Death in the woods
Night in the woods is a game about growing up and about death. I'll start from afar. There is a widespread belief that it is worthwhile to have a hamster for a child in order to introduce death. As for me, this is an attempt to make a good face over a bad game. Are we really could control death? Expecting that the child will not face it in any other way? Specially looking for meetings with death, and she is always nearby, means to close your eyes and defiantly fumble with your hands in the air, missing. To bring a living creature closer to you, specifically to extract (educational) benefit from its death, is to create the illusion that you are bringing death to some schedule of upcoming events.
Because "It’s always the others who die", the experience of death is sealed in our lives in bizarre and unpredictable ways. It may pass unnoticed, may be deeply traumatic, but I begin to think that it does not stack, one death does not prepare for another, in the sense that it does not facilitate the experience the trial of grief an sober. You will not lose, if near you dies one creature less.
But, on the other hand, the death of another serves as an index sign to OWN death. It’s always the others who die, but everyone will die. Another common belief that I would like to touch upon is that a person really matures only when he realizes his own mortality. When he is able with his mind’s eye to trace the index sign of someone’s death and find himself walking along the road in the same direction. Contrary to the fact that May Borovski is over 18, everyone calls her a kid, and she, in turn, declares that she will never die.
And Casey Hartley, May's childhood friend, the loss of which we learn at the very beginning of the game, serves as her guide on the path of realizing one’s own mortality and building attitudes towards it. Perhaps he even leaves her his own attitude as an inheritance:
I just wanna die anythere else.
