Never exactly a rich place, it’s sunk even further into economic depression by the time Mae returns from college. The sense that the choices presented to the player are red herrings or traps mirrors the sense of static despondency and hopelessness that the entire town of Possum Springs seems engulfed in. It’s here where these “false” choices really start to bear their subtextual significance: what else are you supposed to do in a boring small town but commit crimes for fun? (“Doing crimes” is a recurring theme brought up over and over again during Mae’s outings with her troubled, hyperactive best friend from high school Gregg-to the point where Gregg’s boyfriend, Angus, accuses Mae of being a bad influence in the heat of the moment.) One of those outings is at a mall, and as the scene unfolds, it becomes clear that the only way to move the story forward is for Mae to shoplift something, even if the player doesn’t want to do it. Later, the player may choose to try and mend Mae’s estranged, fractured relationship with childhood friend Bea by going on a few outings with her. The player is essentially given no choice but to return to drinking a beer several times in order to move the story along, and as Mae gets drunker, her social decorum (already not in the best state, as throughout the game her dialogue options are often all terrible) disintegrates and the party ends with her disoriented, nauseous, and making a scene.

Early in the game, Mae is at a party where she knows nearly no one, her friends are wrapped up in other conversations, and her social anxiety is magnified by the awkward presence of an ex. What makes them so insistent, and what makes them a rich textual mine to dig into for interpretation, is their inevitability. The player, as Mae, is forced (mainly through dialogue trees) to make decisions throughout the game, which range from irritating to truly terrible. But the scariest element of Night In the Woods isn’t anything aesthetic at all-and the secret to unlocking it lies in the game’s fundamental mechanic of decision-making. There are some superficial earmarks of spookiness: Mae’s menacing platformer fever dreams, which exhaust and overwhelm her more and more as the game goes on the ghost story introduced halfway through the narrative, which provides a nifty basis for some eerie setpieces even the music that plays on the title screen, which feels like a gamified version of the ambient music from Scooby-Doo, priming the player to solve the mystery that drives the game’s climax. It’s no secret that Night In the Woods is a complex game that weaves many threads throughout its deceptively simple storyline-aside from the surprisingly deep religious backstory that the creators developed for the citizens of Possum Springs, the player is rewarded for multiple playthroughs, which progressively reveal more about the lost souls who populate the town, Mae’s relationships with them, and their relationships with each other. Lurking under the surface, however, is a game about existential dread, mental illness, despair, cosmic horror, and feelings of helplessness.

Aside from a few rhythm game inspired musical sequences, it is a relatively quiet game that thrives on rich dialogue and character interactions. Night In the Woods is a story about a 20-year-old cat named Mae Borowski who has returned to her hometown of Possum Springs after deciding to drop out of college, and you spend the majority of the game exploring her relationships with the townsfolk-with her neighbors, with her parents, with the friends she left behind. There are no jump scares, no dread-inducing meta experiments, no resource scarcity (no item management to speak of, actually), and no tense gameplay sequences. By most reasonable metrics, the 2017 indie adventure game Night In the Woods is not a horror game.

The way to the woods