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This game was really good! As other people have said, I found the whole topic of homecoming, dropping out of school, the lack of opportunity in small towns and the alienation of old friends and family as people go their separate ways really familiar and well-done. It's been five years since I moved away from a small hometown myself and while I haven't dropped out have certainly struggled at times and thought about what'd happen if I did. I can't really tell if there being a supernatural cause behind Mae's problems weakens or strengthens the story, since it externalizes a lot of those relatable issues, but on the other hand it's also satisfying as a player to help someone overcome a manifestation of their problems (even if it's by accidentally collapsing a mountain on top of them). Things worked out pretty well plot-wise, although I kinda wish they'd leaned harder on the supernatural stuff and the investigation, maybe spun out the final conflict with the cult a little more. Basically as soon as the severed arm showed up I knew the game wasn't going to be just a story about relationships and introspection but it took until Halloween for the ball to really get rolling and I was hoping for a little more of a conscious effort to take down the cult rather than accidentally sealing them in. Finding out who they were and even discovering some of the townfolk you've met were members (I kept expecting someone to be missing) would've given more punch, and I was hoping for a callback to the big Cat God with Mae "closing the tear" by blocking up the sacrifice pit. I even thought the baseball bat sequences were some kind of prep-work for a combat finale where you actually fight the cultists. Really though I'm just pathetically grateful they actually gave the story a proper ending at all, so many games these days in the artsy-adventure mould go for something abrupt and ~thematic~ but they rightly recognized the importance of the characters and relationships and saw the whole thing through to the end. I was ready to be so annoyed like four times over the course of the ending whenever I thought they were about to cut to black and credits, like Mae giving herself up to the cultist, stressing about whether they were going to stick the landing almost kept me from actually enjoying it! Last thing I'll say is I kind of wish some of the decisions were better signposted to signal which ones were going to advance the plot and which ones are optional side-stuff. I think I missed out on one chance to hang out with Germ for example because I thought if I hung out with him I wouldn't get to with Gregg or Bea that day, and some of Gregg's stuff like light-smashing was apparently a freebie as well. I understand the challenge the devs had there though since being too heavy-handed in the dialogue can spoil immersion a bit. Oh wait, one more thing - did anyone else do the historical society and when you go down the fire escape, end up back at the top again? I went down the fire escape, jumped down, then things went dark and suddenly I was back at the top. I can't tell if it's supposed to be a deliberate time loop or a bug.
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Mar 2, 2017 00:27
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Ahhh okay, thought it was supposed to be some spooky business. Also Cat Mom is dressed as Ned Flanders.
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Mar 2, 2017 03:10
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I want to check my understanding on the supernatural elements, because I think the game laid it out clear enough to tell what's going on. The Cat and possibly the other animals that appear in dreams are Godly, but in the uncaring and distant way and whatever struggles they might have with the cosmos and the infinite bug horrors beyond the edges of the universe are disconnected from anything going on around Earth - it's basically good old Entropy and the apathetic universe business, even if they're a little more embodied and chatty than usual. The cult is real and does gain a supernatural benefit through interacting with what I think is meant to be one of those infinite horrors, since those things Hunger and throwing sacrifices in return for boons is classic cult business. The horror has been shaping and influencing Mae for years, and I think it and the cult wanted her to lead the next generation of sacrificers like the guy who founded it in the first place. I don't think Mae meaningfully defeated the horror exactly, although by killing the cult and sealing the hole they've diminished its influence. I also think the Cat God is opposed to the horrors in its own way, and the way it talked of closing a tear makes me think the way is closed and Mae is safe for now even if they didn't do it out of any compassion for the 'little creatures'. Both the Cat God and Mae make the point that they can't actually destroy these horrors, both personal death and universal entropy are inevitable, but they can be pushed back each day and rejecting the cult's offer and the horror's influence are examples of not giving in to that sort of despair, which obviously matches the overall theme. It'd be neat to see if there are any lasting consequences for Mae. She seems back to normal again in the epilogue, the threat of supernatural grooming looks over so that's at least some of her issues cleared up. Could she, at least in theory, go back to college now? Will she really tell her parents about any of this? Bea wondered if it'd be safe for her to travel and Mae thinks she can. And of course Gregg (who rules) and Angus are moving, there's still the mortgage drama to worry about... They're not particularly important questions, though. There probably isn't enough material for a sequel but I wouldn't mind a follow-up of some kind further down the line. Although personally I like to imagine the four main characters (plus Germ) form a Scooby Doo team of paranormal investigators, driving around the county fighting ghosts and cults and such. Maybe on that road trip Mae wants to plan...?
