Night in the Woods, Part Two

[rynling]

I started playing Night in the Woods again recently, and I have a lot of feelings about the game. When I get interested in something, my first instinct is to read what other people have written about it. Although I knew it was a mistake, I made a bad decision and clicked on the Polygon review.

This specific line jumped out at me:

Mae also does some platforming in her sleep, and these dream sequences in particular are dull, especially late in the game when the story starts to pick up momentum.
 

First of all, this game is not a platformer, and evaluating a story-driven exploration game as a platformer because the main character can jump is not useful or interesting.

Second, the dream sequences are amazing. One of my favorite conceits in gaming is a piece of music that has more instruments added as the player makes progress (like the Hateno Village theme in Breath of the Wild), and every single one of the dream sequences handles this conceit perfectly. The songs themselves are weird and fun and creepy – my favorite is Astral Alley.

The fact that a professional game reviewer could look at Night in the Woods and criticize its "platforming" as "dull" boggles my mind to such an extent that I feel like a Lovecraft narrator who can’t describe what he's seeing and resorts to frenzied and nonsensical muttering. I want to return to this review, but this is the limit of what I can deal with today.

Comments

[runicmagitek]

Yeah, I don't read reviews anymore because of this garbage :\ I usually just glimpse at scores on OpenCritic and that's it.

Also all the Astral songs from the OST were A+. I love Astral Alley and Astral Coal.