Night in the Woods

Night in the Woods is about dropping out of college and going home to a town that's finishing dying. Mae Borowski comes back to Possum Springs expecting nothing to have changed, and she's mostly right, which is the problem.

It's a game made almost entirely of conversations. You wander a small autumn town, you talk to your friends, you decide who to spend each evening with, and you cannot see everything in one playthrough. That constraint does something clever - the friendships feel like choices with costs, because they are.

The writing is unusually good at the specific texture of post-industrial decline: shops that closed, jobs that left, parents working more for less, and young people who love the place and cannot stay. Bea's exhaustion and Gregg's manic energy are two different responses to the same trap.

It also has a mystery, and a genuinely unsettling one, but the horror is really just the town's economics wearing a mask.

This collection covers Mae, Bea, Gregg, Angus and the visual language of the game - knives, cigarettes, band practice and cold autumn colours.