would you like an excuse to nitw post i for the life of me canNOT understand the PLOT OF THIS GAME
that's fair! nitw's core story is intentionally vague and non-direct so i don't blame people for not immediately getting it. i'll talk abt it as quickly as possible bc i just woke up lol
the 3 major themes of nitw i feel are dealing with mental illness as a young adult, existentialism, and how capitalism takes lives in different ways.
while mae's official diagnosis is never revealed, the way she describes her experience at college is easily identifiable if you've ever been through a long-term depressive episode in your adult years. the thing about depressive episodes and other forms of mental breakdowns is that they aren't always rational. in mae's case, while a lot of it seems to stem from peer pressure and rushing into something she wasn't prepared for, she's not really able to grasp what's wrong with her or why everything is going wrong until it's already too late. i always really liked the whole "shapes" allegory when she talks about dissociation; how the world just started blending together one day, from things that used to make sense and have a meaning and an identity attached to them, into random shapes and colors that didn't mean anything.
now, the existentialist and anti-capitalist elements in this game might be harder to see if you don't know youre looking for them, because this is where the whole supernatural/demonic cult thing comes in. it also doesn't help that nitw's full story can't be experienced in just 1 playthrough, since some of the context is locked behind events, hidden locations and specific dialogue choices. i'll try to summarize lt:
BASICALLY: in the game's lore, there's an all-powerful demonic being called "the black goat". it lives down at the far bottom of a hole in the ground, discovered by local miners many years before the game takes place. it's supposedly the cause of sinkholes, floods and other natural disasters around town, as well as the shitty state of the job market and people being forced to leave their homes. certain people (including mae) have "heard it singing" and have been inevitably gravitating towards it.
during an especially tough period for possum springs' working class, the town's old mining community formed a sort of cult around the black goat, after discovering that it LITERALLY feeds on human sacrifices. though the cult made it a rule to only sacrifice people who "wouldn't be missed" or "wouldn't contribute anything important to the town".
this is all a huge metaphor for late stage capitalism, as an endless cycling of people suffering and dying for the sake of maintaining "order" in society, and how you can't improve on these conditions without getting to and destroying the (literal, in the game's case) core of the problem. and that might be a task too big for any person.
near the end of the game, mae has this big monologue moment where she directly confronts the black goat, and in turn, confronts herself and her own issues. she basically goes "yeah, this whole situation sucks and maybe nothing we do will ever contribute to anything on the grand scheme. but that's why i need to hold onto even the smallest things that give my life meaning, even if they're sad, even if they hurt." it's one of my favorite scenes in the whole game, and really ties everything together in a neat little bow.
TLDR; at the end of everything, hold onto anything
