Night in the Woods: The Untold Story

Zoomietot on Bluesky said that she replays the 2017 game Night in the Woods every fall, and I thought that was an amazing idea, because the game takes place in the fall and autumnal imagery is everywhere in it. So I just finished doing it too, and it’s still so fun, especially with the added content from the “Weird Autumn Edition” that was released in late 2017. I played the game over and over that year, and apparently I’d burned myself out on it too much to play it all the way through again after the new edition was released. But this time I did, and I might do it again.

But I wanted to look at the backstory of Mae Borowski, the main character, rather than the story of the game itself. We don’t know that much about her, since she doesn’t want to talk about herself or her experiences with literally anyone – not her friends, not her parents – during the course of the game. She finally tells a friend something late in the game that clears up her backstory a tremendous amount, but she still doesn’t talk about everything. So I’m going to tell Mae’s story, with the caveat that this is my version of her story, and others almost certainly have other interpretations. I’m filling in the blanks, and I’m sure there are other ways to fill in those blanks.

Mae’s parents, Candy and Stan Borowski, tried again and again to have children, with multiple miscarriages. They’d nearly given up when Mae was successfully born. They called her their “miracle baby.” Mae’s dad Stan had a good job working at the glass factory, and although he had a problem with alcohol, he realized that he was endangering his wife and new daughter, so he got help and joined a program. This meant he couldn’t go to the bar with his friends, like Angus Delaney’s father (whose first name is never mentioned).

The family was saving up money so Mae could go to college one day, which would make her the first member of the Borowski family to ever go to college. The family was hit hard when the glass factory closed down, but Stan worked various different jobs to keep paying the bills and saving for Mae’s education.

Mae was a bright young girl. She was good friends with Bea Santello when they were both 10 years old. They were in Scouts together and caught a turtle. They named him Boxy, but he died. Gregg and Casey were two other friends the same age that Mae had, though she drifted away from Bea over time.

When Mae was 14 she experienced what appears to have been her first derealization episode, when she was playing a video game and suddenly everything in the game became just meaningless pixels, losing their coherent identity in her mind. Then she went outside and saw a tree, one that she saw every day and almost considered a friend, but now it had lost that association and was just a thing. She then saw a person walking by, and he was just all moving shapes to her, not seeming like a person at all. She didn’t understand what was happening and cried, but then the episode ended, leaving Mae shaken.

But then the next day while Mae was batting in a softball game, Andy Cullen was pitching to her, and she suddenly had another of these episodes while watching him. Once again she had no idea what was happening, but in her mind he had become just a collection of shapes, not a person, with no meaning or identity. Upset and angry because of this mysterious assault upon her reality that she didn’t understand, she attacked the shapes with the bat she still held, and when the episode had ended, she found that she had hit Cullen in the face multiple times with the bat, badly injuring him.

Cullen’s parents sued the Borowski family to pay for their son’s medical bills and their legal fees, so to pay for it, the Borowskis had to use Mae’s college fund. Mae’s parents, unable to afford any better medical care for Mae after this, sent her to the only doctor in town, Dr. Hank, who was also the town’s only dentist. He was not trained as a psychiatrist or psychologist and misdiagnosed Mae with anger issues instead of what she probably really had, some type of depersonalization-derealization disorder (DDD). He gave Mae a journal-writing assignment, and in a way it accidentally helped ground her in reality. Unfortunately, that reality was the familiar reality of the town she lived in and the people she knew, which would become a problem when she left it.

Mae started to have more difficulty in school due to the undiagnosed disorder that had manifested in her brain. She did manage to stay friends with Gregg and Casey, but most parents didn’t want their kids going anywhere near Mae because of the harm she’d done to Andy Cullen. People started calling her “Killer,” even though she hadn’t killed anyone.

When Mae approached graduation, her parents still didn’t have enough money to send her to college, but they still wanted for their child to be the first Borowski to attend college, so they took out a second mortgage on their house. It turned out to be a terrible deal, and their house wasn’t worth the mortgage’s value. They had to keep paying it back, though, so Candy got a job as a receptionist at the church.

College wasn’t a good experience for Mae. The moment she left her hometown, her episodes began getting worse, because her familiar environment had helped retain her mental associations between sensory input and its meaning, but she wasn’t in that environment anymore. She stayed in her dorm room almost all the time, hardly ever going to class and making no new friends. She starved because she never left her room to eat, ordering pizzas when she got too hungry. Outside her dorm room was a bizarre modern sculpture made of rusty metal pieces that was meant to represent the school’s founder; its arm pointed directly at Mae’s dorm room’s window, which she found threatening and frightening. Mae was too afraid to leave her room and didn’t come home for Longest Night or for the summer.

Finally, shortly before the events of the game begin, Mae had a really bad episode, during which she took her softball bat and caused a lot of property damage, especially to the sculpture of the school’s founder that so terrified her. Mae was intercepted by campus security and expelled from school due to her actions, and due to the terrible grades she’d been getting because of not attending classes. Telling herself she’d dropped out, in order to salvage some agency in what was happening to her, she got on a bus and went home, leaving her belongings behind. She had to return to familiar surroundings in order to be able to deal with what her brain was doing to her.

When she got home, she discovered that her once-familiar surroundings had changed and were threatening to change more. Her friend Casey had disappeared mysteriously; his parents had hung up signs all over town. Her aunt Molly, the town’s only police officer, warned her ominously of some danger that she should be careful of, without being more specific. Her dad was now working at the Ham Panther, a big-box chain superstore that had driven the town’s old neighborhood grocery store out of business. She told her parents and her friends that she’d dropped out of college, or that she’d “dropped out, sort of.” Her parents were inwardly upset and confused that Mae had again seemingly wasted the opportunity that they’d scraped together money for, and her former friend Bea, who would have killed to go to college, was similarly upset and confused by Mae’s apparent decision to throw away that opportunity. Mae learned that her friend Gregg and his boyfriend Angus were going to move away in a few months.

And that is the emotional environment in which the game begins. Over the course of the game’s story, as she learns more ways in which her familiar hometown environment is changing (and in some ways was never what she imagined it to be), Mae’s psyche becomes more and more unstable.

I’m not spoiling the game’s story much here; I wish we’d known more about Mae’s backstory to begin with. The biggest blank I’ve filled in is about why she left college; I’m assuming that her dream after Day 4 is a memory of what happened at college rather than a reenactment of her attack on Andy Cullen symbolically overlaid on top of her more recent college experiences. It’s not stated anywhere that she actually destroyed the sculpture, nor does anything contradict this theory. But Mae is just as reluctant to talk about why she “dropped out” as she is to talk about the Andy Cullen “incident,” suggesting that they’re similar. But this could be interpreted another way; she may have merely been expelled for bad grades due to her undiagnosed disorder that she doesn’t understand and can’t explain.

Can anyone other than Mae see the Janitor?