Mr.Duck on 1/4/2017 at 07:21
For me it was less about not fitting and more about feeling that it wasn't developed enough, and felt a bit tacked on, to some degree, but not too much. Though it did open up a venue for many interesting questions. Again, see my previous post where I sum up my thoughts on the last act and ending. All in all, I really enjoyed it. <3
Also, eeeeeeeeeeeeeellllsssss!
PigLick on 12/5/2017 at 15:20
I have been playing this over the last couple of weeks, I really love the concept, but it does fall down in certain areas. The mini games feel very forced, and I would rather not have to do them, loading times are terrible and there should have been some kind of fast travel system rather than having to traipse back and forth which kinda becomes grating after a while. I am still not sure about the ending.
All in all though great game trying to do something a bit different, and love to see more games like this, its not an adventure game, its not IF, its not a platformer but has elements of all these, plus the art style and animation are excellent. Glad I bought it, well worth.
also +1 for mashing keys and hoping for the best during band practice
oh yeh my fave person was actually selmers
Thirith on 12/5/2017 at 16:13
I love the moment with Selmers at the library. So surprising and lovely!
henke on 30/11/2017 at 16:44
Just finished this. Don't have any deep analysis or anything I just wanted to say that I loved it. It's funny and it's got a lot of heart.
I did played Lost Constellation a while back but never The Longest Night, downloading that now.
Sulphur on 12/7/2018 at 20:49
I finished the game some time back (it only took more than a year!), but I really didn't know what to say about it. It's still charming, hilarious, full of lovely little asides (like Selmers!), and has real heart in its characters. I actually ended up liking Bea a lot; she easily has the most depth of the bunch despite being cold and stand-offish at the outset. The conversations are great. The humour is great. It's a great experience!
But that ending.
What to make of it? What does anyone make of it? Sure, I get that a lot of people would find the way it wrapped up disappointing. But I didn't get that particular feeling from this tale - it just felt like the natural endpoint for where the story was going. Mae starts the game as an overgrown self-centred child, and ends it as someone a little more aware of everyone else's lives, someone inching towards adulthood and what that really means. It's the best way to end, not with a full stop, but an ellipsis.
And yet there's something more to it. I want to say the existential underpinnings of what Mae's going through is reflected in the entire town - it's pretty on the surface, but it's old and decrepit beneath. Mae finds the old duck float she remembers from parades when she was a kid, and it's stuffed in the back of an old building along with parade detritus, collecting dust and forgotten, and yet in its innards there's a clutch of starving rats. Now, the game immediately lets Mae become a rat mother who steals pretzels until they're strong enough to get by on their own, which is of course super cute. But as we've seen, the game's real trick is hiding its messages behind its humour and antic. The metaphor with the rats in the belly of the float is still pretty apparent: even this town's past is slowly rotting away.
The back half of the game is what sticks with me the most, more than shoplifting antics with Bea, and bike rides with Gregg (though those are wonderful by any metric), and for the longest time I've been unable to articulate why, exactly. The qualities of Mae's dreams, the story of her psychotic break, and the feel of the town harbouring some awful and nameless horror begin to coalesce into a feeling of reality slowly eroding, flaking rust from its bones like they were made of rebar. And maybe that's my imagination, but it feels like the game's embracing that all things come to an end, however ungracefully, and that yawning chasm of nothingness is always waiting for the living to acknowledge it - be it by a superstitious populace that form a cult to keep it at bay, or the next generation that inherits that baggage, and sees the chasm as nothing but a mirror.Yet there's more to it. It takes a replay, I think. This review (very well-written and thoughtfully) (
http://wrongquestions.blogspot.com/2018/01/night-in-woods.html) confirms as much. There's a bristling anger beneath the surface that I couldn't place, but the review calls it out for what it is: rage at the damage a capitalist economy can wreak to a neighbourhood and its people. That's the crumbling, skeletal background that I mentally glossed over whilst playing the game, but in hindsight, it's pretty obvious that the game's portraying a specific moment in time with that fraying and weakening network of people trying to do right by themselves and their families, but failing in the face of corporations and companies. And that's pretty damn bleak, because you know how that sort of story usually ends.
So I wouldn't call that ending disappointing. An ellipsis, and not a full stop, is the most hopeful way it could have gone.
Retroactively, then, I'm gonna have to call it: this really was one of the best games of 2017. (And it released one day after my birthday, which officially makes Mae one of my spirit animals. <3)
Thirith on 12/7/2018 at 21:35
Nice write-up, thanks for posting it! I think my favourite scene in all of Night in the Woods is the dinner at Bea's and the conversation in her room afterwards. It's pretty painful to get through, but the two characters are so well written and feel so real. Actually, I tell a half-life: it's this scene as well as Mae's argument with her mother that I love most.
Did you play the supplemental materials, Sulphur? There's some really good stuff in Lost Constellation and one visual towards the end that absolutely broke my heart. Also, the title tune is downright perfect.
PigLick on 13/7/2018 at 01:25
How do you play the extra content, do you have to start a new playthrough?
Mr.Duck on 13/7/2018 at 04:52
With time and distance, I gotta pretty much agree with Sulph's latest.
Thirith on 13/7/2018 at 05:56
@PigLick
It's separate and should be part of the Weird Autumn edition (I think that all versions are updated to this), though I can't remember exactly how to access it. Is there a menu option called "Extras"?
henke on 13/7/2018 at 07:27
You can get the 2 supplemental games (
https://finji.itch.io/) here.
As it happens, I finally played Longest Night last night, after reading Sulph's excellent write-up. Gameplaywise it's very light, but it's totally worth it for more of those wonderful characters.