Critical Play: Mystery in Night In the Woods

Night in the Woods is inherently a game about the mental health of the main character, Mae, after she drops out of college and returns to her small hometown, Possum Springs. Everything seems to return to normal as Mae reunites with her old friends from high school, but Mae keeps on witnessing various strange occurrences that she isn’t quite sure are real.

The role of mystery in the game is almost immediate, with Mae and her friends discovering a dismembered arm in one of her first days back in Possum Springs. While she and her friends joke about it as they marvel at it, it is clear that it’s strange. The sense of mystery of the game is further developed through Mae’s many surreal dreams as well as some short scenes unraveling. Mae will also at times make references to the disappearance of one of her old high school friends, Casey.

While the player is busy working through understanding Mae’s character through her complex dialogue and following her through her everyday life, it becomes clear that there are stranger things happening. This is confirmed when Mae alone witnesses a kidnapping on the game’s version of Halloween. She believes what she saw is a ghost, and convinces the rest of her friends to help search for clues and such. The player then progresses through multiple eerie night scenes of graveyards and abandoned museums to help uncover the mystery that it seems only Mae is fully convinced exists.

While the player’s main focus is on the mental health and character motivations of Mae throughout the game, these little fragments of the larger picture help keep the player guessing about what’s truly going on. While these two threads seem pretty disparate throughout the game, it turns out that they are uniquely interconnected in the end — Mae tells her friends that she actually feels she understands the motivations of the antagonists due to her own struggle with her mental health and sense of self, and if the player was paying attention, they do too.