If you're as disillusioned with the state of video game comedic writing as I am, then I can't recommend Moon enough. The Undertale inspiration is beyond apparent, but, thankfully, Toby Fox-esque dialogue isn't. Instead, it's written more like a golden age point-and-click, in which every character subscribes to the same sort of backwards logic that you have to make sense of in order to progress. This degree of committal, to me, is what separates retro quirk from modern indie quirk, which typically means presenting the player with a series of jokey, half-sarcastic statements that more often than not clash with the setting rather than characterizing it. And the setting's really everything in Moon, which tasks some kid (who I named "Sirloin," for some reason) with collecting love from the citizens of Love-de-Gard through various means. The more love you get, the further you can venture outside without having to sleep, which gives you more leeway into tracking the villagers' day/night and weekly schedules and allows you to reach new locations on your own accord. The same giddy feeling of planning out how to be in the right place at the right time that would later make Majora's Mask great is present here, but it's also amplified by the fact that you have to earn the ability to even be there. You're not guaranteed three full days, you have to work your way up to that point first. Moon's other stroke of genius comes with it being solely composed of sidequests that all reward you the same thing. Hit a wall in a typical point-and-click and you're done progressing until you eventually flail towards the correct answer, but getting stuck in Moon simply means you get to pursue a different avenue to obtain love. Your character's slow movement speed also gives you plenty of opportunity to consider possible solutions, more or less diffusing the feeling of wasting your time that usually comes packaged with any contextual puzzle game. The cherry here is the game's story, which you really have to stumble upon all by yourself. It's all about collecting love, until it isn't, of course, and it's easy to see how railroading could defeat the entire purpose.

Where Moon succeeds on a mechanical front, however, it often disappoints in the satiric sense... or, at least, that's what the first few hours led me to believe. It starts off as a surface-level subversion of JRPG tropes, positing a protagonist that's really a bully and monsters that are misunderstood animals, but, eventually, the hero fades away from the story, allowing Sirloin to create one of his own. Moon isn't simply a base parody or some milquetoast statement on love being the most important power of all, but a past tense coming-of-age story, a portrait of a very specific type of innocence loss using the framework of video games. We've all been there. Believing that L was real, that the truck in Vermillion City was blocking something important, that Sephiroth could be recruited into your party, or that Sonic was an unlockable character in Melee. The idea that games extended beyond the walls of your TV, housing unexplainable worlds where anything and everything could happen. Judging by Minecraft's Herobrine, this is a phenomenon that transcends both generations and philosophies of game design. But, at some point, we lost the ability, or perhaps the willingness, to reenter this state of mind. Play enough games and you realize there's a limit to what they're capable of, that there are certain rules that all developers more or less follow. This is what the fake/real dichotomy on the cover art refers to, and it's also something that's baked into how Moon works at its core. Learn enough about this world and you begin to find out that there's more to it than meets the eye, doing this also gives you the ability (or, the desire) to spend more time here. Spend too much time here and the seams start to show. Routines become too predictable, dialogue repeats itself, and the solipsistic nature of video games fully sets in. What adds to this is how consistently it subtly hints towards the boundary between fake and real. Take, for instance, this line. One on side of the spectrum, it serves to characterize Minister's anality (think "always watching, Wazowski") but on the other, it's a nod towards his ultrasimple AI. After all, any game trying to create the illusion of real characters would certainly avoid directly stating that doing X will always cause someone to do Y. Moon's puzzles also frequently point towards this separation. In gamespeak, someone telling you to look at a painting means that the player is supposed to physically study its graphical asset for clues, but in Moon, you actually have to literally position your character in front of it and wait for a few moments. This one briefly stumped me- I had to come back to it after awhile to figure it out, in other words, I was effectively punished for being on the "fake" end of the spectrum. I could harp on how Moon could've given you a few more reasons to hang out in town, or how the clock stops feeling like it matters too soon, or how it contains the most banal fishing minigame yet conceived by man, but it's hard to argue against how elegantly it ties its themes into how it plays. There's a reason why the tone's so somber, and why so many of the characters are trying to reignite some long lost spark. The Sirloin that your Gramby knew and loved is gone, replaced by a ghost wearing his clothes, while she lies in bed, Claire de Lune softly playing in the background. Once that dragon's slain, there's no going back.

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