This post contains very light spoilers for the first 30 minutes of a demo of Night In The Woods. I honestly wouldn’t even consider them spoilers, but this is the internet and it’s never a bad idea to armor up as much as you can.
“I wanna run!” Mae shouts, after having dragged her old friend through the mall they used to love when they were kids. The energetic cat seems to be unstoppable, always jogging somewhere, the player being unable to control her speed with the analog stick. Mae will either sprint like a champ or stand completely still, ear flicking, in this foreign and exotic town of Possum Springs. At least foreign and exotic to me.
It’s a strange beast, this Night In The Woods — no pun intended. I’ve just come back from the game’s presentation at the Milano Games Festival, an event in northern Italy dedicated to showcasing one single indie game each day in the framework of the XXI Triennale design exhibition. It’s modeled after a film festival, giving the audience — a very small group of 30 to 60 individuals — a chance to experience a game in a carefully constructed environment and enjoy a drink and a chat with the developers.
Soft light, smell of lemon, low humming of electronic equipment.
It was one of the most unique presentations I’ve been to so far. The floor was covered in wood chips, dim lights and plants scattered across the room and a projector turned an entire wall into a manual’s page. Someone had grated a couple lemons and spread them around, and it all smelled wonderfully. The lemons had some sort of symbolic meaning related to the organizers’ previous work and Italian gardens, but I’m ashamed to admit I couldn’t fully understand the explanation that the designer gave me.
The game was a real treat. I’ve already heard about the parallel to Gone Home: both games feature a girl returning to a place they haven’t seen in a long time, giving the player bits and pieces of information to both put the backstory together and figure out what the main protagonist doesn’t know yet. Unlike in Fullbright’s first person exploration game, though, here you have an entire town to play with — and of course the titular woods, that sadly weren’t part of the demo. We’re not coming home to a family, but a place.
Small town Americana is its own little world. A place of local diners, going to church and rebelling against authority in an unfocused but very heartfelt way. A place where everybody knows your name, for better or worse. It’s usually meant to invoke a feeling of longing for the past, in the way Mae idolizes the local mall that, in the end, turns out to be not exactly as she remembers it.
Poor aimless Mae seems to revel in this atmosphere. The stillness of American town life suits her, as she’s apparently given up trying to move in a specific direction and prefers to spend her energies running tirelessly in place. It’s full of people she knows, stuck like her, without a job or without a way out of the job they currently have. It’s a place and a feeling that everyone had at least once in their life, safe and comfortable but dull and lifeless at the same time.
It takes something that’s engrained in American identity and uses it to build a solid foundation for a story, a story that usually tends to go the horror route. Take, as an example, the endless list of towns in Maine that Stephen King decimated throughout the years.
But I’m not American.
Can you be nostalgic for something you never had? This kind of narration has a very different effect on an audience that only knows America from books and movies — and of course videogames. And I’m glad that, in the past years, we started to see this theme pop up in this medium as well, with games like Life Is Strange or the aforementioned Gone Home.
The demo is short, and a lot of hints are dropped without the player being able to expand on them. Mae is currently living with her mother, with whom she seems to have the typical relationship an angsty but loving teenager can have. But Mae is no teenager; she’s already twenty, and just dropped out of college to go back to her parents’. She seems to be perpetually stuck in those high school years, yearning for a time when her angst and rebel-without-a-cause attitude was expected of her, keeping a diary where she scribbles and sketches thoughts and events she finds herself caught up in. She shows signs of kleptomania, and her dialogue drops hints to some deep-seated insecurities and issues that she’s working on. Or running away from.
Drugs, high school drama, the local source of income and jobs drying up while the rest of the world moves towards the future are staples of the small town genre. But I’ve never seen your average American household. I don’t know what the college life Mae ran away from is like. I’m vaguely aware that football is a thing, but not the thing I think about when hearing the name. That’s called soccer across the Pond.
So if I’m not looking at this through the glass of nostalgia or American identity, how am I looking at it? What kind of feeling can this game inspire in me if I’m this far away from the target audience?
