cliché as hell.

Picture, if you will, the humble redneck. They await the approach of big, fast domestic mowers. John Deeres, Cub Cadets, even weird modified Chinese stuff they looted from Aliexpress. There is jubilance, but that soon comes to an awkward hush. An unfamiliar engine note approaches.

My International 1480 combine harvester, all ten tons of it, is barrelling down the highway at a clip somewhere between “tepid” and “jaunty.” Even though I have shown up for a race, I am sandbagging a little bit, making sure that the bets get settled against my vehicle before I show them the might of a fully operational monster such as mine.

Technically, there is no violation. I had looked at the rulebook from every angle in the previous year: it has the correct number of wheels, the proper agricultural intent, and with precise work on the tiller, it can even (poorly) mow a suburban lawn. Is it modified? Oh yes, yes indeed, but I see the nitrous bottles poking out from the rows of Kubotas at the starting line.

And when I leave the starting line, it is a thing of beauty. At least for a few milliseconds. It seems that the wizards at International Harvester simply did not comprehend of a situation in which the frame of their combine would be launched into the air by means of one thousand eight hundred foot-pounds of supercharger-bolstered torque. I had erroneously believed that the loose soil of the rural community would let the wheels dip in, but now I am facing directly into the sky, having twelve o’ clocked hard on my wheelie, shooting flames from my exhaust and whirling vertical blades of death towards the grandstand.

Could do. Night in the Woods has a lot of thematic ground to cover, and the framework of “visual novel/walking sim hybrid that sometimes randomly turns into a puzzle-platformer” isn’t a particularly common one (I’m guessing because it’s very difficult to do well!), so these recs are necessarily going to be a bit scattershot – whether any of them will suit really depends on what exactly about NitW grabbed you.

Donut County - Okay, this one’s actually just a Katamari Damacy style puzzler, and its only overap with Night in the Woods is the tone of its writing. I’m throwing it in because it’s my experience that folks who loved NitW often really enjoy this one as well. Don’t expect a similar story!

Kentucky Route Zero - An episodic walking sim with a magical realist bent, this one’s rather bleaker in tone than NitW, but may scratch some of the same itches. Fair warning: the release schedule is very slow, and the final episode has yet to be published at the time of this posting.

Oxenfree - Basically, take the background supernatural horror elements of NitW and dial them up to eleven and you’ll have something in the neighbourhood of Oxenfree. The real-time dialogue mechanics are novel, but can be awkward if you’re slow up the uptake.

A Short Hike - A 3D platformer walking sim where you play as a bird trying to reach the top of a mountain in order to get a cell phone signal. Non-violent and with no particular failure states, the gameplay is a nice mix of casual exploration and dialogue-driven interaction.

Thimbleweed Park - An old-school point and click adventure game about a small-town murder mystery. You’re not going to find anything so heartfelt was NitW here, as most of the cast are objectively awful people, but the story touches on many of the same issues.

What Remains of Edith Finch - While labelled a walking sim, it’s really more a minigame collection, with each minigame framed as the last day in the life of a different member of the titular Finch family; as such, the story is a series of vignettes rather than a single connected narrative.

Where the Water Tastes Like Wine - Like Kentucky Route Zero, this one’s a semi-episodic road trip walking sim, here set during the Great Depression. Shares a lot of NitW’s narrative focus on how economic hardship affects everyday folks.

The World Next Door - This one shares the basic premise of an ambiguously late-teens/twentysomething outsider getting caught up in a small-town conspiracy, albeit in a much more openly fantastical setting. Sort of a cross between a visual novel and a match-three puzzler.