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Mar 2, 2017 07:26
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Just saw that apparently in the end there's two different endings based on who you hung out with more, Gregg or Bea. Whichever one you do three events with instead of one will be the one you briefly play as after Mae's disappearance, will take point during the rescue and will be the one you have the last conversation with in the end. I don't know for sure if you could do two hangouts with each of them, though I do remember trying to spread my time evenly between them and after the second Bea event got turned down by Gregg for his second event, so maybe it locks you in. Which would make sense, since the first event for both Gregg and Bea ends on a positive note so if you only do one of them it leaves that friendship in a good place before Mae can screw things up on the second one. Speaking of the end, I wondered about what Bea had to say about Gregg and Angus's relationship. She was of the opinion they're just smalltown highschool sweethearts and once they move to a bigger city, meet new people, get new jobs or go to school, they'll grow, change and probably break up. In particular she thinks Angus will outgrow Gregg once he gets past the idea that Gregg saved him from the difficult time in his life where he was getting away from his abusive family. I'm no expert on relationships, but while I thought what she said was plausible, it was also sort of a cautious and conservative take from someone with a (not unjustified) cynical outlook. It seems just as plausible their shared history would keep them together, or if they drift apart a bit later they could still remain friends. Heck, if anything's going to cement a bond with someone it might be sort-of-accidentally killing a murder cult together. I'd be interested to see what other people thought of what she said.
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Mar 2, 2017 21:08
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Oddly good timing to play this and enjoy the anti-capitalist message, just got out of an academic talk about extracting more value for less money out of "gig economy" workers like people doing Amazon's mechanical turk. The researcher proudly predicted that the percentage of North Americans engaged in the gig economy will grow from 8% to 30% over ten years and we should position ourselves now to exploit this. When Selmers burns down the silicon cities entomb me with these monsters. Edit: My guess for what that bit of indecipherable dialogue Mae hears from the horror at the end translates to is "We can operationalize curiosity to incentivize workers without increasing pay." Dolash fucked around with this message at 01:54 on Mar 3, 2017 |
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Mar 3, 2017 01:51
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eatenmyeyes posted:I just noticed that in the last scene a door is being forced open while the first scene portrays a door being fixed. I'm still trying to get a read on the janitor. I also have a sneaking suspicion that the choices for the expository text may subtly alter the game, ditto which of the two investigation are pursued. Could you elaborate? I'm pretty sure that which of Gregg or Bea takes point in the rescue is based off of who you hang out with more, but I didn't see more than superficial dialogue changes from which two investigations you do, like Angus and Bea talking about whether the cultists looked like the person they saw at the graveyard/cliff depending on which of them did what. The janitor guy's also pretty neat but I don't think he plays a role besides being sort of generically mysterious. If he intervened at any point to help Mae, pass on information, foil the cult, interact with the horrors or the forest gods, I didn't see it. At most I figured he might've had an inkling about what was going on and was just sort of observing. Oh, also just remembered that at the church there's a goat I'd never seen before who makes ominous suggestions about who Mae would blame for being attacked if she ever wakes up. I have to assume that was one of the cult members? He's not the one who attacks at the elevator, who's the only one we get a look at, I think that guy was a cat. I picked up a screenshot of that guy's silhouette for comparison and I finally understand the weird beak thing coming out of the hood is a miner's helmet flashlight: 
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Mar 3, 2017 05:18
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I think there's a little extra poignancy to the cultist being a cat with a notched ear, like Mae, since they'd been trying to recruit her to lead the next generation of the cult. It may not be any cat Mae knows but it's a little hint at what she could've become. It's interesting that Mae can sort of see where they're coming from, as she says both there in the mine shaft right before the cultist attacks and again in the end right before band practice. She gets why they'd despair about the decline of their hometown, and in their desperation turn to something horrible for a way out. It might seem absurd that the cult would try to pitch Mae on joining them or that the horror would groom her with its "glimmer" when she doesn't come off as the murdering type, but she's vulnerable to a similar sort of despair and anger and ultimately has to consciously reject the horror in her last supernatural encounter in the water. It's enough to make me wonder if - were it not for her friends - she might've joined. Not as a conscious choice exactly, just that she'd be worn down and terrorized enough by nightmares to take any way out. When she went to give herself up the cult wasn't going to kill her, her friends showing up saved Mae mostly from falling under the cult's control or influence. It's sort of funny playing the character that ultimately needs rescuing for a change.