Also, is Mae a reference to that cat in Trigun? The doubt remains.
The games’ website hints at a supernatural mystery with vaguely horror tinges, but the demo doesn’t show any of that, with one or two exceptions in the form of hints of disappearances and weird occurrences. It’s all setup, with the developers taking great care in making sure you can explore a fraction of the placid town at your leisure. The first half is very open, letting you roam the streets (and power lines) of Possum Falls and making you meet its funny, lovable and/or depressed citizens. Unlike the miners, the local shrink seems to have a pretty safe job in that economy. It’s him, as we discover, who suggested Mae (and other people) keeps a diary of her thoughts and events.
To an Italian like me, it’s an odd experience. It’s not a memory of something lost or family history, but a window into a (literally) foreign universe. Talking with Alec Holowka after the event, one of the three who are currently working on the game, he pointed out how this might feel similar to fantasy to someone like me, as it’s not rooted in the way I experienced my life. I can see his point, but I’m not sure I fully agree. If I had to give it a name, I’d call it narrative tourism.
However, I’m always pleased to see my nation represented in media.
There’s this short novel by John Grisham called Playing for Pizza. In it, an American football player is forced out of the NFL after a serious injury and some very questionable game decisions, and finds shelter in Italy playing for what’s a very minor league in comparison. Little money, little fame, and having to live in a country whose language you don’t know.
The book shows Italy through the eyes of an American football player, and it’s pretty clear that Grisham wants the audience to come with him on a trip to show them how different life is in the Mediterranean. But to me, that didn’t feel like a visit to a foreign culture; it was home. I knew those places, I ate that food on a daily basis. It was an odd case of reversing the intended effect, the opposite of what the author was going for. I greatly enjoyed it.
A very interesting fact to notice was that NITW was translated specifically for this event. The organizers took great care in making sure the dialogue was on point, with a translation that is way above the Google Translate-level you usually find in indie games (looking at you, Italian version of Salt & Sanctuary). Still, a translation is a translation, and it’s incredibly hard to do them right — especially if pressed for time and dealing with such a topic. Some things slipped by the cracks, as they were bound to do.
The result of all this is an odd and fascinating experience. Characters sound slightly disconnected at times, referencing American things you didn’t know and picking up a conversation from seemingly abrupt points. The feeling you get is of a group of people who aren’t really talking to each other, but rather going through the motions, as if they’ve accepted that human interaction is just something that happens anyway and they might as well roll with it. It’s very strong — and in my (probably wrong) opinion very fitting — in the mall scene, as Mae drags her friend Rae along without even looking like she considered her objections for a single instant. Here the translation can make it feel like each character is talking to himself, rather than the other one. And I found myself wondering whether it was intentional or not.
At this point in the story, Rae had already mentioned she doesn’t feel like running a couple of times.
It’s a fascinating game, with foreign concepts like army recruiters in high schools and life revolving around (American) football matches. Every character is struggling with something, and seems to find it very hard to talk about it with someone else. And Mae clearly has more than one skeleton in her closet, but what those skeletons are, that’s not even touched upon in this demo.
I’ve only seen the setup and a fraction of the cast so far but yeah, I’m hooked. It’s not a fantasy game to me, but it does bring me places that I’ll probably never see for myself in my whole life. However, the developers aren’t sure whether they’ll end up translating the whole game or not — it’s no simple or cheap task for a game with this much dialogue and stuff to read, and there’s a lot that would need tinkering. I hope they will, and I’d be happy to help if needed.
You can’t play this demo for yourself unless you stumble upon another event, but you can check out the two Longest Night episodes the team made on their website. Those are a more fairy tale-ish kind of deal, the setup being a bedtime story being told to Mae by her grandfather. They’re very solid, so give it a shot.
In the meanwhile, I’ll sit here waiting for the game to release. It shouldn’t take long now. I’ll pour a glass for the town of Possum Springs, and wonder whether I should play the game in English or Italian, if they decide to fully translate it. I might do both. I have a feeling it might be worth it.
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