Black holes, storms and a night out of town.
A few weeks ago, I finished If Found…, an indie game from studio Dreamfeel, that tells the story of a young trans woman returning to her hometown in Ireland, in the country, and revisiting her past. It’s a strange experience, since it is a small town, where everyone knows each other and talk about their lives, where she finds long lost friends, the whole package for this kind of story.
And there’s an important detail: an astronaut has discovered a black hole, somewhere in the universe, that is possibly going to swallow earth very soon.
At the end of If Found, I thought about how this isn’t the first time that I found myself fascinated by a story like this: a young adult dealing with the pains of growing up, while something supernatural or dangerous lurks in the shadows of daily life, bringing some tragedy.
More specifically, bringing the end of everything.
Reality is (or was, until the whole world went crazy) a little bit boring, most of the time. The days go by, and go by, and go by, and we stay here, trying desperately not to fall victim to time’s ability to just keep going without us even noticing. At least, that’s how it is for me. I fear that, if I don’t hold on to the moment, time flies without me even noticing.
And, along with that fear, comes something that has accompanied me through my growing years: a hope that time would, eventually, lead me to something that… would make sense. You know? I thought someday, I would wake up and realize that there was a bigger, supernatural purpose, something that made all the chaos of our lives, all the suffering, all the problems have some sort of “narrative” purpose, a motive.
I waited for that, for a long time. And then came the interest for magic realism. People with normal lives, sprinkled with some magic, shown through details of their daily routines. These stories resonated deeply with me and, better yet, they ignited this longing for my existence to be more, more than just… this. Just this mess.
That was when I found Night In The Woods.
There’s something out there
Night In The Woods is an indie game from Infinite Fall, about Mae Borowski, a cat who comes back to her hometown, Possum Springs, after leaving behind a graduation because it “wasn’t working out” for her. It’s a strange experience, since it is a small town, where everyone knows each other and talk about their lives, where she finds long lost friends, the whole package for this kind of story.
And there’s an important detail: there’s something circling the town, which will possibly bring about the end of everything.
Night In The Woods is a very intimate story. You live every day walking around in a town where everyone fights their hardest to leave, and not only did Mae manage to do it, but she came back with nothing to show. Her friends have changed and, worse, always wanted what she had and threw away. To top it all off: she can’t even explain why she came back. Her mental health being in shambles is a factor, but there’s something bigger going on.
So begins the dreams, the astral projections, the constellations that seem to want to say something, the conversations with god, and Mae’s reality starts to get weirder and weirder.
Even though, nowadays, I’ve been distant from the game, much of it is still very much alive in my head. I still remember it clearly, four years after living for a while in Possum Springs. I remember seeing Mae’s friends for the first time in so long, and the discomfort that distance can bring to even the strongest of bonds. I remember seeing the consequences of capitalism in a town that was left behind by the very system that created it, with stores closing down, places being abandoned, people fighting to maintain their job, to keep their town alive, since the mine which made the town possible was closed after an accident. I remember the repeated gut punches in the conversations with Bea, Mae’s old best friend, where the distance which was previously mentioned might have grown far too much to be settled.
And I remember the fear of everything coming to an end. I remember the strangeness of seeing reality and mystical colliding. And still, it was comfortable. This strangeness came from the certainty that something bigger was happening in this story.
There was a reason for the suffering, for the struggles the characters were facing, and it was all waiting for them at the titular night in the woods.
Max Caulfield, time traveller
I started thinking about writing this right after I finished Life Is Strange. Dontnod’s hit ended and it left me profoundly unsettled. I just wanted to spout how I hadn’t liked the game somewhere, but I ended up waiting, because even I realized I was being far too negative with the game.
In Life Is Strange, you play as Max Caulfield, a teenager that is coming back to her hometown of Arcadia Bay and finding, once more, the life she left behind when she went away for the first time. It’s a strange experience, since it is a small town, where everyone knows each other and talk about their lives, where she finds long lost friends, the whole package for this kind of story.
And there’s an important detail: in five days, a storm is going to destroy the city, and now Max can go back in time.
To make it clear: I don’t really like Life Is Strange. I feel that its message depends on something that simply does not work in the story it is telling, and that ends up putting the rest of its good ideas down (I’m looking at you, Chloe). But I still appreciate the fact that it exists and was so popular. Even if it isn’t that well written, it’s still something that’s different from what usually blows up in the games industry (and Life Is Strange really blew up), and it motivates people to tell different, more intimate stories with games.
The apocalyptic event in Life Is Strange is perhaps the most present in all of these games I mentioned and, truthfully, it’s the one that got to me the most. It is always there, inevitably, just a few days away, and you are the only one that knows that everything is headed to something so terrorizing. Maybe, you can’t even do anything about it. Maybe, you just know that it’s coming, and you’re paying the price, playing the role of a witness to the end of what you hold dear.
