Take the character design of Animal Crossing, the writing style of good young adult literature and the art style of an internet web comic and you have Night in the Woods.

It's a coming of age tale with many a twist.

Let me tell you about this game. Spoiler free.

If there's anything that NEEDS to be stressed about this game, it's the writing and character building.

The writing is as natural as anyone speaks to one another, it's real as ♥♥♥♥.

The characters are very well fleshed out, Undertale's characters ain't got ♥♥♥♥ on the citizens of Possum Springs. Yes I went there. Undertale's characters are well written but they're also fictional caricatures of fantastical things. There's parallels to reality of course but come on, it can be argued that some of those characters are a stretch too far into fiction.

But with the characters in Night in the Woods, I can say I have EASILY met and spent time with people like any one of these characters in real life. These characters of Night in the Woods may look like caricatures out of a web comic, but MANNNN do they have real life issues and depth.

This game literally makes me feel as if I'm hanging with real friends every night I play it. (Yes, play it at night, in the dark.) I always look forward to the laughter, the tears and the fears of Mae Borowski and her gang.

This game has moments that are genuinely hilarious, sad, scary and hey, without spoilers I will even say... Mind blowing.

This game touches on a lot of mature themes despite its gentle exterior, again without spoilers it touches on the following topics...

- Love
- Death
- Change
- Crisis Existentialism
- Religion
- Peer pressure
- Jealousy
- Suggested hallucinogenic mental disorders
- all the drama that follows the years AFTER adolescence.

And that's about all I can say without blowing the lid off.

The gameplay? It's more than just walking around. There are light minigames throughout the story and without spoilers... There's a FULL META GAME built into the game that some people spend more time on than the main game. And it's actually a game that could have released independently. Seriously.

The game itself is linear in the fashion that it tells it's story, if you go to bed at night, there's no way to go back to any of the events of that day you missed, and thus, this game requires multiple playthroughs. I'm on my second one now. :)

Anyways, I just had to get that off my chest. There are folks saying this will be the next "Undertale" craze so... Get into it before it's supposedly "uncool" and "cool to hate"

So yeah.

10/10 Gregg rulz ok?