After finishing Xenoblade Chronicles X, I was at a loss as to what to play next. I didn’t fancy another 125+ hour epic, so had a flick through what I had installed, and came across Night in the Woods. I’d looked at it before but hadn’t realised I owned it (well, PS+ rented it anyway), and I found it was only a few hours long, so here we are.

It starts with you, an anthropomorphic cat coming back to her home town after dropped out of “school”. I say “school” because it’s a university, and it irks me when people refer to university as school. Anyhoo, Mae turns up at her parents’ house and the first few days involve her reintegrating back into her family and the friends she’d left behind, rejoining her band and hanging out and doing things she used to do as a young teen even though she’s now 20 years old.

Soon it is clear there’s something very wrong with her. She gets headaches, but she’s also constantly tired, has bad dreams, doesn’t want to talk about her reasons for ditching uni and for some reason is happy to jump on rooftops and balance on power lines. Because of course. At the same time, you get to know more about Possum Springs, her run-down town which used to be a thriving and prosperous mining town but now all the work as dried up, the shops are closed or closing, some folk have gone missing, and there’s just nothing to do and everyone is a bit miserable. Oh, and sinkholes keep opening up.

Then Mae sees a ghost kidnap a child.

Or did she? Or is she just going a bit mad and it’s a symptom of everything else she’s struggling with? Things aren’t clear until they are and even then it isn’t entirely.

As a sort of platforming puzzle visual novel, Night in the Woods somehow manages to feel laid back but full of existential dread at the same time. Light hearted banter belies the truly horrific things happening in the town, and the feeling that summat just int right. It’s a great story with some great characters. And a Guitar Hero mini game because why not?

So what if dominoes was an art deco dungeon crawling roguelike deck-building puzzle game?

You’ve inherited a fortune from your great uncle, but only if you’re able to reach room 46 of his 45 room house. Getting to the room involves solving logic and cryptic puzzles, realising that random items in each room might actually be important clues, and putting together hidden messages and objects to understand your family’s past and the reason the house is so weird.

The weirdness of the house comes about from the fact that each day, it is emptied of all the rooms. Each door you open requires you to draft the room that will appear on the other side of it, and you can choose from three randomly chosen rooms from a larger deck each time.

Rooms have different purposes, with different door layouts, so it’s possible to dead-end yourself and that’s where the roguelike bit of the game comes in – you call it a day and start afresh tomorrow. The house layout resets, you lose all the items you’ve collected, and you give it another go. You can also end a day if you run out of steps – you only start with so many and each room you enter (or re-enter, so backtracking is penalised) uses one up. Food you find and sometimes drafting bedrooms can boost your number of steps, though.

As you play, you find a few things which do persist between days, like being able to start with some money – which you can use to buy things in some rooms – or gems – which you mainly use to draft rarer or more powerful rooms. You can also open up permanent shortcuts and boons, and start with more steps.

I’ve seen a lot of people complaining that you’re at the mercy of the random number generator in order to progress, but that’s no different to Rogue, really. Most runs have you finding something new, like a bit of story, a secret, a clue, a new room in your room pool or a permanent bonus of some kind so even failed runs usually have some progression. For example, you may find a safe combination but then fail to get the room with the safe in it on the same run, but your knowledge of the combination carries over.

It’s smart, weird, occasionally cruel, but always intriguing. And who wouldn’t want to explore a reassembling, randomly generated family mansion full of secrets and puzzles, one failed day at a time?