Been playing any new video games these last few months? If so, do you have any recommendations?
Naturally, I've been playing plenty. My favorite new game though isn't just my favorite from the last few months, but one of my favorites ever. I haven't decided its exact position yet (will need more time with the game to see if it fades or grows on me in the long run), but I can safely say that it's in my all-time top three, up there with Gone Home and Papo & Yo. I figured I'd recommend it to @Chloe especially because it deals with a lot of highly pertinent social topics that I think we largely agree on from a type of perspective we seem to basically agree on. It's called Night in the Woods.
Night in the Woods is a narrative-driven downloadable computer and PlayStation 4 game ($20) with secondary platforming, puzzle-solving, and rhythm-matching elements. It may revolve around talking animals, but make no mistake: this is a game for adults, and most especially, for young adults.
You play as 20-year-old Mae Borowski, who recently dropped out of college and returns to her home town of Possum Springs to live with her parents and reunite with old friends. I grew very attached to Mae as the game progressed, as it became clear that the depressed, ever-cynical, and somewhat mischievous lead was a character whose attitude I could relate to, particularly at that age. Her parents worry about her and force her to take a job, which in the game's dying mining community means menial, minimum-wage employment. You'll spend the bulk of Night in the Woods navigating the pretty realistic and believable relationships between the game's characters, working your job, playing in your friends' band, and exploring the town's folklore (which is a sort of metafictional element). Most of the game's more conventional game play elements (like platforming and solving environmental puzzles) are essentially confined to surrealist dream sequences that take place between days. It's not an exaggeration to say that these sequences are gorgeous, meaningful, and that their challenge level is simple enough to avoid interrupting the flow of the larger story while providing just enough relief from the mundane to keep things from getting monotonous, though it's worth saying that playing with your band in the real Possum Springs revolves around Guitar Hero-like rhythm matching as well. (The songs are quite awesome!)
As Carolyn Petit has aptly surmised (and I'll be borrowing some of her screen shots from the game here because I think she made excellent choices that highlight the essence of the game quite well), Night in the Woods, at its heart, is "concerned, literally and metaphorically, with what is happening under the surface of this country today," where mounting economic frustrations...
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...are building a large reservoir of hidden anger that's beginning to boil over, often in directionless and unhealthy ways.
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While the creators don't pretend to have all the answers, they also don't do what so many other games do with serious social dilemmas: pretend that some false equivalency exists between progressive and conservative solutions that requires thinking people to take up a neutral position that, by comfortably avoiding all real controversy, just so happens to sell. Instead, this game encourages us to reject the aforementioned regressive attitudes...
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...in favor of both recognizing and challenging the structural nature of the rust belt's problems.
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You can FEEL the anger seething through this game. Town residents vent that "There isn't gonna *be* a Possum Springs," a want to "burn their Silicon Valley to the ground", and much more, and you and your friends grapple with some of the personal consequences of that mounting anger and of its expression in conservative attitudes, including struggles with physical abuse, mental illness, discrimination, and social alienation. Developer Infinite Falls, above all, challenges us to search ourselves and ask whether and to what extent our anger is rooted in love for oppressed people or instead rooted in hate and prejudice. I can't think of a more timely challenge than that! Never before have I played a video game that so completely encapsulated my own worldview!
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Originally Posted by IMPress Polly
