Night In The Woods, pulling the metaphorical trigger

Or: The intentional illusion of choice in (some) video games.

Okay it’s going to take a while to get to what I mean by “pulling the trigger.” I’m just trying to be poetic here as I move into acknowledging that this emotional stupor I’ve been in the past several days needs to be addressed in words. Lots of words. A couple pieces of fan art simply aren’t the catharsis I thought they’d be.

So yeah, it’s time to talk in depth about Night in the Woods.

Is this a review? Not exactly. Maybe a little? Maybe it’s a response to some reviews? But really, it’s an attempt at an analysis, one that focuses on a rather specific aspect of the game. One which I think various people have already noted to at least some degree, but I haven’t seen anyone launch into gushing incessantly about giving consideration at great length. So strap in and hold on to your porn-riddled laptops because this is about to get looooooooooooooooooooooong.

Before we get into the meat of it, let’s back up a sec while I get some people up to speed on what this game is all about, since I hopefully won’t have to make this too spoiler-y and even people who haven’t played it can read this. Night in the Woods is… uh, a 2D platforming adventure game - for lack of anything better to call it - where you play as Mae Borowski, a 20-year-old college dropout who has just returned home to the Small Town, USA that she grew up in. A USA that is inexplicably populated by stylized anthropomorphic animal people, but that’s honestly a pretty incidental detail. Anyway, here’s Mae:



Yeah, me too girl.

So, to get right to the point: Mae is a hot mess. I mean, that’s not ALL she is. She’s also clever, sarcastic, personable, and amusing. But it’s not much of a spoiler to say that she’s a walking (and running and jumping) ball of insecurities and tragically undiagnosed psychological problems. And, like, that’s it, that’s your main character. That’s your hero. A fucked up reflection of a disturbing number of America’s youth. And, as Super Bunnyhop so articulately pointed out, that fact will make or break your enjoyment of this character and, indeed, this whole game. (but seriously if you want a real good fucking review of this game, go watch that one. It hits the nail squarely on the head)

Now, that’s not to say that Mae is a bad protagonist. She’s got a certain gumption, determination, and moral compass that I think handily secures her the role. She’s also not a bad player avatar, controlling fluidly as you navigate her home town from day-to-day, talking to who you like, making varied dialog choices as you wish, and even engaging in no small amount of urban exploration to find optional sights and interactions. She provides all the player agency that a video game protagonist should.

… right up until she doesn’t.

You see, while 99% of the time Mae is a player avatar where her healthy characterization merely serves to enhance the game play experience, there’s this remaining 1% of the time where the game reminds you that she is her own character - own person - and it’s quite possibly the most deeply ugly and uncomfortable thing I’ve ever seen in a piece of media.

You see, most games, when it’s “characters get to act as themselves” time, they simply subject you to some variety of cutscene where you stop worrying about reacting to things or making choices, and watch (or read) the characters do any say whatever it is they’re going to do, until it’s time to play the game again.

Not this game. Oh-ho-ho-HO boy no not THIS fucking game.

Yeah thanks Gregg.

Anyway, this is early enough in the game to not be a HUGE spoiler, so let me set this up for you: a few “days” into the game (the game is kinda like Persona, where you have to choose to do a major thing each day, and only have so many days in the game to work with) Mae and her friends attend a party out in the woods. (No this isn’t the titular night in the woods. Or is it?) Some old high school flame of Mae’s is also there and our little ball of nerves wants to talk to him but can’t bring herself to really do it. Her solution? Get drunk, of course. At this point your only option in the game is to manually walk over to the drink cooler and press X to Beer. Which after everything up to this point - as pointed out by a Rock, Paper, Shotgun reviewer - feels strangely and abruptly forced.

Well, okay, not all games are perfect. Maybe it’s just trying to push along the scene without over-complicating things. Whatever, right? Let’s get on with the scene.

Well, it happens again. She thinks one beer wasn’t enough so you’re forced to manually go pour a couple more into her tiny body that could probably get drunk off of a single whiff of the stuff. And, subsequently, she gets smashed and starts acting like an idiot. Like, a real big idiot. A freaky, disturbing idiot. She hops up onto a stump and starts raving and wailing about how she’s going to sneak into her one-time prom date’s bedroom and stab him to death. “Stab stab stab! Boom! Dead.” Characters try to laugh it off, but it’s… beyond awkward.

So, okay, she’s drunk off her ass. This is a good excuse for a character to be out of the player’s control, right? I mean, yeah, but… at the same time, she isn’t out of the player’s control. Not exactly. Through the course of her inebriated ranting, the game actually does stop occasionally, prompting the player to choose what to say next. The somewhat humorous presentation of these choices aside, they boil down to something like this:

1 - Say something unhinged and uncomfortable.

2 - Say something else unhinged and uncomfortable.

3 - Say yet something ELSE unhinged and uncomfortable.

4 - There is no fourth option.

