BOUND 4 GLORY: The Tragic Case of Casey Hartley
Night in the Woods is a 2017 adventure game, developed by Infinite Fall and published by Finji, in which you play Mae Borowski, a twenty year old who returns to her hometown inexplicably after dropping out of college. As you explore the charmingly desolate town of Possum Springs in an imaginary Rust Belt region where all characters are anthropomorphic and colourful, you get to rekindle friendships with Mae's neighbours, acquaintances, and friends. You get to hang out with Greg, the enthusiastic up-and-down childhood best friend, Angus, his chill fedora-wearing boyfriend, and Bea, the cool sarcastic replacement of your lead drummer Casey in the old-party-place-we-illegally-squat-so-technically-not-garage band. And throughout the game, as you discover that more and more spooky things are happening in Possum Springs, Casey Hartley's name continues to loom over the narrative. There are missing posters of him in town, your friends casually mention he must have hopped on a train and left this shithole town, you even end up asking drifters to tell him to call you if they ever see him. He's one of the first characters ever mentioned in the prologue, he's gotta be important! Except Casey's dead. He's been dead this entire time. His body is rotting away in a cave right next to where you live and yet you spend the whole game seeing his ghost (metaphorical ghost here) in the little details.
One of the game's mechanics is that you can access Mae's computer, in which you can play a minigame or chat with her friends. Their profile pictures are on the side of the screen, Bea's, Greg's, Angus's... and Casey's. Clicking on Casey's profile shows you his away message, a snippet into the personality of Mae's best friend, a punk teenage dirtbag who likes skating and dreams of running away. In all caps, he tells you BORN 2 LOSE, COUNTRY TRASH PROUD, BOUND FOR GLORY. Of course, it's only when you replay the game that this message truly hits you in all its tragedy. As the game unfolds, it reveals Casey was killed by a group of cultists who believe that sacrificing someone in the mine will bring prosperity to the once-beautiful Possum Springs. They explain choosing Casey as he was ‘a nobody that would contribute nothing to society’ and someone no one would miss. When you see his away message, you can’t help but mourn what he could have been. How he would indeed have been bound for glory had he had a chance to live. We see from Mae’s point of view the depths of Casey’s character and how much she and her friends care about him.
Although it has been disproved that Casey wrote the song ‘Die Anywhere Else’ by the developers, as you replay the game you’ll find yourself looking at it with Casey in mind. This idea of outliving your crappy town is juxtaposed with Casey’s fate of dying for the town, and as you explore more of Possum Springs, from the vandalised mural of old miners to the rusty town sign or the abandoned limestone furnace, you only see more signs that Possum Springs is dead and decayed and that the loss of Casey’s life was futile in saving anyone. The tragedy of it all is accentuated by the traces Casey has left behind.
Night in the Woods is a complicated game with many emotional storylines and Casey’s is just one of those, albeit one of the more underrated ones. It does, however, set the tone for the antagonists of the game and the background of this imaginary yet familiar Rust Belt town. It explores the classism inherent to working towns where there is a dichotomy between the older crowd who yearns for faded prosperity, and the younger crowd who were always born to lose yet still choose to live their lives fully. The loss of Casey coinciding with the collapse of Possum Springs is, in my opinion, a symbol that you cannot kill the youth without killing the beating heart of a town.
Cover image from the game Night in the Woods designed by Alec Holowka, Scott Benson and Infinite Fall studios.