Before the Green Moon is a farming / life simulation game set in a unique science fiction world. Explore a small community at the base of a space elevator during the days and seasons leading up to your departure for the moon.
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I got burnt out halfway through my playthrough and stopped playing for a few weeks and then came back and realized it was entirely my fault for misunderstanding a basic mechanic and then the last few hours brought me to tears multiple times. This game is something special.
Before the Green Moon is a beautiful game. Relationships unfold slowly and gently, but the pace of the game around the busywork of farming and gathering provides structure. For a large chunk of the game's time (which, for me, lasted about 9 or 10 hours), it seemed like there was at least one new encounter or discovery each day. The ending also provided me with a feeling of nervous excitement that I get before a big trip. Few games are this emotionally engaging.
(BacklogBeat's Game Club - January 2024 nomination)
I ultimately enjoyed my time with this but I can't help but feel that the game would've been better off if it were a narrative focused game like the developer's last game because the vibes are immaculate and the themes are wonderful, they're just dragged down by the really weird pacing that's associated with farming sim games. The gameplay's incredibly dull and interesting events happen far too infrequently. I understand what the game's trying to do, but the message isn't worth the hours upon hours of doing menial tasks when it could’ve been delivered just as effectively in a different way.
Still, it’s a game that will stick with me for a long time. I’ve never really played anything like it.
I ultimately enjoyed my time with this but I can't help but feel that the game would've been better off if it were a narrative focused game like the developer's last game because the vibes are immaculate and the themes are wonderful, they're just dragged down by the really weird pacing that's associated with farming sim games. The gameplay's incredibly dull and interesting events happen far too infrequently. I understand what the game's trying to do, but the message isn't worth the hours upon hours of doing menial tasks when it could’ve been delivered just as effectively in a different way.
Still, it’s a game that will stick with me for a long time. I’ve never really played anything like it.
I thought I had this game figured out before I even played it. Harvest Green Moon: Friends from a Ghost Town. Self-cultivation via land cultivation. “The only thing that’s actually still growing is capitalism.” (Necro)pastoral mono no aware. The expectation that you’ll know the exact moment when you have to trigger the ending, even if you still kind of want more, or still want to linger so badly, because Turnfollow. In the end, it’s all these things, anyway, and it offers much to essay about one or all these angles.
But no, after another run with it, I think the angle that’s illuminating new things for me, the one that’s turning my initial approval for it into something closer to affection, is the angle that frames this game as a game that wants to explore desire. About desire clarifying itself, contradicting itself, configuring and being reconfigured, settling in, being settled, being satisfied, yet also being stirred to uneasiness, often by itself, being relinquished finally. Most of all it’s a game about desire being unfurled from material considerations, poured out of specifically-shaped receptacles, allowed to insist and to persist and to chance upon an individual more ethereally.
Because yes, your initial goal and your ultimate goal are the same: you want to earn enough scrip so you can buy a ticket to the moon. And yes, this game only has one ending, and it involves you accomplishing that goal. But be that as it may, you’re not really going to spend much of your playtime with this goal in mind. Rather, you’ll be spending much of your playtime being a member of a peculiar community: being served meals by a cook who wants no compensation of any kind, hanging out with a kid who introduced themselves by saying they don’t trust farmers, falling in love with someone who was so sure that she was going to leave, and that she was going to leave soon. Yet she’s still here. And the time she has outside of work is usually spent with you.
Putting it like that, it sounds like the game is making you consider the possibility of staying, that the moon isn’t the only place for you, that where you currently are might even be the better option. It even externalizes this through the characters. Carol remarks that you’ve become a great fit for the community. Marshall is observed as being worried about what will happen to you in the future. Pony practically begs you to stay, even as she tries to obscure it in distantiating language. All this, even as they anticipate your future departure. It was inevitable, of course, for me to weigh this heavily on my mind. Do I stay or do I go? Do I convince Pony to go with me if I do go (I eventually find out that wasn’t even an option)? It was already emotional for me to pass by the area where the Moon Elevator was located on a rainy evening. To do nothing and just take that moment in as both the music and the rain swelled, to let the game run until it transported me back to my room. It became all the more wistful as this town started to become more like a home.
And yet, as felt as this aspect was for me, much of my fascination with Before the Green Moon isn’t even here exactly, in this idea that it’s making you choose between two places. Instead, it’s in the idea that it’s problematizing what a place even is. It’s a game that’s interested in the liminal: a ghost town that grows life for the moon, abandoned yet needed, place and placelessness, a community where a member is both stranger and friend, living to work and working to live, scrip for today and scrip for the future, permanence and lastingness, something out of nothing, everything despite nothing, what is now and what is awaiting, even if they might end up being one and the same. The characters are conditioned by this, of course. Maria considers this a perfect place for her, though she sometimes wishes she could travel. In one of her key scenes, she shares that she came from an island that no longer exists. You ask her if leaving was the right choice, and she simply answers she doesn’t know. Int, meanwhile, seems to always be informed by where he ought to be. He is working on this thing because it will bring him there, he is heeding the words of his Granny because she will bring him there. Yet later on, without any real climactic event that you can pinpoint and say, “Yes, this is where everything changed for him,” he says something like, “I’m a different person now. Are you a different person too?” These people are currently living lives here, and the game never declares if they’re the lives they should be living or if they had lives they didn’t get to live, only that these are their lives now, and while their pasts may point to something that was lost or something that was foundational, what is here is what is the now and the currently happening.