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Mar 3, 2017 08:26
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Those are legit good moves and I went from highschool wallflower to drunk dance king when I realized nobody really knows what they're doing either so just flail around and have fun. You go, Mae. Edit: Also, about that scene. I didn't go further right when I saw the dude standing there, I was sure he'd end up being a creep and Mae would need rescuing again, thereafter ruining Bea's night. I ended up seeing his conversation on youtube though and he actually seems okay, unless I failed to pick up on something. Dolash fucked around with this message at 22:54 on Mar 4, 2017 |
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Mar 4, 2017 22:52
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Macaluso posted:Well for one, that's a girl Beekeeping and You posted:I think that's a woman? Because Mae mentions seeing a hot woman and not getting her number, and later draws a little picture of the bear with a caption like "TOTAL HOTTIE." Unless I'm misremembering that scene. Welp, I'm blind, deaf and can't read. Thank you for the clarification! 
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Mar 5, 2017 03:17
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Alder posted:What game is this? Why it's the indie hit app "Good Night - In The Woods", friend. Many levels and fun! That twitter thread is pretty good though. You know you've made it when your work is getting appropriated for spyware scam games that are just a looping loading screen riddled with ads. Next they'll start showing up in those disturbing flash games about Disney characters going to the dentist or cutting their toenails or whatever.
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Mar 5, 2017 03:44
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Someone on Tumblr pointed out that the four chamber of commerce people are all the same species as the four monstrously huge animals from Mae's dreams, and the cultist that tried to kill her in the end was a cat like the huge cat God, and also that the chamber of commerce people aren't in the epilogue (I don't remember seeing them at least) so maybe they were part of the cult?
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Mar 5, 2017 08:59
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Man we all know the horror down the hole just wants to Make Possum Springs Great Again. But yeah, the game wore its politics pretty openly, as do some of the devs (peep Roko's Brocialist's twitter page, also the name Roko's Brocialist), which is good! The game did a good job of painting the sort of dismal conditions that can make people desperate enough for any solution, even a bad one, without condoning them or writing them off. Considering how much anger's flared up since the election, a message encouraging empathy is timely. And if you miss all that Bea tells you straight up she's a member of the Young Socialists so there ya go. She shoulda told that poly-sci major at the party she's a big Chapo Traphouse fan, that would've smoothed everything over.
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Mar 5, 2017 20:43
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I thought the ending revelation about the influence of the Black Goat (was that its proper name? I've just been calling it "the horror", I don't remember a name) on Mae's mental state didn't undermine her internal issues and struggle too much - I read it more like they'd been exploiting that vulnerability, with the nightmares being just one symptom of it, to shape her into something useful to the cult. Now that they've been cut off she's free from that influence and can make progress on getting better but she still has her own issues to overcome, including external challenges like her family's struggles or whether to go back to school or work, just now there isn't an eldritch abomination with its thumb on the scales trying to push her down a dark road. On a related note, is Mae not meant to have visited over the two years she was away? Was she so far away she couldn't swing by over the summer or for Longest Night? There's a college town just a two-hour drive away, I don't recall hearing what she was studying but she didn't come off as a star student whisked away to a top college on the other side of the world. Alder suggested she could try transferring to a more local college and that seems like a natural fit.
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Mar 6, 2017 19:22
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Ohhh, okay. Yeah I guess that would make sense too. Edit: Or not? I definitely got the impression from how her friends reacted and how much had changed that it had been a couple years, which was a little odd.
