowledge of the ending, it’s true. knowing what’s going to happen can add depth to the actions of characters by offering a better understanding of their motivations and circumstances. but still, all this means is that in rereading the story you become able to see things you hadn’t noticed before, and therefore the text continues to offer novel experiences. eventually, those run out, and enjoyment of the story for the story’s sake fades as each little moment and narrative trick becomes a known quantity. but with enough time removed, this knowledge fades. when i played it again, the game had regained the element of surprise, and its moments could once again move me. in the argument with beatrice, (and yes, i went with beatrice’s route) when you’re given a choice between two all but identical dialogue options that say “you always have a choice”; when the ghost of mae’s grandfather comes and sits by her side; the conversation at the end of “proximity”; stargazing with angus; and even the end of the game, seen every playthrough and every playthrough essentially the same, earned goose bumps and tears from me. when i finished the game, i was missing pages in the sketchbook. god, that felt good.

like i said, i rarely reread things. i come back to stories years after i first read them even less frequently. but night in the woods stuck with me. i’m sure playing when i did changed something simple yet fundamental about me. it felt important enough at the time i wanted to get everything out of it that i could. i guess i probably did. as i sit here with it’s music running through my head, i suppose i’m different enough now to find something new in it’s story. how obvious. how revelatory. i guess going back to things can be a way of failing to move on. i think it can also be a way of finding out you moved on a long time ago.