2.5/5 ★ – jake84's review of Night in the Woods.

Night in the Woods took me three years to complete. Not because it’s that long (although at times it feels like it), but because I found parts of it so insanely boring that I gave up and doubted I would ever come back. It’s a game I have a hard time defining. Wiki says it’s an adventure game and an exploration game. I don’t see it. There aren’t any real puzzles in it, and you “explore” the same town again and again. Well, I call it a “dialogue-skipping simulator”. There’s SO much filler dialogue (all text, none spoken) that you have to actively continue manually with a button press after EACH. FUCKING. SENTENCE. More than two-thirds of the game was me skipping through endless text of non-important chit-chat by annoying or flat two-dimensional characters - in both senses of the word. “Hey, isn’t it interesting to read 20 minutes of written dialogue of people deciding to order pizza?!” I didn’t know what I was doing most of the time, because the plot is practically non-existent, and it doesn’t really matter until the last hour or so (out of a 8-10 hour game). It could easily have been a 3 hour game, and it wouldn’t have suffered for it. And I think people praising this for its story and characters need higher standards. While the music might be the best aspect of the game, it’s also pretty forgettable compared to, say, Scntfc’s score to Oxenfree. The art doesn’t impress me, and the plot is really weak. Especially the reveal at the end. And I fail to see a point to the whole thing. It felt like a “jump the shark”-moment and a too obvious twist. The tone just seems so ill-fitting with the seriousness of their actions. And there’s so much repetitive gameplay. The plot is barely there, and the art style didn’t suit the melancholic borderline thriller narrative. Everytime something vaguely interesting happens, the character talk about something else for 45 minutes. The characters feel fake and the story didn’t engage me at all, and it tries so hard to be funny and young. I still had to finish it to see what everybody’s been raving about. It’s a game that might have worked for me with a different art style, spoken and less dialogue and non-animal characters. I have to come to terms with the fact that this game just isn’t for me, but it might strike a chord with you if you live in a small town in America. While I sincerly think Oxenfree is the good version of this game, I won’t write it off as a complete disaster because it does have its charming moments. I’m only being so harsh on it, because people seem to think it’s a masterpiece (and possibly a little angry because I feel like it wasted my time), and I’d expected so much more.