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Mar 6, 2017 21:12
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Alder posted:I'm disappointed they didn't go beyond the whole evil murder cult issue and felt very vague. I expected to see some kind of plan for the next few months but it just ended? Also, I feel like Mae could've stayed over the holidays but you know that's not cheap either. It's possible she could've went home during the winter/summer but didn't spend much time outside her home too. I've thought about this too and sort of wanted them to go further or make some kind of followup, but I can see why they wouldn't. The supernatural threat gives a strong central plotline to build the story around and something climactic to beat in the end, but the ongoing struggle of life isn't that clean and it might've seemed like a bit of a cop-out if she'd been ready to get her whole life back on track as soon as the horror and the cult were out of the picture. Mae talks a lot in the ending about needing to "process" the events they've gone through and has enough deep-rooted issues of her own that it's believable she wouldn't be ready first thing the next day to get back to college or find a job. She can tentatively plan to tell her parents about what happened to her or Casey's parents about what happened to him, maybe plan to visit Gregg and Angus in Bright Harbor or go on a road trip with Bea, so I think there's hopeful hints that she's going to keep working things out. It might be neat to see how she's doing a year down the line. edit2: wait already made that point. Dolash fucked around with this message at 02:18 on Mar 7, 2017 |
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Mar 7, 2017 02:14
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I'm telling you guys, Scooby Doo mystery-solving team. Mae wants a road trip with Bea and/or to visit Angus and Gregg in Bright Harbour, travel around Hollow County hunting spooks and cultists. After all, Mae still needs a job and now she's got hands-on experience in a pretty rare field. More seriously though, looking from just what was in the game I think a sequel's pretty unlikely. Mae had a central struggle that tied together her mental state, the cult at the rotten heart of town, her relationships with her friends and family and basically everything else about her, and while she definitely has a lot of work left to do on that front we're already passed the big supernatural climax. I don't think it's impossible to make a good sequel, but the story doesn't really have a desperate need for one. I could see something like Lost Constellation/Longest Night, the little supplementary games the devs made over the course of developing NITW. Just in case they want to do a check-in on the cast after a year or something but don't need a whole new plotline to support it.
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Mar 7, 2017 08:36
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Nah, I can't see that. The opening text crawl suggested he died pretty unambiguously and from his appearance in Lost Constellation he seemed like a decent guy. It'd be too much of a twist without there being more foreshadowing or supporting evidence, especially when there are already other cats in town. As for the weird teleporting, the first time with the kidnapping victim and the fence I think was a Hot Fuzz situation where there were just two cult members and one threw the victim over the fence to the other then hid, while the second time it's pretty clearly the guy who got shot earlier sneaking up on them to get his revenge. Also I don't think Molly knew exactly either, just suspected. I think her and the handyman/janitor were just people in town savvy enough to suspect something was up but not really enough to act on it, which is why she did investigate Mae's claims, was worried about her being out raising trouble, updated her on the arm and so on. I think actually aiding or abetting the murder cult is beyond her, Mae is quite hostile to her in a "gently caress the po-leece" way but I never saw anything that made her seem like a bad person. Edit: I do like to wonder what would've happened if that one guy hadn't attacked and forced a cave-in. It sort of feels like that might've been done to cut down the ending a bit to help wrap up development, there was room there for Mae and friends concocting a plan to strike back at the cult or at least more formally discuss and reject their offer, but it gets short-circuited.
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Mar 7, 2017 19:14
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Nichael posted:I played the Bea route in the game so I've been watching Gregg scenes on Youtube. I'm kind of glad I played Bea because Angus in the Legends segment acts like a jerk. The Bea route is probably a better choice for Mae's future too, because it's pretty clear that Gregg and Angus are moving on without her. It was a little weird comparing the difference those two routes made to overall tone. In the Gregg route it actually feels like by pursuing the route you are causing the problem you're trying to get Mae and Gregg out of, namely that when they hang out they can end up dragging each other back down into their bad old ways. Mae's trying to relive their highschool troublemaker glory days, but only if you keep hanging out with him - if you hang out with Gregg just once, like on the Bea route, then it's just one lapse instead of a pattern and there really isn't a problem. Bea actually needs some work to repair her relationship with Mae and uncover some of the buried sources of resentment which you don't manage hanging out with her just once. The final sequence also seems to hit harder with Bea in the lead over Gregg since it shows how much they've come around whereas Gregg stays pretty reliably in Mae's corner either way. I sympathize with Angus in Legends since nobody likes to be the one in the relationship who has to tell their partner their friends are being a bad influence. He's balancing his sympathy for Mae going through some tough times with his concern for Gregg and how their plan could go up in smoke if he gets arrested or fired. A lot of people aren't great at having that conversation outright and it's good that by the end of the chapter they manage it and work together on a little monument without having to be prompted by some emergency or disaster. It makes sense to have both routes anyway since they're both good characters and people can spend more time hanging out with whichever one they're more drawn to, plus more to do in a replay, but yeah I think Bea's might be stronger overall.
