If only I could diiiie anywhere else — how the portrayal of homecoming narratives on Night in the Woods helped me come to terms with my own homecoming narrative

Originally released in 2017, Night in the Woods can be summed up as the story of Mae Borowsky, who, along with her friends, tries to find the culprit behind a series of increasingly violent events in her hometown. Simple as they may sound, these events also happen to get mixed up with Mae’s surreal dreams, which seem to be caused by either some supernatural entity, or by her own (unspecified, yet realistically portrayed) mental illness. This overlap between dream worlds and real-life events poses an extra challenge in Mae’s quest, whose journey not only makes her try (and often fail) to figure out what’s happening inside her own head, but it also makes her reacquaint herself with the place — and people — she left behind once she went to college.

Like many others, Night in the Woods can be considered a homecoming story. Unlike many homecoming stories, however, there’s no immediate reward waiting for Mae upon her return home. Far from being some sort of monolithic source of comfort, the town of Possum Springs is instead a withering portrait of the place Mae and her friends grew up in. This portrayal of the game’s setting not only feels realistic to the times, but it’s also one the factors that make Mae’s narrative (and her character) so compelling to me: an adult who also had to make the decision of returning home to a deteriorated town (and a country) many had already left, and many more were also planning on leaving.

From her smarmy comebacks to her refusal (often out of an inability to properly do so) to address her own issues, there were many traits that made me gravitate towards Mae’s character. These same traits — and the way they add to her interactions with the rest of the cast — made it easy for me to sympathize with her journey, especially because, as she does in the game, I found myself returning home after a series of events that took a pretty heavy toll on my mental health.

Much like it happens to Mae during the game’s story, a big part of my return home meant coming to terms with the fact that things not only had changed while I was gone, but they had often changed for the worse, and much of my understanding of that only came once I gradually reinserted myself to my daily life in my hometown, a town that isn’t too difficult to compare to the fictional town of Possum Springs.

Introduced as a town that’s trying not to fall apart several decades after the shutdown of the local mines resulted in massive unemployment, Possum Springs is a quiet, but not necessarily peaceful, town. Along its few streets (decorated with an increasing number of closing shops) there seems to a general sentiment of wanting to overcome the adversities that befell the town, be it either by somehow landing a good job, by burning the days away, or by just leaving.

The fictional recession portrayed in Night in the Woods is the result of extreme capitalist practices leading a town into economic stagnation. While, ideology-wise, this is different to the current Venezuelan recession (caused by a totalitarian, left-leaning regime) it doesn’t take much effort to find things in common between the fictional town of Possum Springs and… pretty much every single populated area in my country.

Though it’s difficult (and sort of insensitive) to look at Possum Springs through nostalgia-tinted glasses, it didn’t take long for me to create a sense of attachment to the game’s setting. Seeing these characters (no matter how small their role in the plot is) try to carry on with their daily lives, despite their dire economic situations, not only contributed to the game’s feeling of realism, but it also made the story it tells hit really close to home.

Although a big part of the game’s story circles around Mae’s return to Possum Springs, a town — especially one’s hometown — is not just made out of places, which is why reconnecting with the remaining citizens of Possum Springs makes for a pretty large part of the game's narrative; pretty much from the get-go, Night in the Woods makes it obvious that these characters not only are (or were, in some cases) part of Mae’s life, but they also have lives of their own. Only a few days after her return to the town, Mae’s friends take her to a party in the often-referenced woods, where she both makes an embarrassing mess out of herself and makes it clear (both to the other characters in the scene and to the players) that she might have lost her direction in life.

Even now, years later after having both returned home and first played the game, Mae’s anguished rant not only feels like a character-establishing moment, but it also mirrored what I perceived as having lost my way in life.

When comparing the game’s narrative to the period of my life I often relate it to, I could see many parallels between the way Mae reconnected with most of the game’s cast and my own experiences, especially in the way many of these relationship dynamics were — intentionally or not — circling around ideas of leaving, staying or returning home.

Starting with her family, who accidentally forget to pick Mae up at the bus station after getting the date of her return mixed up, it becomes obvious that Mae’s return to the Borowsky household isn’t simply regarded as a matter of celebration; along several of the game’s scenes, topics like Mae’s mental health, her responsibility to contribute with the family’s finances, and the many sacrifices they’ve made to get her to college make it pretty evident that, at least during the time of the game’s events, Mae’s homecoming is a bittersweet event, both to herself and to her parents.

This same bittersweetness carries over to Mae’s friend group, whose reactions go from getting excited from having regained a partner in (literal) crime to flat-out disapproving not only Mae’s decisions but of her current state. Through several of these characters, the game manages to make the town of Possum Springs feel like an even more realistic portrayal of recession, with many of them facing dilemmas like being as doomed as their families or having something to look forward once they eventually leaving the town.

While my return home was far more welcoming than Mae’s (something I will always be grateful for), I still remember being paralyzed by conversations having what I perceived as lingering questions of “what will I do now?” or “how do I face these people?”, and seeing Mae go through experiences similar to this one contributed to the deep connection I feel both with this game and with its main character. I also think playing the game gave me some insight on how to process all these experiences, something that helped me understand that, my decision to return home —one that seemed to lack in purpose and character when I originally made it — allowed me to gradually move towards better things.

By having them go on a big, scary adventure together, Night in the Woods leaves the player with the feeling that Mae’s bond with her friends is far more solid than it ever was. Even with the looming prospect of they soon being unable to hang out the same way they do during the game.

As things stand right now, I think I have reached a place where I can positively say my personal homecoming narrative, much like Mae’s, happened for the better. Even if I still often find myself measuring my own health (mental and emotional) in terms of how much I am able to deal with the effects of a recession, as many of Possum Springs’ residents do. Despite this, and despite many other setbacks in my personal narrative, I think I’m currently in a place where I can aim to keep moving forward, no matter how unclear things might be at times.