This terror stuck between a story about revisiting your mistakes and your life story (it’s a game about time travelling, after all) has such high potential. And even though the game does not deliver on everything it could, for all its mistakes and that sin of an ending where all your decisions can just be thrown out the window, there’s something here that stuck with me. There’s something special about the mood of the game, some moments that are really impactful, and I’m glad that I took my time to let the frustration wash away so that I could look at it with kinder eyes.
And, even though the delivery of the message is done in a not-so-great manner, Life Is Strange is, out of the three games, the one that talks about the themes of these kinds of stories in the most direct approach: the loss of innocence while growing up is the center thesis of a long monologue by one of the characters. And both Night In The Woods and Life Is Strange are about that, about discovering what really awaits you beyond these mystical years, beyond the teenage awkwardness, organizing your future life as a young adult, and about finding out what those around you really are. And about the disillusion from the chaos of all that, of how cruel life can be. But most important, the fear that none of this suffering has any purpose.
I’m afraid of erasers now
If Found… is a bit different. The fantastical elements are much more prominent in the other games, while here, it takes much more time for it to show itself, and it is more upfront about its message. The key difference in If Found…, though, is in how you interact with the game: by erasing what’s written in the protagonist’s journal. To see what’s ahead in this story, you need first to erase, to forget what came before.
And there we go, reading, erasing, and reading and erasing more and more. It’s painful, even before you really understand what’s going on. The simple act of taking the eraser and erasing someone’s story, from the first moment, seemed incredibly cruel to me. It was sad to keep going. Even in tender moments, in a beautiful scene, a scene that got me laughing, I knew that my role there was to erase everything from my memory.
The black hole, meanwhile, kept moving towards earth.
If Found… is my favorite from all of the games I mentioned. For being the one that is clearer in my memory (I just played it), and also for being very different. The way the story is told, the writing, the characters, everything left me very impressed. Most importantly, this was where I changed what would first be this text, and where I may have grasped what these specific stories, with these specific elements, mean to me.
And now, some introspection
The last two years (well, not only them, but specifically them) weren’t easy. I imagine that this is something we can all agree on. It seems like part of the collective human interaction agreement nowadays is understanding that everyone who speaks, does so from a place of emotional misery, that we must ignore so that we can communicate. And, by the looks of things, the world won’t be improving anytime soon, and this agreement is going to stick around. “How are you?” followed by a “Well, aside from the end of the world, given the state of things, I’m actually okay”. Normal.
This feeling that the world is coming to an end, with the ocean on fire, everything going wrong, is a pretty strong feeling, and it goes through all of us. And that’s the big picture we’re talking about. Personal suffering comes to fill in the rest of our time.
2020 was, personally, terrifying. I went through things I never thought I’d have to deal with, and every day managed to be just a tiny bit worse than the day before. Some pillars of my life were completely crumbled and I’m still not sure if they can be rebuilt. And that feeling of… “why?” is back. The need for something bigger. For a reason, a narrative purporse that wraps everything that I was living.
Being around these stories was weird, specially for how much they affected me. I couldn’t finish Night in The Woods again. Its slower pacing, seeing the things around me go away little by little, was leaving me… bitter. Even knowing what awaited me at the end of that story, the road there was much more real now. Life Is Strange, even without being able to juggle the infinity of themes it wanted to with perfection, made me stop at some points. I played it on stream for a few friends, and, in a scene at the end of the second chapter, I froze, my heart sunk. It was getting too real.
And then, we had If Found…, which I didn’t think would echo so much within me. It was here where I realized what was the end of everything, this dramatic and absolute and terrifying thing that all of these characters faced in all of these stories: it was insignificant. The message here, what really matters, is perseverance.
It’s looking at this big absurd of life, at a crucial point in destiny, that sometimes takes the form of a black hole about to swallow you, or a tornado that will wreck your childhood memories, or something lurking in the woods, cursing your town and your mind, and knowing that in the end, what was left for the characters to do was persevere. Be here tomorrow. Get to the other end of the storm.
I get uncomfortable with how that might sound. I don’t want to say that this is easy, something that everyone needs to do. No. Suffering is different for each of us, and this is just an extremely personal experience of mine.
Still, it is what fascinates me, at the end. It’s the day after. It’s knowing that there is no great narrative purpose in my life for the problems I face. And that, even if there was, it wouldn’t be what matters. What sticks with me, is tomorrow. Beyond all of the pain that is announced, it’s the possibility of being here after the damage. Of seeing some good.
Of persevering.