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Mar 10, 2017 00:05
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I mean I think that was clear once she met the cult who knew about her dreams and what was drawing her to their particular meeting-ground, even if their beliefs about health and prosperity weren't verifiable. Cool to see some extra info though, thanks for linking that.
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Mar 10, 2017 01:10
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Yeah the bodyshape stuff is a bit tricky since there's no doubt that Mae's supposed to be short and stout (people call her "sturdy", her comments while looking at herself in the mirror) but the abstract art style leaves a lot of room for interpretation. Being an agile outdoor cat balancing on powerlines and jumping around town probably influences some artists. Speaking of cats... precision posted:Wait is Gregg supposed to be a dog? I thought he was a deer. I thought he even says "I'm a deer" as a play on "dear" once. I thought everyone in the game is either a Cat, a Crocodile, a Deer, a Mouse, or a Bear. JazzFlight posted:He's definitely like, a fox, I think. I find it kind of interesting that the fact that everyone's animals isn't really brought up at all. Hell, there are cats just walking around and Mae calls out the Cat God as a well, Cat God. Their species may not be 100% aesthetic since, for example, the parents all appear to be the same species as the children, but I don't think the social complications of say cross-species relations being infertile are implied anywhere. It's enough to imagine the animal stuff is just an art style thing and you can really just treat the story as plain small-town Americans (with the exception of a few setting-specific tweaks concerning religion and myths). The downside is that by using animal people and then not noting that they're animals, the topic of race seems completely excised from the story. This can awkwardly dovetail with the economic message of the game since tension between economic and social leftism is a hot topic at the moment (the dreaded "identity politics" discussion). It does make it a whooooole lot easier to talk about and sympathize with the economic anxiety of small-town mid-Westerners, and the cult does capture some of that with their anti-immigrant opinions, but in a very abstract way. LGBTQ issues are touched on with Gregg, Angus and Mae, like when Gregg and Angus discuss their motives for moving, but I can't remember any indication that Night in the Woods is a setting where say slavery happened or the different species were segregated.
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Mar 14, 2017 00:00
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Yeah, I also think for thematic reasons and how it dovetails with the climax that Bea's route is a little more compelling than Gregg's, but I do like that there's events and differences for both characters since it encourages replaying to find more cool hidden stuff and some people are going to be more drawn to either character's story. Also discovering a decent BBQ place nearby is basically a happy ending.
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Mar 14, 2017 20:32
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See I thought he was a dog as a joke because he's best friends with a cat.
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Mar 17, 2017 07:07
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The Saddest Rhino posted:isn't the dream people the four musicians who died in the forest from exposure as told by the saxophonist if you get her and the violinist together Those are the dream musicians, the four dream animals Roland Jones mentions refers to the giant glittering god-animals Mae meets one at a time in her dreams before meeting the Cat God. They're the same species as the chamber of commerce councilors (who are notably absent from the epilogue), and the one cultist whose silhouette is briefly visible during the elevator attack scene is a cat like the Cat God, so it's maybe a hint the council-members were cult members.
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Mar 17, 2017 09:02
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Then again, consider the council's reaction to Bruce. How they obviously wanted to move him on or maybe get the police to bring him in, but were at least partly restrained because the preacher - new in town, I believe - had taken an interest in them. I thought it fit into the cult stuff since they actually wanted to sacrifice him but couldn't do it if the preacher was going to notice he'd disappeared. Also going over some of the supernatural stuff again, I figured the thing down the mine was one of those blind horrors the Cat God showed live outside the universe and that the hole they came in through to this universe is different than the Hole At The Center Of Everything. The Cat God seemed to suggest they were closing that lesser hole to prevent other crossings, but the horror down in the mines will remain on this side. It makes me wonder what they got up to in the mines after the collapse. Did the cultists jump down the hole and sacrifice themselves? Were they just killed in the cave-in? The horror seemed to survive considering it spoke to Mae while she was in the water, it seems like they only succeeded in burying it and cutting off its influence by killing the cult but it's still there waiting to be discovered again. I know these aren't really questions that need answering since they sort of take the supernatural elements a little too "seriously" as opposed to their allegorical significance, but it's still kind of fun to think about. Your average Call of Cthulhu investigator would give Mae and the gang low marks for their shoddy workmanship, let me tell you!
