Night in the Woods and Genre | Critical Mode
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- Опубліковано 28 вер 2024
- What kind of game is Night in the Woods anyway, and more importantly, does that kind of distinction even matter?
Critical Mode is a video essay series that offers an in-depth analysis of a particular game and uses those observations as a catalyst to examine a larger topic within the world of games.
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This did an absolutely fantastic job at contextualising NitW's mechanical framework that goes well beyond the "that's what teens are like!" assertion I've seen a lot of discussion about the game start and end at. Really, really excellent work!
Thanks Hamish, that means a lot.
I'm a huge fan of old school point and click adventure games. My first experiences with them were on my junior high computer teacher's gen 1 Mac, playing the original MacVentures games (especially Shadowgate) and Maniac Mansion (we all had Apple IIe systems and we got to rotate playing on her Mac every Friday). I've been playing them ever since. I got NitW on the recommendation of a friend, who showed me the library scene. I thought the music was quirky and the dialogue was great, so I got it. It immediately shot into my top 10 of all time, and that's high praise, since I've played games from every single generation. The music in particular absolutely floored me with how good it is. It still blows my mind how a game that looks like a storybook with cutout animals could be so fantastic, even if I'm a couple of generations removed from the target demographic. Personally, I would categorize NitW as a platform/adventure game, but like you said, nothing is 100 percent accurate in describing it. I also still find little things I missed on each playthrough, like the grody mattress at the end of the salvaging trip with Mr. Salvi, or the fact that you can completely bypass certain events and they're never addressed after that. Truly a one of a kind game, and an accurate essay on it.
I had Studio Ghibli-sized tears going down my nasty face by the end of this game. It all hit really close to home and it hit HARD.
Same 😭😭
Woah the level of quality of this video is amazing! That was the fastest I've ever been persuaded to subscribe to someone!
Isn't like... *every* game classed as some kind of adventure game? Like, as soon as there's a character in it and not just blocks to stack?
Great video! Definitely intersting how we define genres. It seems like we always pick out one layer of the many that make up a medium and let that define everything. For games it seems to be mechanics. For music... maybe instruments? If it has a violin it'll at least get a 'classical-' tacked on to it, if it has an electric guitar it'll probably get called some flavour of rock. Although music has been around for long enough that there's so many sub-genres and sub-sub-sub-genres to more accurately explain things and also take other aspects into account, I guess the same will one day happen to games.
This video rulez ok
🤘
I love this essay, keep up the great work!
Appreciate it, and thanks for watching.
I feel like I am late to the discussion.
But what I would claim the game genre to fall into would probably be something like a visual novel with 2D platformer elements with minigames.
Incredible video, perfectly lists a lot of my thoughts about this game.
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Wow I missed a lot of the mini-games you mentioned.
Yeah, it's definitely worth replaying the game just to see all the mini-games and conversations you missed the first time around.
Interesting point about all videos games arguably being pastiches. It makes me wonder if this is common to the early evolution of any artistic medium-before the different genres have developed huge corpuses of their own unique tropes and techniques, they borrow from each other to round out the experience.
It's a good question, and as with most good questions, the answer is probably a little bit of both. As I said in the video, I think there is a slightly unique way we define genre in games that makes it hard to compare to other mediums, but at the same time for any form of art, you do need a long enough timeline for different genres to start establishing themselves before you can start borrowing and learning from them. Thanks for watching and commenting.
Great job, you got yourself a new subscriber! :)
I’ll be sticking around after this vid, it’s rare you catch analysis channels like these before they get bigger. Keep up the quality content and I’m sure you’ll start reaching a bigger audience!
Appreciate the kind words, and of course the sub. Thanks for watching.
Thank you for that
Sooo a game that's whatever it needs to be from moent to moment, but overall carried by the writing....
Soo NITW is in the same genre as Conker's bad fur day? Sure the latter might feel a bit of the "unpolished roadblocks" the ps2 games had, but Apart from the racing part everything seemed very solid, and by not lasting too long most issues are mitigated. NITW being an adventure about people, all stuff that people might do appears, and Conker's bad fur day, being an adventure in a absurd land, has different absurdities of gameplay sections, come on it makes sense!
I would probably use the term "Slice of Life" to describe NITW. It's a game about a period of Mae's life.
Slice of life + exploration with mystery elements maybe?
@@dragonfire7965 Slice of Life + Fantasy + Thriller