by Rebecca Stow

Night in The Woods is an adventure video game which follows protagonist Mae Borowski as she returns to her home town of Possum Springs after dropping out of college. Playing it took me back to the worst time in my life in the best possible way.

The opening hours of the game depict Mae hanging out and catching up with her old friends, evading questions about the reason she left college early. Somewhere between controlling Mae as she attends band practices and exploring Possum Springs, I found myself falling into a chasm of my own memories that I’d long pushed aside without ever properly facing.

I found myself relating to Mae on a deeper level than simply feeling sorry for her character. I understood her struggles almost perfectly because it was unsettlingly easy to put myself in her shoes, all because, when I attended university myself, I had some of the worst experiences of my life and came very close to giving up on my studies. I felt like, through Night in the Woods, I was essentially playing a video game version of my own life.

University is often lauded as being the best time in a young person’s life. It’s where you flesh out your experiences, meet lifelong friends and enjoy being a young-adult away from home for the first time. However, it wasn’t like that for me at all. My time at university was a spiraling descent into stress and torment, leaving me with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) that I still suffer with today.

I attended university with the sole purpose of graduating. I decided to move into halls simply because it was more convenient, and I always assumed it would be easier to connect with people that way. Instead, I found myself being endlessly bullied and harassed simply because I didn’t fit in with my fellow housemates and the lifestyle they decided was the only one a student should be living.

Nights out were never my thing, and when I refused to attend both drinking sessions and club nights, I quickly became excluded for my early nights and dedication to school work. I could have coped with exclusion, eating dinner alone in our shared kitchen and spending my evenings locked away in my room playing video games. But, it soon moved past exclusion to harassment and bullying.

At first it was congregations of drunk students hollering outside my window at 4am almost every morning, then it was people in the kitchen (which backed onto my room) yelling and screaming comments about me through the thin walls. I fell into a cycle of sleepless nights, anxiously lying under my duvet waiting for the harassment to begin and hoping they would move on from bullying me as the year went on. Things only got worse, to the point where my room was trashed when it was left unlocked and the boys in my block would jimmy the lock on my door and come into my room at night, drunk and delirious finding my shock, fear, and confusion hilarious. In my worst week I only got seven hours of sleep. I began to struggle with both classes and my emotions as I felt my mental health plummet, so I filled out a form to drop out of university.

Throughout Night in The Woods, Mae represses her reasons for leaving college, though her emotions and instability are shown through dialogue and in the rare moments when she opens up to her friends, Gregg and Bea. Her friends struggle to understand why she would throw away her opportunities and return to a town in the midst of economic downturn. They long for her chances in life while all Mae wants is to return to the happy life she left behind, leaving her mental health problems behind. Trauma isn’t a 2D emotion, so it seems like a difficult concept to convey in a video game, but Night in Woods perfectly captured what it feels like to struggle with your mental health at such a young age.

I moved back home after only two months of living in halls and, while my letter of resignation from university remained in my bag ready for me to hand in, the desire to drop out slowly left me. Away from the people who made my life so difficult I realised how much I loved my course, and how much I wanted a future as a journalist.

Unfortunately, even four years after the events described above happened, I still struggle with PTSD and the insomnia, anxiety and extreme unease it brings when night falls. However, since playing Night in the Woods, I have stopped ignoring the issue, talking to my family and friends about my mental health and taking steps to recover. Just like Mae eventually does. Every day is a struggle but, if Mae can succeed, then so can I.

Rebecca Stow is a freelance video game journalist with bylines at the Daily Star, Tech Radar and others. Follow her via @Rebeccastow97 on Twitter or view her work here.