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Mar 19, 2017 00:54
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exquisite tea posted:I really like Bea as a character, and how expressive her sprite is with only very limited movement. It's kind of amazing how effective the art style is. Was there just one artist on the project? Graphics in indie games are interesting in general since they sort of have an "art from adversity" vibe to them where there's so many limitations in terms of budget, time, complexity and so on. Picking a style that looks good and distinctive and also lets you put out a large volume of content doesn't look easy, but when it works it can make a game more memorable than a dozen triple-A "photo-realistic" games. The same is true of music in indie games too, I suppose. NITW has great music, and the guy who made all the music also did the programming? Really impressive stuff that such a small team managed to cover so many roles as well as they did. I'd love to read more about their process and how development went. I get the impression it took longer than expected after the Kickstarter, it probably helps hearing about a project like this after it comes out rather than having to wait for years.
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Mar 22, 2017 22:50
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Forgall posted:Were there any feelgood stories about their teeth being pulled out? Well, after a flood that killed 2000 people because rich industrialists bought a dam to turn the lake behind it into a hunting and fishing lodge while letting the dam itself fall apart, the survivors couldn't sue the rich people because no one of them could be proven to be directly responsible for the failure of the dam, so tort laws were rewritten so that people merely party to a collective action that resulted in a disaster could be held liable. Which didn't help any of the victims or survivors of course, but boy howdy the next band of ultra-rich assholes who buy up privatized utilities and let them decay into disaster sure thought twice*! *they hired better lawyers Yeah though I thought of NITW during that Chapo episode as well, there's definitely a bit of a blindspot in cities and the coasts for the history of class and labor struggles elsewhere. The election certainly put the spotlight on areas like the midwest and the need for rebuilding that connection, the game's weirdly timely in that regard.
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Mar 28, 2017 02:33
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If you didn't play with the yarn ball every day your a busta Actually I think Mae saying "Oh well that's just patronizing" in response to seeing the yarn ball for the first time is the only acknowledgement that she's a cat?
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Mar 28, 2017 04:50
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Synthbuttrange posted:Screw them, they were murderin' people down there! Yeah that's about the gist of it. Angus has some pretty strong opinions on morality and belief, and the combination of superstition and abuse of others the cult was built around was probably offensive to him on a number of levels. He might not've actually been prepared to go Rambo on the cult if the accident hadn't happened, but I can believe him when he says if given the choice he'd decide to let them die down there. I'm actually a little disappointed we didn't get the chance to see what they'd have done if the cave-in hadn't conveniently solved the cult problem for them. Would they have seriously considered the cult's offer? Investigated who was part of the group? Gone to others for help? Some people have compared the game to the movie Hot Fuzz, and an ending where you run around town fighting cultists and getting helped by the people you interacted with throughout the story might've been cool too, even if it wasn't really that sort of game at heart. I do wonder though if they might've considered a more expansive ending before development crunch, the ambush leading to cave-in feels like the sort of thing you write as a patch to a story you need to shorten in a hurry.
