Post
A game about being a 20-something failure in a dying small town, starring cartoon animals, that somehow nails millennial existential dread.
Night in the Woods by Infinite Fall follows Mae Borowski, a college dropout cat who returns to her fading hometown of Possum Springs. What starts as a story about reconnecting with old friends and doing crimes in the woods slowly becomes a meditation on economic anxiety, mental illness, growing up, and the death of small-town America. The writing is achingly real; Mae's friends feel like people you actually know. The gameplay mixes exploration, minigames, and dialogue choices, but the real draw is the characters and their struggles with debt, dead-end jobs, and the terrifying question of what you do when the future you were promised does not exist.
Example
The scene where Mae and Bea have a massive fight about privilege, and Bea, who had to drop out of school to run her dead father's shop, tells Mae she does not get to have a breakdown because some people cannot afford to fall apart. It hits devastatingly hard.
Why it matters
Night in the Woods captured millennial and Gen Z economic anxiety better than almost any other piece of media. It proved that games about ordinary emotional struggles can be just as compelling as games about saving the world.
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