The whole game behaves this way. It hints at current experiences textured by what was, but it's not clutching onto the past, instead sets it aside so that what will be can be in a community like this. Even the things that are really just there to mechanically convenience the player seem to be pointing towards something. You have a dwelling, but you can sleep anywhere where there’s a bench and no one will chastise you for it. There are shelves in places where you don’t expect them, and you can use them for storage. Who set them up? To whom do they belong now? To no one and to everyone, of course. This is a country without a flag.
The game only has one ending, and it involves you going to the moon. Yet despite that knowledge, it seems to invite you to stay instead. Why is it doing that? And why doesn't it just make it easier for me by framing it as a binary choice, where I can just choose the Moon ending or the Town one? Is it making me ask what it is that I really want, making me examine what it is that makes something important to me? Is it making me purify my intentions, by making me question if there is something postponing for, if staying for a bit longer is even postponement? Is that why there’s this otherworldly moon lore that the game refuses to elaborate upon but nonetheless drip feeds you with, at one point shoves in your face? Does that have a thread I can follow to a tangible end? Does a formalized tangibility even matter at all, or is it enough if all this is just presenting a metagaming angle, one that allows me to write an ending for myself, and which can feel as equally realized as the only real, which is to say official, ending? I still don’t know. Maybe I can’t know. Maybe both the game and I knew from the start that it was not for me to be able to know. It’s disconcerting in its uncertainty yet I’m driven to wonder. That’s desire, baby.
But no, after another run with it, I think the angle that’s illuminating new things for me, the one that’s turning my initial approval for it into something closer to affection, is the angle that frames this game as a game that wants to explore desire. About desire clarifying itself, contradicting itself, configuring and being reconfigured, settling in, being settled, being satisfied, yet also being stirred to uneasiness, often by itself, being relinquished finally. Most of all it’s a game about desire being unfurled from material considerations, poured out of specifically-shaped receptacles, allowed to insist and to persist and to chance upon an individual more ethereally.
Because yes, your initial goal and your ultimate goal are the same: you want to earn enough scrip so you can buy a ticket to the moon. And yes, this game only has one ending, and it involves you accomplishing that goal. But be that as it may, you’re not really going to spend much of your playtime with this goal in mind. Rather, you’ll be spending much of your playtime being a member of a peculiar community: being served meals by a cook who wants no compensation of any kind, hanging out with a kid who introduced themselves by saying they don’t trust farmers, falling in love with someone who was so sure that she was going to leave, and that she was going to leave soon. Yet she’s still here. And the time she has outside of work is usually spent with you.
Putting it like that, it sounds like the game is making you consider the possibility of staying, that the moon isn’t the only place for you, that where you currently are might even be the better option. It even externalizes this through the characters. Carol remarks that you’ve become a great fit for the community. Marshall is observed as being worried about what will happen to you in the future. Pony practically begs you to stay, even as she tries to obscure it in distantiating language. All this, even as they anticipate your future departure. It was inevitable, of course, for me to weigh this heavily on my mind. Do I stay or do I go? Do I convince Pony to go with me if I do go (I eventually find out that wasn’t even an option)? It was already emotional for me to pass by the area where the Moon Elevator was located on a rainy evening. To do nothing and just take that moment in as both the music and the rain swelled, to let the game run until it transported me back to my room. It became all the more wistful as this town started to become more like a home.
And yet, as felt as this aspect was for me, much of my fascination with Before the Green Moon isn’t even here exactly, in this idea that it’s making you choose between two places. Instead, it’s in the idea that it’s problematizing what a place even is. It’s a game that’s interested in the liminal: a ghost town that grows life for the moon, abandoned yet needed, place and placelessness, a community where a member is both stranger and friend, living to work and working to live, scrip for today and scrip for the future, permanence and lastingness, something out of nothing, everything despite nothing, what is now and what is awaiting, even if they might end up being one and the same. The characters are conditioned by this, of course. Maria considers this a perfect place for her, though she sometimes wishes she could travel. In one of her key scenes, she shares that she came from an island that no longer exists. You ask her if leaving was the right choice, and she simply answers she doesn’t know. Int, meanwhile, seems to always be informed by where he ought to be. He is working on this thing because it will bring him there, he is heeding the words of his Granny because she will bring him there. Yet later on, without any real climactic event that you can pinpoint and say, “Yes, this is where everything changed for him,” he says something like, “I’m a different person now. Are you a different person too?” These people are currently living lives here, and the game never declares if they’re the lives they should be living or if they had lives they didn’t get to live, only that these are their lives now, and while their pasts may point to something that was lost or something that was foundational, what is here is what is the now and the currently happening.
