Another Night in the Woods
Picture yourself a young liberal during the climax of the 2016 US Presidential election. You’ve become disenfranchised with the status quo, feeling outcast and alienated by American society. The world has grown intimidating, daunting, like a beast that can’t be overcome, an unknowable entity in the dark looming over your every move.
As power shifts right and you realize nobody is coming to stop it, you’re left to find your own path forward. The world is broken, something has to give. But what is the source? How did we arrive at this pressure point of civil collapse?
Night in the Woods (Infinite Fall, Secret Lab, 2017) aims to offer an answer. Released just weeks after Trump’s inauguration, this game features cute anthropomorphic animals unraveling a mystery as they go through the toils of everyday life, attempting to understand the world as it is crumbling around them. In this essay we will look back at the five years since Night in the Woods’ release, examining how its political allegory has held up, the critical conversation surrounding the game, and what roads of analysis may still lay unexplored.
///
Night in the Woods, for those unaware, follows college dropout Mae Borowski as she returns to her family and friends in the town of Possum Springs. Shaken by her time at school, Mae attempts to adjust to life in her small childhood town, but soon learns that something sinister is lurking under the placid exterior.
A narratively and thematically rich game, Night in the Woods inspired a lot of critical analysis, much of it extremely positive. In his video essay, “Capitalist Present, Collective Future: An Analysis of Labor in Night in The Woods and Tacoma,” Jacob Geller praised the game for its depiction of working class labor; its characters trapped in their small town, forced to live with their soul-crushing dead end, constantly worrying about which bill they won’t be able to pay. Geller commended the game for its realistic labor dynamics, drawing parallels to how people in the games industry experience this reality every single day, and applauding Night in the Woods as an accurate and realistic portrayal of what people are forced to go through just to survive.
In their essay for Paste, “Night in the Woods is the Working Class Fiction I’ve Been Waiting For,” Salvatore Pane similarly praises Night in the Woods as a revolutionary piece of working class fiction, writing that the game “completely shook me in the rarest and best possible way.” Their article delves into how the game portrays the life of a working class person living in downtrodden suburbia, moving between the pure horror of daily struggles to attempting to enjoy what little scraps of life they can.
What it’s like to live in Possum Springs is one of Night in the Woods’ primary focuses. While Mae is undeniably the protagonist, the town embodies a character all its own. Throughout the game Mae meets countless pedestrians, workers, and families who each have a story to tell of the town’s slow demise. You’ll see working-class families talking about losing their jobs due to insufficient funds and businesses being forced to leave the town or shutter for good. All of these work to depict Possum Springs as void of opportunity, having lost its potential in the years prior. The town is portrayed almost as a decaying body, neither dead nor alive, trapped in a perpetual state of limbo.
This image of a failing working class town is comparable to many contemporary communities struggling to survive amid the ongoing pandemic and developing recession. Jobs are being outsourced to areas where labor is cheaper, and Rust Belt towns, which sprung out of a once-thriving coal mining economy, routinely fall into disrepair as people leave looking for better prospects.
Youtuber Gnoggin expands on this in their video essay, “The Socio-Politics of Night in the Woods and the Rust Belt,” discussing how many Rust Belt towns are quickly declining, having fallen far from their former economic prosperity. With few jobs in the area, people are left to work for large chains that don’t care a lick about their employees' well-being.
This post-mining economic collapse has left these environments a shell of their former selves, a hollowed out husk of something once financially prosperous and now in shambles, leaving anyone who can’t get out to pick up the scraps. Night in the Woods highlights how individuals living in these towns respond to their working class reality, empathizing with their confusion, anger, and anxiety at what the future may hold. Like so many working class people in modern America, the residents of Possum Springs are trying to piece together everything that they once knew, while the youth are looking for answers in a place that fails to give them.
The overall aesthetic that the four main characters - Mae, Bea, Gregg, and Angus - adopt is one of a disgruntled youth that’s tired of the status quo. They represent the growing phenomena of Gen Z turning away from Capitalism, refusing to accept crumbs from the impoverished Millennial’s table. Carolyn Petit writes about this further in her article, “What Lies Beneath: On the Love and Anger of Night in the Woods,” discussing how the main gang is explicitly disenfranchised with the way things are, turning away from a broken capitalist system while older generations try in vain to defend it.
Jess Joho argues a similar interpretation in, “The Human Cost of the Millennial Generation Gap in Night in the Woods,” but from an inverted position, writing that the game focuses on millennials instead of Gen Z. Joho states that the game showcases the conflict of younger and older generations, doomed to be pitted against each other when the real issues are systemic.
///
Not all elements in Night in the Woods have aged perfectly. Anti-Capitalist rhetoric has become much more common within progressive spaces since 2017, particularly among Genz-Z, with many people now recognizing that talking about the problem is not enough and more aggressive tactics are needed to create a post-capital society.
