Hello there, Gameologerinos, and welcome to our weekly thread for the discussion of weekend gaming plans and recent gaming glories. This weekend, I’m going to be continuing my Nintendo Switch odyssey, and I’ll have plenty more to say about that next week. But I’ve been taking some breaks from my Hyrulian excursion to check out a much smaller game that I’ve been looking forward to for a long time: Night In The Woods. From the team of designer Alec Holowka (Aquaria), illustrator-animator Scott Benson (Late Night Work Club), and writer Bethany Hockenberry, it’s an intimate story about a twentysomething cat lady named Mae who drops out of college and moves back to her sleepy hometown of Possum Springs.
It aims to capture that feeling of coming home and becoming reacquainted with the familiar, while also sensing how so much of it has changed—and in the case of this town that is so strongly representative of the American Rust Belt, how much of it has decayed. I could see the main characters, Mae’s college-age buddies who exude that stereotypically millennial mix of aloof and hip, grating on some people, but the writing is charming and relatable enough that even the most curmudgeonly among us might be swayed. And if you need more than some earnest commentary about going home, coming of age, and the state of working-class America, there just might be some spooky stuff happening in Possum Springs and in the woods that surround it.