Creature Feature: Night in the Woods and the Horror of the Mundane
Gina Stinnett, Contributing Editor
This piece contains end-of-game spoilers for Night in the Woods—proceed with caution!
Who are our monsters?
We tend to answer this question with some sort of concrete entity, whether supernatural or grounded in reality. Frankenstein. The Jersey Devil. Charles Manson. The monster is tangible, easily identifiable, and ultimately, vanquishable. Night in the Woods (Infinite Fall, 2017) is unique in that their more obvious monster shares the spotlight with, and at times is overshadowed by, a more existential horror. In allowing this mundane horror to serve as the true monster of the game, NITW plays with a horror most of us have experienced—the bleak existence of being on the losing team in a capitalist society.
A not so triumphant return home.
NITW is a slow start. You assume the role of Mae Borowski, a somewhat prodigal protagonist returning to her dying hometown after dropping out of college. You spend your in-game days exploring the decaying town of Possum Springs, catching up with old friends, “doing crimes,” as your friend Gregg is fond of putting it, and strutting across telephone lines and rooftops. The gameplay is pleasant, the characters are compelling, but at times one might wonder when the story “really” starts.
If you explore the town enough early in the game, you can uncover small clues that something isn’t quite right, but none of this information is directly provided by the game. In fact, it isn’t until around the halfway point of the game that the primary monster is fully introduced. After the town’s annual Harfest event (Possum Springs’ Halloween festival), Mae witnesses the abduction of a nameless, faceless character. After the abductor disappears over a fence and deep into the woods surrounding the town, Mae recruits her friends to pursue what she sees as a “ghost.” Mae’s investigation of this “ghost” leads her through the town’s sordid history of coal mine accidents, heated labor strikes, and a National Guard massacre of the strikers along with two children who were delivering food to their striking parents.
Eventually, the core four characters venture into an abandoned mine deep in the woods to discover that their “ghost” is one member of a large, murderous cult worshiping an unseen monster at the bottom of a copper mine pit. The cultists believe that their sacrifices to the pit keep the town stable, and every few months, they send a member out into town to kidnap and murder “drunks, delinquents, and drifters.” After a tense confrontation, Mae and her friends flee the scene, and eventually cause the mine to collapse in on itself, trapping the cultists underground.
Cultists trying to appease the horror of the mundane.
Various critics have referenced the game’s pacing issues, and how the game often feels as though it’s split between two plots—Mae’s return home, and the later, rushed murder cult plot. However, the pacing of the game is no longer an issue when one reconsiders who—or what—plays the role of the true monster in the game. To put it simply, the cultists are merely a symptom of the larger horror of life in a forgotten, decaying town. This horror is present from the moment you boot up the game and choose from different segments of text to fill out Mae’s poem about the death of her grandfather and the death of the town. Mae describes her grandfather’s last moments as him looking out of the bedroom window at the dilapidated abandoned mill before uttering his final words: “this house is haunted.”
Poem for a town haunted by capitalism.
When you assume control of Mae, you walk past crumbling, abandoned playgrounds, wreckage from the old mines, and overall devastation of her hometown. As Mae reacquaints herself with her home, she finds that both nothing and everything have changed. Mae’s parents are at risk of losing their home after spending most of their savings on her failed college adventure. The town is essentially kept running because of the Ham Panther, a big box grocery store that muscled out the local Food Donkey. Bea, Mae’s childhood best friend, is stuck managing her father’s store after her mother’s death saddled the family with insurmountable medical bills and her father had a nervous breakdown. Mae’s partner-in-crime Gregg and his boyfriend Angus are working every day to save up enough money to move to the bigger, more progressive city of Bright Harbor.
Most residents of Possum Springs seem stuck in time, in a town with no opportunities. In fact, one of the major plot points at the beginning of the game is how angry people in town are at Mae for dropping out of college—in their eyes, Mae had a chance to escape the everyday horror of Possum Springs only to squander the opportunity they’ve all fantasized about. For the residents of Possum Springs, particularly the young residents, simply getting out of town is the goal, even if it means they’re ultimately working a similar job in a different city. As written in a song by a band made up of Mae’s friends: “Stuck where the past and future meet / Watching all our autumns drift away / I just wanna die anywhere else / If only I could die anywhere else.”
This is the horror of the mundane in NITW. There’s nothing about this dead-end small town life that’s beyond what we see in our current socioeconomic landscape. Possum Springs isn’t Silent Hill—it’s a reflection of dying rust belt towns across the US. Perhaps most chilling is that even though Mae and her friends succeed in trapping the cultists underground, absolutely nothing else in the game has fundamentally changed. Mae is still directionless, Bea is still left to manage the family store and take care of her father, Gregg and Angus are still left trying to get out of town. Mae’s parents are still trying to figure out how to keep the family home. Mae’s father is considering unionizing his coworkers at the Ham Panther, but he recognizes the uphill battle ahead of him. The systems that created the cultists are still alive and well, and there’s no real sense of triumph at the end of the game. The monster is vanquished for now, but the forces that gave birth to that monster will simply churn out another version of the same.
The end of NITW is merely another small victory in the face of seemingly unbeatable odds. In the context of the upcoming election, this ending feels particularly bleak and troublesome—if we elect Trump out, we have merely removed a representation of a larger problem. It’s more comforting to imagine that by trapping the cultists underground or voting out a fascist, we are ensuring our own safety, but in the end, the horror of our conditions is precisely that slaying the visible monster doesn’t touch the true monstrosity of the white supremacist heteropatriarchal capitalist society that produces these monsters time and time again.
If you enjoyed this article, check out some of our other “Creature Feature” essays like Alex Finley on noonwraiths in The Witcher 3 or Heather Lamb on the Flood in Halo.