The whole game behaves this way. It hints at current experiences textured by what was, but it's not clutching onto the past, instead sets it aside so that what will be can be in a community like this. Even the things that are really just there to mechanically convenience the player seem to be pointing towards something. You have a dwelling, but you can sleep anywhere where there’s a bench and no one will chastise you for it. There are shelves in places where you don’t expect them, and you can use them for storage. Who set them up? To whom do they belong now? To no one and to everyone, of course. This is a country without a flag.
The game only has one ending, and it involves you going to the moon. Yet despite that knowledge, it seems to invite you to stay instead. Why is it doing that? And why doesn't it just make it easier for me by framing it as a binary choice, where I can just choose the Moon ending or the Town one? Is it making me ask what it is that I really want, making me examine what it is that makes something important to me? Is it making me purify my intentions, by making me question if there is something postponing for, if staying for a bit longer is even postponement? Is that why there’s this otherworldly moon lore that the game refuses to elaborate upon but nonetheless drip feeds you with, at one point shoves in your face? Does that have a thread I can follow to a tangible end? Does a formalized tangibility even matter at all, or is it enough if all this is just presenting a metagaming angle, one that allows me to write an ending for myself, and which can feel as equally realized as the only real, which is to say official, ending? I still don’t know. Maybe I can’t know. Maybe both the game and I knew from the start that it was not for me to be able to know. It’s disconcerting in its uncertainty yet I’m driven to wonder. That’s desire, baby.
approaching this as someone who has tried and bounced off of each farming sim that i've tried in the past had me unsure. the art design, world building, and general atmosphere looked stellar so i decided to give it a go anyways and i'm glad i did because i had a wonderful experience.
at a glance there's not a lot here but as i spent more time with this i was struck by how strong the sense of place was. familiarizing myself with the maps and establishing relationships with my neighbors while getting a deeper understanding of the game's universe scratched the same itch that a large chunk of my other favorites did. just something about centralized locations that become increasingly familiar does it for me and this was a masterful example.
farming sim elements end up taking a bit of a backseat which might have been the point to an extent. either way it wasn't a massive issue for me as it allowed me to grind away at depositing money early on before eventually settling into something of a routine where i barely bothered with farming at all.
after finding a high value item i blew past the moon ticket price and i still lingered around for weeks because i wanted to make sure i saw most of the events and conversations. i almost didn't leave at all which speaks to the strength of what the devs accomplished here.
something about a place that wasn't the ideal or originally in mind becoming more meaningful due to community or otherwise really spoke to me. genuinely one of the most impactful games i've ever played.
at a glance there's not a lot here but as i spent more time with this i was struck by how strong the sense of place was. familiarizing myself with the maps and establishing relationships with my neighbors while getting a deeper understanding of the game's universe scratched the same itch that a large chunk of my other favorites did. just something about centralized locations that become increasingly familiar does it for me and this was a masterful example.
farming sim elements end up taking a bit of a backseat which might have been the point to an extent. either way it wasn't a massive issue for me as it allowed me to grind away at depositing money early on before eventually settling into something of a routine where i barely bothered with farming at all.
after finding a high value item i blew past the moon ticket price and i still lingered around for weeks because i wanted to make sure i saw most of the events and conversations. i almost didn't leave at all which speaks to the strength of what the devs accomplished here.
something about a place that wasn't the ideal or originally in mind becoming more meaningful due to community or otherwise really spoke to me. genuinely one of the most impactful games i've ever played.
it's refreshing to see a game so loose on the guided experience, allowing you to figure out the world for yourself, which also aptly suits the plot and major theme of the game.
Maybe I gamified my experience too much, but at some points I felt like I was simply cutscene-hunting by visiting every area at every time of day. Ironically this was because I had enough money to buy things I wanted, I wasn't buying many things anyways, and farming became a bit boring.
Instead, I was just buying these things I don't even need just because I sort of wanted to have them. It felt like things weren't changing. Days and days passed before I knew it.
...writing that out, it sort of reminds me of how my own life has felt recently.
Was that the point of the game?
Is there a point to the game?
Is it okay for games to not have a "point", a reason behind why we are spending our time with them?
Hmm...
Maybe I gamified my experience too much, but at some points I felt like I was simply cutscene-hunting by visiting every area at every time of day. Ironically this was because I had enough money to buy things I wanted, I wasn't buying many things anyways, and farming became a bit boring.
Instead, I was just buying these things I don't even need just because I sort of wanted to have them. It felt like things weren't changing. Days and days passed before I knew it.
...writing that out, it sort of reminds me of how my own life has felt recently.
Was that the point of the game?
Is there a point to the game?
Is it okay for games to not have a "point", a reason behind why we are spending our time with them?
Hmm...