Night in the Woods’ commentary doesn’t extend far beyond a surface-level analysis that the status quo has flaws. It’s certainly a great highlight of the average Joe’s plight in America, however, it doesn’t dive substantially into what belies it. You won’t find an analysis of how work is insidious, or of how Capitalism ingrains itself into the individual’s consciousness like a parasite. Instead, you are presented with an ambiguous notion that maybe things aren’t so good and that, possibly, something should be different.
This is one of the issues I’ve yet to see properly unpacked amid all the praise. Miguel Panabella in “Opened World: Standing Still” claims the game to be an accurate representation of systemic, institutional issues, however his analysis leaves me unconvinced that the game does anything more than skim the surface. This isn’t to say that the game is wrong, just that it doesn’t go into enough detail to warrant claims of being institutional.
Night in the Woods’ political sophistication (or lack thereof) was appropriate in 2017. Socialist and anti-Capitalist politics were still developing within the US, gaining support off the campaigns of people like Bernie Sanders, but still far from a coherent movement. But now that time has passed, the game has aged a bit, and while it remains a pleasant experience to play, it is clearly a product of its time. Were it released in 2022, we’d expect to see more explicit anti-Capitalist politics, a more direct and confrontational commentary, and an even rawer picture painted of a country ripped apart by the ruling class.
A surface level analysis of Night in the Woods’ politics is showcased within the articles covering it, too. In, “Night in the Woods and the Lies of Nostalgia,” Dante Douglas praises the game for wearing “its anticapitalist heart on its sleeve.” His article, however, only covers the surface as to how Capitalism is bad, arriving at the right conclusion but without a sophisticated critique.
Take the party Mae attends towards the end of the game. It’s a college party hours away from Possum Springs, filled to the brim with tired young adults who are looking for something to occupy their time. At this party, one of the attendees - a goat named Jackie - goes on a rant about antifascist action, talking about how violence against fascists is the only good approach. The game portrays this as an extreme position, one that’s a bit too out there to even be considered. Mae’s reaction as the main character sells it - uncomfortable and unsure how to respond. It doesn’t go beyond the surface, arriving at a simplistic “violence is always bad” answer to this complicated issue. This one brief conversation is all we get about anti-fascism in the game.
This could’ve been used as a jumping-off point for discussing how to approach sensitive subjects like this to regular people. Night in the Woods could’ve talked about the ethics of retaliating against fascists, and when violence is a reasonable response. It could’ve talked about how the harms of Capitalism intersect with the harms of fascism, and covered this with the seriousness it deserves. Instead, we get a short conversation that portrays the issue with minimal care and without the nuance it so rightfully deserves
And yet the game received praise for its leftist politics, such as in Carolyn Petit’s previously mentioned article, in which she praises the game for being “unabashedly anti-capitalist and anti-fascist.” Far from unabashed, Night in the Woods tiptoes around its more radical politics, offering only gestures towards these positions or dismissing them as too aggressive.
Another pertinent example are the times Mae goes to hang out with the fox Gregg. They’ll often be found doing some sort of illegal activity while hilariously shouting “crimes!” Sure, it makes for a cute moment, but it’s a missed opportunity Night in the Woods could have used to expand on its leftist politics. The game could have used this as an avenue to explore how crimes can be justified in opposition to the status quo. While it does depict property damage in a lighthearted and sympathetic light, it doesn’t go beyond typical teen mischief. With how much crime is a symptom of Capitalism’s failures (forcing lower class people to put themselves in dangerous positions just to survive), the lighthearted and flat depiction here is disappointing.
///
Night in the Woods’ anti-Capitalist politics were seen as revolutionary at the time of its release. Even years later, writers like Madison Butler are still praising the game for its analogs to contemporary America (“Two Years Later, Night in the Woods is Still Relatable”). While the game had a lot to offer, praising it as a revolutionary text feels like a stretch. It could’ve edged off the conspiratorial end of things a bit, and gone deeper into Capitalism’s systemic oppression. There’s more at stake than just the local club down the lane, and Night in the Woods’ metaphors are ultimately lacking at best and naive at worst. You need to understand the collective aspects of how Capitalism harms people to truly appreciate the way it affects the individual.
Only time will tell how Night in the Woods and the library of writing it inspired continue to age. Hopefully, as anti-Capitalist politics continue to gain support, new games will emerge with the nuance and energy we so desperately need.
///
Additional reading: I would recommend checking out Kathryn Hemmann’s article, “Cosmic Horror and the Ruins of Capitalism in Night in the Woods,” for an in-depth look at the game’s ending.
Mira Lazine (she/her) is an American writer aiming to cover every topic under the sun. You can find more of her writings on Twitter @MiraLazine.
If you enjoyed this post, consider sharing it with a friend. If you'd like to help keep the lights on you can buy me a Ko-Fi.