"You picked up a leaf, brown and curled and dry as a stick of cinnamon and dangled it over the lighter flame. I watched as the fire skimmed your fingertip and you cursed, letting the blackened leaf pieces crumble to the ground.
'Would you kill me for a million dollars? A billion?' I asked you.
'I mean, it's a billion dollars...' You shrugged and flipped your hand in a mock how-could-I-refuse-that manner and I made to swat you and we laughed.
'Would you kill me if it meant Pink Floyd came back to life and released new music?'
You wandered away into the dry scrub brush of the steep hill where we were sat, right behind the test prep center and the run-down family donut shop. You kick at the needlegrass. 'Nah, I think their time has passed. They're done.'
'Would you kill me if it meant you'd finally be happy?'
You mimed shooting at me and we both cackled again, but you denied the offer a hundred times and patted my head, mussing up my hair in a way that made me think maybe this moment is what brought you happiness.
The only way to have fun in town is to create it in the guise of trouble, and God knows we love to make trouble. We both think it's ridiculous how I'm more hesitant to smash an aluminum can full of pepsi over a comparably larger glass bottle of lemonade, because I'd rather risk glass shards in my hair and skin than soda. You cut your fingers trying to beat the cap off one of the (also glass) coke bottles with your bat because we thought of everything but the bottle opener. For all your logic and rationale you can be so impulsive sometimes. But that's what I love about you. We marvel at the blood and the soda glistening on your hand, sticky and wet and congealing together in the dull yellow of the flashlight. Desert evening potion.
Cars and passerbys stop and stare at us and we must look so strange - coming out of the woods covered in dirt, me with the bat hoisted over my shoulder and you cradling your bleeding hand in a Hello Kitty towel. Us emulating Mae and Gregg. The streets are full but sleepy and I worry that every sudden sound of police sirens is aimed at us. We bring the heat. We pretend we are rebels, top gun fighters, criminals on the run. Every move we make feels like we're doing something illegal but it's the most alive I've felt in a while."

This poem was written to me by my friend a couple years ago after we went up into the hills to smash some glass bottles and cans with a baseball bat. It's strange to think that this game was the reason why we became friends in the first place.
Night in the Woods is one of my favorite games of all time. It's definitely far from perfect, but it's amazing how a game featuring anthropomorphic animals entails a narrative that is more relatable to me than any other story-driven game I've played.
Mae Borowski is a 20 year old bass-playing, second-year college dropout. She returns to her quiet Rust Belt hometown called Possom Springs. Throughout the game she struggles with her identity - who she is, what she wants, what will happen to her . . . On top of her own identity crisis are the several traumatic memories of her past. Things she's done in high school, and things she's done in college, all come back to haunt her. She has friends - Gregg, Bea, and Angus - who (although she hasn't seen them in a while) give her the opportunity to rebuild and strengthen her relationships with them.
As she continues figuring things out for herself, she gets a shot at redemption. She makes new friends, meets new people. And in the end, it seems like she's more content with herself than she ever has been in her life.
Besides the superstitious elements that are within the narrative, I've never felt more connected with a game's story than I do with Night in the Woods. I'm a 20 year old, bass-playing, second-year college student. I don't live in the Rust Belt but instead live in a relatively quiet neighborhood in Southern California that is somewhat similar to that of Possom Springs (but most definitely evokes the same feeling of a town so boring you have to create your own fun, hence the poem above where my friend and I smashed bottles in the hills). I'm no dropout, but the COVID-19 pandemic has forced me to leave my university and return to my family. Being stuck with my family is like highschool all over again, but I'm always anxious being home as a result of the horrible memories of the past. Things I've done I regret, things that happened that traumatized me, but recently things have been clearing up for me. Like Mae, I've been given a chance to figure out my place in the universe and make reparations with my past. I became friends again with someone who I thought was out of my life. I strengthened my bond with my highschool friends (we still play on Steam all the time just like how it was when we were highschool sophomores). I fixed my relationship with my family, and I'm more close with them than ever.
Night in the Woods is more important to me than ever. It's comforting, sentimental, grounded, and so much fun. I don't know about anyone else, but relatability is pretty difficult to find in a game, mainly because most games' objectives is to immerse yourself in environments and gameplay that go beyond realism. Games like Doom or Call of Duty where you really act as a god-killer, or Grand Theft Auto where you can be a houseowner in Southern California. Night in the Woods doesn't focus on that. Mae is vulnerable, and even though she's a bipedal cat, she's more human than nearly every other video game character I've seen (like all of the horrible characters in Life is Strange). I find there to be so much replay value in it despite having only really two routes that share the same ending. But despite that, it evokes a feeling like no other. The visuals, the writing, the music, and the gameplay all come together to accurately depict the struggle that we have all faced or will face at some point in our lives: adulthood.
This game is truly one-of-a-kind.