What makes them so insistent, and what makes them a rich textual mine to dig into for interpretation, is their inevitability. The player, as Mae, is forced (mainly through dialogue trees) to make decisions throughout the game, which range from irritating to truly terrible.
But the scariest element of Night In the Woods isn’t anything aesthetic at all-and the secret to unlocking it lies in the game’s fundamental mechanic of decision-making. There are some superficial earmarks of spookiness: Mae’s menacing platformer fever dreams, which exhaust and overwhelm her more and more as the game goes on the ghost story introduced halfway through the narrative, which provides a nifty basis for some eerie setpieces even the music that plays on the title screen, which feels like a gamified version of the ambient music from Scooby-Doo, priming the player to solve the mystery that drives the game’s climax. It’s no secret that Night In the Woods is a complex game that weaves many threads throughout its deceptively simple storyline-aside from the surprisingly deep religious backstory that the creators developed for the citizens of Possum Springs, the player is rewarded for multiple playthroughs, which progressively reveal more about the lost souls who populate the town, Mae’s relationships with them, and their relationships with each other. Lurking under the surface, however, is a game about existential dread, mental illness, despair, cosmic horror, and feelings of helplessness.
Aside from a few rhythm game inspired musical sequences, it is a relatively quiet game that thrives on rich dialogue and character interactions. Night In the Woods is a story about a 20-year-old cat named Mae Borowski who has returned to her hometown of Possum Springs after deciding to drop out of college, and you spend the majority of the game exploring her relationships with the townsfolk-with her neighbors, with her parents, with the friends she left behind. There are no jump scares, no dread-inducing meta experiments, no resource scarcity (no item management to speak of, actually), and no tense gameplay sequences. By most reasonable metrics, the 2017 indie adventure game Night In the Woods is not a horror game.
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