(ED: Okay I don’t feel like editing all this. I kinda jumbled up the party with the car ride after. The car ride is when you get most of the dialog options. STILL.)

So, you’re given a choice, but the one option you’re most likely to look for - the “stop the main character from making a complete ass of herself” option - is suspiciously absent.



And it fucking suuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuucks.

This easily could have been a raw cutscene. Or, as the above RPS reviewer said, a tv show, a movie, a comic… what have you. We could just watch Mae make an ass of herself. But naw son this is a hipster indie video game so what’s gonna happen is that you’re going to be given a choice that isn’t a choice because it makes it so much harder to press the button to advance the scene. This egregious bald-faced illusion of choice doesn’t give you the option to really change the outcome of the scene in any way shape or form. But it does give you something else that is so, so much worse:

Responsibility.

Even though it’s not really a choice, even though you KNOW there’s no other choices, god fucking dammit you feel RESPONSIBLE for pressing that button. You feel responsible for what this absolute train wreck of a character does next. Because, hey fucker, you PICKED an OPTION. You could have just, I don’t know, turn the game off? But you just HAD to see what would happen next, you monster. You made her do this!

Understatement.

I could honestly end this somewhere around here, because I think I’ve made my core point, but damn, I can’t stress enough that this isn’t a phenomena that is constrained simply to this one scene. Naw, this scene is practically just a tutorial, and a taste of things to come. This scene, even though it gets into the realm of “uncomfortable,” still has something of an air of comedy surrounding it. The game hasn’t taken the gloves fully off, only tugging them down a little bit, maybe exposing a bit of that lump of muscle at the base of the thumb. It gets so much worse.

I won’t get into further details about the story and its scenes beyond this point, since that’s getting into more hardcore spoiler territory. But let’s just say, Mae’s complete lack of vocal filter and nonexistent sense of tact results in a number of scenes where she tuns a conversation with a loved one into an uncomfortable debate, and then a full-on feelings-getting-badly-hurt argument. And there’s not a god damn thing you can do about it. And the game just LOVES to remind you of that with its insidious “choices” in these scenes, which usually look something like this:

1 - Misguidedly antagonize a dear loved one.

2 - Misguidedly antagonize a dear loved one in a slightly different way.

3 - There is no third option.

Oh and I forgot to mention the “party pre-game” scene that comes before the party scene, where you’re “controlling” Mae as she stares at herself in a mirror in her bedroom, and the game asks you to pick which parts of her body she finds most ugly.

Uuuuuuuuuuaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaagh whyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy.

In an average, casual moment Mae has a range of potential, reasonably measured reactions to things that the player can choose from. But as soon as things get pivotal, the Mae Train gets moving, and there’s no fucking brakes on the Mae Train. Not anywhere on your controller, anyway. The only end in sight is a disastrous wreck that injures everyone present.

And let me tell you this, this is not a criticism of this game. This is me praising this game to high heaven. Which seems strange. “This game gives you the paltry illusion of choice” sounds like a criticism, like something you might hear about a David Cage game, or a Telltale Games game, or parts of Mass Effect, or countless other games that like to pull out dialog option wheels at great frequency.

But there’s a big difference between what those games are trying to do whenever they pull a narrative fast one on you, and what this game is trying to do in seemingly similar circumstances. Those other games are trying to actually trick you into thinking your choices mean something, even though its painfully obvious that they don’t if you pull back the curtain even a little bit, leaving you with nothing but disappointment and criticism. But Night in the Woods? Haha, WHAT CURTAIN? There’s not a single doubt in my mind that these non-choices present in NitW are anything but completely intentional, existing entirely to taunt you with how powerless you are and how out-of-control the situation is and how much Mae is not you and she’s broken and no you can’t fix her. It exists entirely to make you gnash your teeth and tear at your hair because, again, you still have to press that fucking button while the devs at Infinite Fall lean back in their office chairs and cackle with mad glee and twirl their assuredly ridiculous mustaches.

Alright let’s take a breather and prepare for something a little different, but still on-topic. So last night - while being completely unable to sleep because an indie video game has caused me to completely lose control of my life - I was thinking about this whole gameplay-not-gameplay subject, and something struck me: this isn’t the first time I’ve seen something like this. Indeed, I’ve seen something like this, once, what seems like ages ago, in another game. A pivotal game, in a pivotal franchise, presenting me with an absurdly pivotal scene. One that sticks with me to this day. One that gave me a choice, that wasn’t a choice, and made me briefly but poignantly hate my existence as a gamer. Something that easily could have been a tragic cutscene that played out on its own, but instead deliberately took the time to stop and force me to press that button. Forced me to be the one to pull the trigger.

Can you guess what it is? I’ll put a bunch of space before I reveal it. Warning: it’s a spoiler for a 13 year old game. If you don’t already know it, it’s probably not that important to you, but its sort of a big deal too.

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You ready? You READY? I’m the Juggernaut.

