So a trailer for the new game Revenant Hill came out today, and it caused some talk about night in the woods. I sort of wanted to just write out all of my thoughts on the subject in one place, because otherwise I was just gonna sit and think about them all night.
So from my view, one of the largest themes of this story is about handling change. The story starts out with Mae returning to Possum Springs after some time away at college, and with her returh she has some expectations that the town is just as she had left it. She quickly finds that this is not the case, her friends have new responsibilities and are moving along with their own lives. She wants to slot right in exactly where she left them, but they are not in that place anymore and she has to learn to accept this. Sure Gregg might have fun smashing empty bottles behind the store, but he has a goal of saving up money and moving away with his partner and wants to be responsible to achieve that goal for the both of them. Bea has some newfound resentment of Mae having an opportunity that she never had and not being able to follow through with the chance. Outside of her relationships with her friends, the town itself and it's surroundings are changing as well. The pizza place is closing down, the old grocery store has been abandoned for quite some time, and the mall where they used to hang out right outside of town is completely dead.
This is much of the first act, Mae trying to slot herself back into a town that has moved on without her and coming to terms with this. The second act of course starts with Mae seeing an attack and wanting to investigate, but what really happens is that we start to peer into the history of the town itself. I don't think it is made obvious why we are looking into the history of the town from a thematic point of view at this point, but it's made very clear that the past is full of bloodshed and tragedy. There is the idea of hunting a ghost but that ghost is really just the towns history. In this act, we also see Mae coming to terms with some of her friends, and gaining an understanding of them. At the end of this of course, Mae finally has the encounter with the ghost she has been chasing and discovers that it isn't a ghost it is a cult.
So there's two things I want to explore with the cult in this game. The first is the parallels that they have with Mae. You see, in game this cult has been sacrificing people, heavily implied to be minorities or the poor-people with no power- to what they believe is an eldritch god. I feel like whether this god is real or not isn't an interesting question, the entire ending does take place inside a mine that they note had a gas leak and might cause hallucinations so it's hard to tell how much of what actually happens is real versus some form of mass hysteria. What I do think is interesting here though is the cults motivations. You see, like Mae, these cultists are not very happy with the state of the town. There is no money, and no jobs, and people are barely scraping by. The people who get drawn into the cult here are essentially yearning for this vision of a past version of the town that was prosperous. You understand their reasons, at least on a surface level, because they really are the same root feelings that Mae has been grappling with for the game. The main difference we get here of course is that we learned in the second act that this past that they are striving towards is not real, but clearly something must have been better in the past right? This is why I feel like the cult is a good foil for Mae in particular, they are essentially dealing with the same problems she is facing, but failed to let go of the past and instead holding onto anger and resentment about the state of the world.
The second thing I want to point out is, why a cult versus something else? Surely there could be a lot of different ways to approach this fear of change, and I think the reason that it is a cult is because it becomes something more structural to the community than to individuals. Each one of these members have dealt with the same feelings of loss of a past they feel they should have and have come together as a group to try to address them. The way that they are adressing them of course is non-sensical, but these are clearly people who feel like they have no other option, they need to hurt people for the greater good and whatnot. You even hear them justifying the people that they kill as people who aren't part of the community and won't be missed because they have to justify their actions to themselves in some way.
We are also not ever really told who these people are, and I believe that is very much intentional. It's a hard trade-off because on one hand you can't really foreshadow them as well if they aren't actual characters(there's one or two who are implied ot maybe be among their numbers, but not people who Mae ever has any real connection to), but I think that in return they get to represent not a group of people but be a physical manifestation of the feelings that have haunted Mae throughout the game. They are all her, in a way, but she is not them. They both know that the town might be doomed, but she can see herself accepting that change when the time comes and they cannot. She can find meaning in her community and let the changes hurt her
So during the confontation, the cult of course offers that they take over, kinda standard stuff. It's pretty easy to see that they reject it because they knew Casey, one of the cults victums and know the real harm that they are doing. But on another level, they also know that the promised result isn't something that will ever manifest. They've been doing this for decades and the town continues to decline, and even so the vision they have is not real. After this confrontation, Mae has a converation with what is implied to be the cults god, but really its a way to sort of deliver a final word on the themes themselves. Mae declaring that she knows that things will get worse and that it will hurt, but that hurt will actually mean something was being lost and that meaning is important. The cultists of course do not feel this hurt, they kill but they kill those specifically those whose loss will not hurt them. Essentially it's a call for finding meaning and hope in a world that is difficult and that's always a message that at least ressonates a lot with me.
We then have the question of the character arcs. All of the characters are clearly shaken by their encounter, and they will never really know who those people were or what was really happening, but they know they have to move forward into the future regardless. Gregg and Angus will move away, Bae will continue working her job, and Mae will find out what the future holds for herself. They haven't resolved their problems, as their problems aren't things that can be solved by fighting a cult, but they will continue to work towards their own goals and living. I like this, although I know I am an outlier, the characters we see are characters we get to explore and understand, but outside of Mae they don't have arcs they're just people. Sometimes people just grow apart or leave and there's hurt there, but we know what hurt means.