So, I’ve been on a kick of “visual novel” sort of games recently and snapped up a bunch on Steam to play through, with this one being among the first for me to play through. I thought I’d made a good pick; Night in the Woods is a highly-rated game, with glowing reviews across multiple gaming sites and an avid, Undertales-like fanbase. Everyone who’s ever touched it loves it and you should, too!
For my discerning, red pill brothers, however, I’ll give you the real story:
It’s utter s~~~.
The short version: It’s a story of four 20-year-old SJW caricatures running around a small town, committing petty crimes and whining about their feelings. It’s paying $20 to actively participate in what you can drive to your local college and watch with both hands available to eat popcorn, for free.
The long version: There’s nothing endearing about the characters (Oh, wow, a 20-something lesbian college student who screams at a pastor about how they don’t believe in God and their parents about how they’re misunderstood? So original!), they defy sexual demographics (they’re all queer/gay/bisexual/asexual), they hate “fascists” (they might as well all be wearing #antifa shirts), and any attempt at character depth or tackling real hardship or heartache is so heavy-handed that it’s impossible to actually attach to it. The lead writer (a woman — shocker — with what appears to be a mangina co-writer who I’m sure agrees with all the anti-Patriarchy talking points she needed to brute force into her tale) might as well be grabbing you by the shoulders and shaking you while she yells “You should be feeling sad right now!!!”
But, terribad writing, awful characters, and blatant misandry aside, the most depressing part of the game is this undercurrent of quasi-supernatural events that lead up to… nothing. F~~~ing goose egg. Really trippy dream sequences here and there, speaking to eldritch beings, hints at a Shub-Niggurath type of deity, all these wonderful little tidbits of Lovecraftian horror that really are enough of a trail of breadcrumbs to justify suffering through the God awful, highhanded, uber-feminist, pro-Union, anti-capitalist tripe that the rest of the game is.
Except the Cthulhu cult is a batch of veiled old miners that might as well be wearing MAGA hats (and don’t worry: they’re made out to be absolute villains), nothing happens with Shub-Niggurath, and the game ends on the day after in the midst of a conversation about how it makes the characters feel.
F~~~ your expectations for a good story, we have a Patriarchy to smash!
So, when you’re seeing it lauded everywhere else, just remember that this is a title that absolutely reeks of tuna, with an overwhelmingly unimaginative story that serves as a shameful blight on what is a actually a unique art style and what I believed was a freaking incredible soundtrack.
TL;DR: Pirate the soundtrack, don’t waste your time or money on yet another s~~~ story churned out by yet another Sylvia Plath wannabe and her white knight sympathizer.
"Almost the main work of life is to come out of our selves, out of the little dark prison we are all born in... The danger is that of coming to love the prison." ~ C.S. Lewis
Jim01 2 years, 10 months ago.