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Fffffffuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck yoooooooooooouuuuuuuuuuu Kojimaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa.

Yeah. Welcome to the climax of Metal Gear Solid 3, where Naked Snake has basically no choice but to put a bullet in who is easily the most important person in his whole miserable life. She has to die and look like a villain for her (incredibly complicated international espionage) plan to work out, even though you know she’s an incredible hero. And the game. Makes. You. Pull. The. Trigger. And it’s almost elaborate in it’s subtlety. Leading up to this, you’ve had yourself a pretty traditional (though beautifully framed) final boss fight against your old mentor. And then its followed by an equally traditional cutscene, where she makes it clear that she needs to die for everything to work out. And then… this. This shot right here. The camera pulls back a bit, with a three-quarters overhead view that most of the gameplay takes place in. The letterbox vignetting at the top and bottom of the screen that indicates a cutscene pull away, again indicating actual gameplay. And then the game just… stops. Right here. No dialog. No prompts. No text. No buttons work, try as you might. None except one. It’s on you. You have no choice, but you still have to make the Bad Thing happen. You’re bereft of options, but burdened with crushing responsibility. On the off chance the thing that’s going on in this scene doesn’t penetrate your thick skull - like it didn’t mine - a small symbol representing the “fire” button (in this case, the Square button) will eventually fade into view at the bottom of the screen. This game’s subtle way of telling you to MAN UP AND FUCKING SHOOT HER YOU PUSSWHACK.



I gnashed my teeth, I tore at my hair. This scene really got me. It got a LOT of gamers at the time. And the reason it “got” us is just so, so deviously, nefariously simple: it reminded us that this is a game where we control the character… but only sorta. I decried Kojima as an evil genius. I hailed it to the high heavens even as a I cried at the image of the newly christened Big Boss saluting the grave of maybe the only person he ever truly loved. Who he killed. Who I killed.

And that’s it. That’s what Night in the Woods does. Perhaps not quite so dramatically in every single instance. But it does it, constantly, repeatedly, forcing you to point Mae’s mouth and fire forth her horrid thoughts and words, directly into the hearts of her friends and loved ones. Because it’s the heat of the moment, and she doesn’t have the luxury of sitting there and thinking about the best possible thing to say or do like we do as we sit comfortably in front of the monitor staring at a freeze-frame of her situation. She doesn’t have a choice, because she’s bad at handling heavy personal things, and all we can do is sit there and feel deeply uncomfortable as she gazes at the grave stones that mark her former relationships.

… well okay, maybe it’s not THAT gloomy. For all the game’s hard-hitting themes and character arcs, it’s not really a game about loss. At least, not immediate loss. Some things do survive Mae’s bad choices and some things improve, herself included. But damn if the journey isn’t downright soul-crushing at times. I just can’t stress it enough: the bad things start to happen, and the game lets you know you can’t do anything about it. Hard. You can’t stop Mae from being busted in the head. You can’t stop her from saying awful things to her loved ones. You can’t. You just can’t. You can’t you can’t and you never will you can’t ever press a button to make her stop or step in the game and tell everyone that it doesn’t have to be this way and you can’t press a button to get Snake and The Boss to forget this whole stupid war business and go live happy lives you can’t YOU CAN’T YOU CAN’T FUCK FUCK FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK.

It’s intentional gamer frustration of the absolute highest order. And somehow, despite being this borderline dadaist non-gameplay it somehow manages to still be gameplay. Possibly more than gameplay. Something that sits above the gameplay and shines a harsh light down on our usual expectations and desires as gamers. Just to make us feel bad about what we’re doing to these collections of pixels and polygons. And, perhaps more importantly, to make sure we don’t forget that it happened.

And maybe that’s the big takeaway here. That earlier RPS review said that the climax of NitW is a lot more linear and choiceless than the rest of the game. And at a basic factual level that’s not an unfair assessment. However, if taken within the context of everything I’ve said up until now, it seems less like a sloppy and forced climax, and more like just another piece of the point the game is getting at. That the worst things are hard - if not impossible - to figure out and control, and painful to slog forward through. But you gotta. And much like how despite a whole boss fight and cutscene the true climax of MGS3 is probably a simple scene in which you just press one button once, the true climax of NitW is a series of simple scenes where you just hold one direction on the d-pad. And maybe we shouldn’t have expected anything more. Because, more than the times we get to make real choices, its the times where we couldn’t do anything, or couldn’t avoid doing something incredibly distasteful despite every fiber of our being fighting against it, that we remember the most. And Night in the Woods doesn’t want you to forget. Not for a long, long, long time.

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Well, that’s it, I think that’s the end of this. Now, I think I’m going to go take a long nap in an effort to recover from the sleepless nights of emotional breakdown this fucking game has inflicted upon me. Fuck you Kojima. Fuck you Infinite Fall. You brilliant, shining, magnificent bastards.