4/19/2023 0 Comments The sorty of night in the woodsGood stories drop us into the shoes of another being. It was at this stage that I realised that the game had become less about Mae's waywardness - for which there are Reasons - and more about my own uninvestigated privilege and stuffy ideas of grown-up behaviour. I wanted, most of all, to tell her to stop wasting her evenings at band practice (a splash of Guitar Hero rhythm-matching) and get a job. Perform badly in band practice and you'll earn some back-handed reassurances from friends, but there are no major story repercussions. I wanted her to stop saying "like" all the time, to quit breaking out in childish ecstasies over crappy horror movies and pizza. I wanted to tell her to give her friends some goddamn breathing room, to stop blundering through delicate conversations about childhood abuse or bipolar disorder. I wanted to yell at her to stop ducking her parents' tentative inquiries about what exactly went wrong at college. In Mae's case, I quickly found myself settling into the persona of a disapproving older brother. Video game characterisation generally works in two directions, as players both assume a role and assume a role in response to the role they're invited to play. This is a game that, amongst other things, uses a scarcity of "meaningful" interaction in order to make a point about the protagonist's passivity. Similar things could be said of your infrequent ability to pick a response in dialogue, which is usually about adjusting the tone of a conversation or shifting the focus ever so slightly, rather than deciding on a course of action. In large part, though, the platform mechanics are there to be indulged, not mastered - sauntering along telegraph wires that thrum like guitar strings while somewhere below, busybodies mither about vagrants and call centre operators complain of needing drugs to get through the 9-to-5. You'll need to ascend to the rooftops to speak with certain characters, and there's an element of skill to chaining jumps in order to bounce extra-high on the third, as in Super Mario 64. Night in the Wood's throwaway sprinkling of platform-puzzle mechanics almost feel like an extension of the character's fecklessness. 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. Everybody is worth talking to more than once in a row.Ä«etween 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. A witty smalltown adventure with light puzzle-platforming elements that walks the line between nostalgia and nihilism.
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