Listening To The Night in the Woods Soundtrack: Thoughts On Art and Controversy
By: Priya Sridhar
Tags: Death, Controversy, Video Game Music, Night In The Woods, Video Games

I’m a person that keeps soundtracks on my phone. They help me focus on writing and remind me of the stories that each musical note carries. When I have an Internet connection, I prefer soundtracks on YouTube but like having pockets of music.

Last week, I put on a soundtrack that was written by a rather terrible person. I closed my eyes and pressed the play button. The first few familiar MIDI notes rang through my noise cancellation headphones.

And? I didn’t feel anything bad. The music was still enjoyable, even knowing what happened. I was able to savor each note while knowing I’m probably going to the Bad Place.

Night in the Woods is one of my favorite games, created by Scott Benson, Bethany Hockenberry, and Alec Holowka. It combines horror with realistic despairs and adds in a potentially supernatural element. In this day and age, the game is reassuring. This is all the more reason why my heart broke on hearing that Holowka was a creep.

Real-Life Horrors And Abuse

It came out that Alec Holowka abused Zoe Quinn, one of his ex-girlfriends. He was terrible to her, in ways that are best detailed in her words. Alec would die by suicide a week after the allegations came out when Scott and Bethany officially severed ties with him. Scott later revealed that Alec abused him and Bethany during game development, to the point that they nearly didn’t finish the project. People knew, but everyone was afraid to speak up.

I was hurt. Disappointed. Yet another pedestal fell and broke. Another creep whose crimes are revealed long another the damage is done, and within a game that I loved and provided reassurance in an uncertain world. I felt really sad that week, and upset. Now I’m ambivalent.

There’s a lot of talk of separating art from the artist. Everyone’s opinion varies on what their line is. If you mention Ayn Rand to people, you’ll get an expression of disgust and a lecture about how she opposed Social Security only to go on it later in life. Talk about Bryan Singer, though, and you get a lot of questions of if Bohemian Rhapsody is better than Rocketman despite the taint of integrity on the former.

For me, it helps that Scott’s account reveals that this game did not belong to Alec. Night in the Woods belongs to Scott and Bethany. Alec, in fact, asked rather insensitively why one character couldn’t just leave for college after her father had a nervous breakdown. He did write the music, but it wasn’t his game.

Night in the Woods still means a lot to me. I have the soundtrack on my phone, gifted it to a friend, and played it the whole way through over the past two years. Despite what happened, and my sadness about what happened, I can still find fragments of joy.

We are going to talk about the game, so SPOILERS obviously. Do not read further if you are planning to play the game blind.

Night In the Woods: A Summary

The game, Night in the Woods, is a tale about finding hope and reasons to move forward in the worst of times. Our main character Mae is a college dropout who returns to her hometown. She spends her time shoplifting and smashing objects to deal with the boredom while ignoring everyone’s questions about why she left in the middle of the semester. Meanwhile, a murder mystery crops up when her friends discover a severed arm outside the local diner, and Mae witnesses a kidnapping on Halloween. She goes ghost-hunting while bearing witness to all of her friends’ problems.

We find out that Mae’s hometown is dying. It used to have mines, but the mines have long closed, and corporations are moving in and bankrupting the local businesses. The local pastor wants to open the church to the homeless but fails because the town council doesn’t want potential businesses to be scared away. Also, the town council can’t agree on anything else as the town wastes away.

The story changes little depending on who you choose for hangouts with Mae. Gregg and Angus are a gay couple who grew up with her and are nice but also want their space. Beatrice is the alligator woman that runs the local hardware store and resents that she couldn’t go to college. Hanging out with Gregg enables his penchant for petty crime, and hanging out with Bea helps Mae realize she can be an entitled jerk. Either way, they have her back when she goes hunting for a ghost.

A lot of the characters’ problems hit close to home; Mae reveals that she suffers disassociation episodes, and she had to drop out after suffering a breakdown at college. Beatrice has to work at the hardware store because the owner — her father — suffered a breakdown after her mother died and they are too deep in debt to pay tuition. Gregg and Angus are worried that if he slips back into “crimes” that they won’t be able to move to Bright Harbor and start a new life. Everyone has problems that they can’t solve overnight.

What keeps this game from being utterly depressing? The zany humor. Mae electrocutes herself on a regular basis, yet she can walk on power lines without trouble. She keeps a running commentary on the town’s happenings, and can shoplift pretzels if she wants to feed rats and be a “mother”. Gregg’s “crimes” can be as hilarious as they are destructive, with robot heads carried from abandoned stores. You keep laughing and that helps with the bad parts.

The game’s signature scene is when Mae stares at a nihilistic god in the face and tells it that she will continue to care about her friends and feel every moment because that way her life has meaning. We don’t know if the god is real or a manifestation of her fears, but Mae’s decision to care despite the pain in her life leads her to get a better ending. Not a happy ending per se, but a better one.

Why Do We Protect Creeps?

The big questions are, of course, why creeps still persist and flourish in this world. We seem to get one consistent answer: that we have a sense of shame about if people will believe the victims. There’s the worry about our heroes when they fail us. What’s more, victims who speak up face dire consequences for years on end while the accused get to rebuild their careers.

Stories keep coming out, of people that take advantage of others’ faith in them. Matt Groening comes to mind, with the revelation that he solicited a sixteen-year-old girl for a foot massage and was associated with Jeffrey Epstein. Or John Lassetter at Pixar harassing women who wore skirts and didn’t cross their legs.

For people like me, it feels terrifying, the thought of someone coming into our creative space and winning us over with their art and then betraying that trust. It’s happened to me, with friends that made me feel bad about my writing, or who wanted to change it. Mixed in with that is that I keep letting people in because they help us get better.

I’m hoping that maybe this time we learn that we don’t accept creeps into games because of their talents. It’s unlikely, but one can hope. Maybe this time we will be careful and identify those who want to hurt us.

Moving Forward

I’ve told a few friends about what happened; one missed the rollercoaster, fortunately. Their love of the game is intact. Mine is too, despite all that happened.

The soundtrack is still decent, despite the composer being a creep. I’ll keep listening to it while knowing the truth. As Mae stared into the face of god and promised to care, I’ll stare in the face of creeps being unmaked and vow to care as well.