Too Many Negatives to Be Worthwhile

User Rating: 3 | A Night in the Woods LNX

I enjoyed the other game made by Patchwork Doll Games “Trigger” so I had high hopes for A Night in the Woods but it was way too rough for me to enjoy. There is little to no narrative. How did I get stuck out in the woods ? Where am I ? Even if I survive the night that’s not the end of the journey, just a step but no epilogue delves into that. There are newspaper articles you find but they simply give little articles that may or may not shed light on the overall world itself but don’t expand anything on the person you control. The game is quite literally walking around finding firewood and then finding a place to make the fire. Now I don’t mind walking sims with simple game play but those usually have a good story to back it up or nice visuals to give you something to look at. This game has no narrative and it’s visual style isn’t suited to pixel art in my opinion. When you try to do pixel art in a dark environment things become too difficult to make out which is what I found happened here. The music was very well done but it only appears for a minute or so. I also wasn’t a fan of how the game doesn’t take up the whole screen. This isn’t a bug but a design choice as the game’s text shows up at the bottom and the rest is in it’s own frame.

I played A Night in the Woods on Linux. It never crashed but I did encounter a lot of issues. I could not play with my second monitor plugged in as if I did the game wouldn’t let me move at all. Even with the second monitor unplugged I found that several times I lost the ability to move and would have to Alt-Tab out of the game and back in to regain movement. There is no menu at all and no options. You can’t save or pause the game. You can only exit normally at the end or by using Alt-F4.

Game Engine: Unity

Disk Space Used: 68 MB

GPU Usage: 3%

VRAM Usage: 451 MB

CPU Usage: 16 %

RAM Usage: 1.6 GB

I just had too many issues and too little to praise to recommend A Night in the Woods at all even though it’s free of charge. I know the developer can make quality games but this wasn’t for me. I finished the game in eight minutes.

My Score: 3.5/10

My System:

Intel i7-6700 | 16GB DDR4-3000 CL15 | XFX RX 590 8GB Fat Boy | Mesa 22.2.4 | Solus | Mate 1.27.0 | Kernel 6.1.5-229.current