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Mar 28, 2017 06:41
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Trick Question posted:I feel like the implication is that without her friends/without Eide trying to do a murder, Eide is basically Mae in like, twenty years. It's not hard to imagine Mae getting desperate as she doesn't have any marketable skills and the town she can't leave dies around her. So it's appropriate that the thing that dooms the cult is basically Eide being a vindictive idiot gently caress-up who can't talk to people. There's definitely the parallel ofEide looking like Mae. She shows a notable amount of empathy and understanding for them and why they choose to heed and obey the horror in the mine, especially since compared to her friends she has the strongest belief that the horror is real and might be bargained with. An important part of the story is immersing the player in the sort of dismal, dead-end environment that could believably produce a cult ready to do anything to fix it, and suggesting that Mae could end up like the cultists or was even groomed by the horror for membership is part of that. But I don't think it was just luck that destroyed the cult and saved Mae and friends from following down their path. Beyond that her friends were there to support her (and they're having none of the cult's business), she emphatically rejects the horror when they meet in the water down in the well. That's an encounter that may have happened even if the cult had not been caved in, and certainly Mae didn't seem to have put together what they'd actually done yet. I think she was definitely vulnerable to them, the game's message is pretty clear about the temptation desperate people face in dwindling circumstances, but for all her flaws Mae has the strength of character and help from friends she needs not to fall into that. How they'd actually pull off some kind of investigation or attack on the cult in the event they had to, I don't know. Heck killing the cult by accident might've just been the more believable story beat than Mae and friends suddenly becoming competent in the last act, but it's still interesting to think about.
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Mar 28, 2017 20:48
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Only in the sense that nothing really matters once the credits roll, or possibly nothing matters in a story at all. Obviously the characters would care a whole lot if the cult were still alive, if the ending had pulled back to reveal the outline of cult robes peering into the gang's band practice it would've changed the tone a whole lot. You're free to interpret things as you like of course but the ending as-presented where they're dead and Mae and friends are out of the woods, so to speak, seems a lot more concise.
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Mar 29, 2017 19:33
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The game was actually a prescient warning not to ignore Pennsylvania and other midwest/rustbelt communities or else they'll turn to an awful outsider they don't really understand in a deluded bid to bring back prosperity. Unfortunately the development delays prevented that message from reaching the audience that needed it in time. Thanks a lot, game devs.
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Mar 29, 2017 23:52
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Gonna check that stuff out when I have the chance, indie game development is usually a pretty interesting story unto itself.
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Mar 31, 2017 02:04
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FutureCop posted:"You're still a good person." Some games definitely present themselves as letting you make your own character and your own decisions, where even if there are always limits they try to give you enough space to develop your own motivations and justifications for what you do. A lot of games have toed the line in recent years by having characters with fairly strong personalities whom you nevertheless can push in one direction or the other, and the presence of dialogue branches, exclusive decisions (hang out with X or Y), and optional side content might encourage people in thinking they've got more control over the character's development. Basically, "Choice" is the single most loaded word in video games. Interaction is one of the distinguishing features of video games as a medium, particularly as a storytelling one, so every game involves a certain amount of engagement and decision-making from the player. What people imagine when someone offers them "choice" though is this huge, sprawling mesh of misconceptions and influences and trends and hopes all balled together, which is why every forum where RPGs are discussed are roiling arguments about whether the choices were meaningless or not. That's why a lot of games (including probably Nigh In The Woods) get called a Walking Simulator, since even if the player is constantly making choices, unless those decisions are validated by some kind of difference then they're often not seen as real. You could probably make a good video game that was exclusively about exploring and messing with the concept of choice as seen in games so far. Edit: Also the Super Best Friends are funny and so far as I know haven't been revealed to be Nazis yet which puts them above the fold so far as streamers are concerned. Dolash fucked around with this message at 00:14 on May 4, 2017 |
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May 4, 2017 00:09
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Oxxidation posted:It was called The Stanley Parable and it was grand. Right, I remember that one. That was good.
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May 4, 2017 00:33
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If you 100% perfect all three bass segments you actually unlock the Good Ending where Mae gets her poo poo together and becomes a contributing member of society. Unfortunately, her contribution involves becoming Cthulhu's chosen one and punting her friends down the hole. Edit: For real though if you can do the solo bit in pumpkin head guy I'm gonna have to assume you're possessed and can also spin your head around 360 on command. Dolash fucked around with this message at 06:50 on May 4, 2017 |
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May 4, 2017 06:38
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Bae is their fusion form where they combine to make one extremely socially-maladjusted person.
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May 7, 2017 19:48
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Dias posted:
For me, it's the bassline in Weird Autumn, but since I play bass worse than Mae I haven't actually been able to work it out. Edit: It was actually kind of funny during the game proper to bomb those bass segments and have everyone dump on Mae for being so terrible, while I was thinking "this my best bass-work ever, I was very nearly on beat!" Dolash fucked around with this message at 05:48 on May 9, 2017 |
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May 9, 2017 05:41
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