This Is Beautiful: Night in the Woods

I'm chugging along this list of random free games that I have, and a friend happened to recommend "Night in the Woods" to me, having seen it on the list. So I popped it open. It's a really cool game, it follows Mae who just dropped out of college and moved back to her hometown. She reconnects with her high school friend Gregg, her childhood friend Bea, and also the rest of the people in town. Over the course of the fall, she thinks there's something paranormal going on, during Harfest (the small town version of Halloween) she sees someone or something kidnap a kid. She and her friends investigate to see what's at the bottom of this.

The basic mechanics of the game is you explore the town and interact with what you can each game day. Most characters say something different every day, and it's fun to see what ledge or power line you can jump up on from one day to the next. The more you explore, the more you learn about the town and its history.

What I think is pretty cool about this game is that it clearly has a well-thought out plot without ever being pretentious, and I think the meaning at the end is certainly up for debate. But as the janitor says at the end, sometimes big events don't teach you anything, but they make you something. And you just have to wait and see what happens with that.

One of the major themes is the meaning humans put into the world around them, and how fragile that can be. Mae reveals that when she was in high school she beat a random guy because she lost the meaning in the world around her. Everything went from being people and places that she knew to just being shapes. Similarly, Angus (Gregg's boyfriend) talks to Mae about the stars and about how he doesn't believe that there's a whale in the sky, but he believes in the person who saw this pattern of stars and called it a whale. And Mae has multiple discussions with the town pastor about God and belief and what good it does someone. My personal interpretation is that there is no ultimate meaning to us and what we do, but we give it meaning by seeking a pattern, declaring that meaning for ourselves. And there's still worth in that, or nothing would matter and we'd go around destroying everything. But that could just be that I'm on a metamodernist kick so I see a lot of art through that lens.

Regardless of what you pull from it, this is a neat game that was a lot of fun to play. The mechanics are simple, and the storyline definitely pulls you in. Would highly recommend!