College is a stressful time for many people and there hasn’t really been a game that deals with the mindset of a drop out college student who moves back to their hometown. Well now you can know that emotional journey with “Night in the Woods” an adventure, narrative-based game developed by indie studio Infinite Fall and published Finji.

The game centers on Mae, an anthropomorphic cat who has recently dropped out of college, moved back to her hometown of Possum Springs, a once busy coal town, and is living in her parent’s attic. Now, Mae must uncover a dark mystery that the town has ignored for a long time with her childhood friends.

Possum Springs is supposed to be representative of the slow death of small town America, where their entire livelihood was based around one major industry; when it goes down, the town slowly goes with it. This provides for a very interesting setting as the player will meet people who moved there when it was a bustling coal town or were born and spent their entire lives there. It provides a nice contrast to Mae, who has left her town for university but has returned.

Night in the Woods has this classic storybook feel, where the characters look like construction paper overlaid on top of each other. It works very well though and doesn’t feel cheap while still adding a certain depth to the overall narrative.

There are no voice actors in the game, all the conversations are text based but you can still see the feelings in the characters through their facial expressions, and they are expressive. Each character has their own personality and feels like they live in this created world for themselves, not just there for the sake of the game. The whole point of the game, other than solving the mystery, is to just hang out with your friends and reconnect just like you would in the real world if you dropped out.

The soundtrack is more of quiet ambiance, than a bombastic song that sets the tone of the game and where Mae is at instead of trying to force the player to feel a certain way. This is really nice because so many story driven games have soundtracks that force what the player is supposed to feel instead of “here’s what it’s like in the area, create your own feelings of it.” Sure there needs to be a bit of guidance with the music but it’s nice as the player to use my own imagination and create what I think the game should feel like.

Night in the Woods is a beautiful indie game that makes you feel in a way that a game has no right to make you feel. Don’t look up story spoilers of this game, don’t read a walk-through, just get the game and enjoy a wonderful story that will make you question yourself and miss talking to your old friends.

Night in the Woods gets a five out of five stars.