Night in the Woods review

[Administrator]

Video games have cast me as a dapper hitman, an alien garbage collector, a chinless vampire and countless other roles, but this is the first time I've been asked to play a mess. Infinite Fall's bleak yet sparkling interactive novel is the tale of Mae Borowski, a feline college drop-out in an allegorical America populated by talking animals, who is crashing with her parents for the winter. The fact that she's a cat who plays bass aside, Mae's most distinctive quality as a protagonist is that she's a total liability - lazy, needy and far younger than her twenty years suggest, with a miraculous knack for saying the wrong thing at exactly the wrong time.
Rather than imposing her will on the world - in keeping with the worn-out view that escapism in a game means being irresistibly powerful - she bumbles through it, sloping off downtown each day at sundown to clamber up buildings, shoplift and hang out with her best buds after they finish work. This adolescent routine persists throughout the game's six hour length, even following a twist that takes the story into suspenseful whodunnit territory - crawl out of bed, hit the high street, bound over fences, steal pretzels, pester exhausted friends for attention.
Between trips into town you can also chat with your buddies over social media, and maybe polish off a level or two of Demontower, a delightfully grungy 8-bit dungeon-crawler hidden away on Mae's laptop. The plot does throw up its share of excitement eventually - a macabre discovery outside a diner, a giddy chase, a trip to a museum at night - but excitement is not why Mae has returned to the town of Possum Springs. She's basically here to waste time.
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