Week 8: Once Haunted, Can a Place Be Unhaunted?

Progress This Week

Before I get talking about coding and all that good stuff, we have more research results to cover this week. This week, the game I opted to research was Night in the Woods.

Night in the Woods follows 20 year old college dropout Mae, who has returned to her hometown of Possum Springs and is trying to reconnect with her past as she wanders the area, whether that be via talking with her neighbors, hanging out with her friends, and uncovering strange cult activity in the area. This one is similar to previous games I’ve researched, in that there are some effects of interaction on the game. However, the fundamental ending of Night in the Woods does not change, and making choices only alters some dialogue present at the end of the game. There are also some dialogue options to choose from when talking to other characters. But more than that, some choices lead to different events on different days, and choosing one over another locks you out of the other one in the same gameplay file. In that sense, the focus is different as the choices do not alter the ending much, but instead alters the gameplay path.

Before I show the results, I’ll leave my scoring system here again, since it’s been a few weeks since I’ve talked about research.

1: the presence of different endings / routes detracts from the experience

2: the presence of different endings / routes does not affect anything

3: the presence of different endings / routes improves the experience

And now, here’s a fact breakdown for my research results!

– Including my own opinion, I gathered a total of 11 different reviews.

– The ratio of positive to negative reviews is 9:1, or 90%. This was in order to emulate the actual percentage of positive reviews on Steam, which is 94%.

– You’ll note that there’s one review missing from the above ratio. That’s because the review had more of a neutral opinion. To quote the reviewer himself, “At one point I was sure I was going to write about how much I disliked Night In The Woods. At a later point I realised I was going to write about how much I loved Night In The Woods. I think there’s a lot to know about Night In The Woods from that. It is both extraordinary and wanting, fantastic and frustrating.” The review does mention both positive points and negative points to the game, but those mainly balance each other out into a more neutral opinion overall.

– Out of all 11 reviews, six of them scored a 3 / 3. Some of the most common points mentioned were that due to the fact that the game locks you out of certain encounters due to the choices the player makes, this makes the game more replayable and therefore makes the presence of different options more interesting. Many times, the dialogue options Mae has were also mentioned, and the reviews do note that these dialogue options were interesting and made the game more enjoyable.

– Four reviews scored a 1 / 3. Most of them mentioned that even though there are different choices that call for multiple playthroughs, the changes present are very minor and thus do not make multiple playthroughs actually interesting. In addition, there is plenty of side content that can be missed due to this. Another review mentioned that the dialogue choices in this game have too little interaction, and it feels more like watching events just play out on their own rather than actually playing a game.

– One review scored a 2 / 3. This was because the review noted that despite the presence of dialogue options many times throughout the game, these dialogue options actually seem more like an illusion of choice, since nothing really changes. In addition, there are some dialogue choices where there genuinely is no actual “choice,” since the options all restate the same sentence in different ways. As such, the dialogue options do not have much impact on the actual game.

– The average score of all reviews is a 2.181818182 / 3. This means that people do believe that the player choices in this game do improve the gameplay experience, but not by that much. This does make sense, as the options present here are very lowkey and do not actually impact the game as much as it does for a game such as OMORI. It also does score slightly lower than Library of Ruina, but not by much.

I’ll have a final research summary coming up next week, so stay tuned for that.

Besides the whole research thing, I spent a lot of this week messing with Ink, which is an external software we are using for our dialogue system. Due to this, I was able to add more conditionals to the dialogue we had for our NPC, which means that the NPC has a lot more possible lines now, just to make things a little more interesting. I also worked on implementing a way to call C# functions from within Ink, which makes using Ink quite a bit more convenient.

Up Next

Next week I’ll probably just spend more time in Unity, haha… Specifically, I plan to work on the battle UI for our game. Since there are monster encounters in this game, there has to be a specific battle-like scene where the player faces them. In addition, we will be adding some actual artwork to the game to replace our placeholder art, so that’s exciting. Other than that, I also will be adding a final research summary, like I mentioned above.