There has been discussion as to whether Infinite Falls’s “Night in the Woods” is a coming-of-age story about mental illness or a supernatural adventure rooted in small-town America’s decline and despair. The answer is both, but neither entirely; at its heart, NITW is about something much bigger, bleaker, and more hopeful: accepting the absence of meaning in our existence.

NITW’s protagonist is Mae Borowski, a 20-year-old anthropomorphic cat who has returned to her hometown of Possum Springs (“the original seat of Deep Hollow County!”) after abruptly dropping out of college in her sophomore year. The first few hours of the game have Mae exploring the run-down mining town, reuniting with old friends, reminiscing about growing up, and interacting with the many other well-developed denizens. Through dialogue with others and Mae’s own musings about her surroundings, we begin to learn about the troubled history of both the main character and her town: a mining accident, the resulting economic stagnancy and decline, and a past violent incident which leaves Mae with something of a scarlet letter to bear in a town where one’s own business seems rarely to be minded.

Mae soon begins to struggle with an unspecified mental illness, a dissociative disorder which renders her feeling entirely disconnected from reality, presumably the reason she left college. Interspersed with the day-to-day exploration of the town are Mae’s celestial dream sequences, each as hauntingly beautiful as they are disjointed. Mae slips further and further from reality, eventually encountering a being which she describes as “God,” despite its repeated insistence on the contrary, culminating in a confrontation with her personal demon, the “hole in the center of everything.” It is through these sequences that the player begins to understand what is at the heart of the hopelessness and sadness that Mae, and her town, are ultimately struggling with.

The universe, our home, doesn’t care that life exists. It probably doesn’t even know.

In a way, the fate of the universe is pre-determined. Not because of any sentient being or conscious plan, but because it is governed by the laws of the science which created it. Physics dictate which objects move where, at what speed, for how long. These forces have been steering the universe long before life existed, and will continue to do so long after. In other words, the universe didn’t begin with life (and certainly not human life specifically); rather, life was tossed in partway through, in the same way a chef might add an arbitrary bit of pepper to a full pot of stew. It is now, and has always been, hurtling at breakneck speed towards some foregone conclusion. And there is absolutely nothing we can do about it.

But it is in acceptance of this powerlessness, this emptiness, this abject loneliness, that NITW finds hope, even optimism. One of the game’s more interesting characters (and that is saying something) is a reserved, well-spoken bear named Angus. Many of the themes are explored through discussion of the stars and constellations; in a particularly poignant scene, Angus explains his belief that people are “pattern-finders” who are “good at drawing lines through the spaces between stars.” In other words, the universe put the stars there, but it was humans who connected the dots and assigned them meaning. People care, even if the cosmos don’t.

None of us asked to be here. None of us were chosen. Nothing created this world just for us, to foster our existence and support our quest to find some pre-established meaning. Quite simply, nothing cares that we exist at all, in the grand scheme of things. As bleak as that is, it is in the absence of meaning that we are united, brought together by, if nothing else, the commonality of insignificance. And so we are free to assign our own meaning to the world, through the relationships we foster and our engagement in activities which give us a sense of purpose, or at least usefulness. We create connections in a space where none inherently exist.

Confronting her mind’s “blackness” in the game’s penultimate chapter, which is described as “not a color, but an absence, like the space between the stars,” Mae asserts that she wants to feel pain. She wants to “get beaten up, to lose,” because she realizes that experiencing pain is the consequence of creating meaning. If we feel sadness, it is because we are something. And in the face of cosmic indifference, being “something, at least” feels like the ultimate act of defiance.

We have been thrown onto a conductor-less train, powerless to stop it or steer it or even alert it to our presence. In the face of that reality, we all have to find something to hold onto. To find something that keeps us from careening off into the chaos and the dark void of meaninglessness. To find something that has the power to make us hurt.