I've come to realize, through current political climates and having played Citizen Sleeper before this, I'm a down-with-the-ship type. If the world is burning, I want to stay. If people are suffering, I want to be beside them. Before the Green Moon registers your role and gives you one objective, one ending: leave. To leave is to succeed, to win the game, to have earned status. Take the corporate elevator to live on the Moon, where all of humanity is flourishing, all of life is happening. Getting FOMO by now, right? Crawl under the corporate thumb for warmth. Besides, the earth is flooded! Nature is reclaiming all, leaving only stripped-wire junk hamlets. Hitch a ride on the connective elevator that we built for resource extraction and tourism for only 110,000 of set-aside funds one-way! Don't be left behind working tirelessly for seemingly no other end.
Before the Green Moon is the first farming sim I've seen not only to be effectively anti-capitalist, but also avoid fetishizing rural communities as an escape from such systems (a pairing as rare as an anti-war war film). Please don't give me a "Stardew's opening and Joja stuff is anti-corporate", because this feels explicitly like a critique, politically, of it and it's AAA ilk. There is nothing challenging about Stardew's critique. There is a loss in the popular farming game when it moves from intimacy to a glorified tycoon game that gamifies human connection and menial labour. Stardew, I now feel, is the American Dream to Green Moon's colonial extraction.
You don't need to earn money. Nothing is making you but that elevator ride. Yet, what else are you gonna do in Trashcan: population 6? If you choose to start, your labours quickly mount. More and more rice is dumped on you from those above with expectation. None of what you grow goes back to your community, but is vacuumed up, maybe available to the local chef if he pays a jacked-up bribe to skim off the top.
In the dry season, to simply grow rice for minute returns is to work 12 hours every day, very often collapsing from exhaustion. All you can buy outside the travelling bazaar is company-owned tools that let you work harder, make you take on more a day. Beyond this, tourists arrive once a week, flooding the streets with garbage, a nickel per, that respect for your community inclines you to pick up. If you take on chickens, you must manually find feed for them or buy it for only a tiny bit less than their eggs sell for. Maybe you still have a pinch of energy left at the end of the day. Don't worry, the want to know what lies at the end of the mines will quickly manage that.
Days simply aren't long enough to hang out/enjoy and balance the swell of labours. You have just enough energy to squeeze by and break even half the year. While there is a mindless flow in min-maxxing, dedicating all to the accrual of money, to do so is to fundamentally lose what makes Before the Green Moon special. To treat the game as transitory, a consumable experience book-ended by more consumable experiences, or to treat it as something to be rushed, are both passively punished.
The people of our Gamecubian, Chulipean mossy scrapheap townlet are not auxiliary to our accrual, not archetypal cogs, but fellow vagabonds in arms. All, for one reason or another, are unable to go to the moon. Their role is too pivotal on Earth, they aren't emotionally able, they'll never have enough money. While the Moon is a choice for you, which it's massive corporate structure that takes up half the town and blocks the stars makes it seem inevitable, it isn't for them. Our relationships are developed through drip-feeding shared hours whenever the town isn't cascaded by the needs of tourism [On more than one occassion, I couldn't replenish my energy and finish watering my crops because tourists had taken every seat at the restaurant], through idle afternoons in which bonds advance not through lore but a growing nearness.
Relationships take time and require checking in on each other. The game's real story is optional, for those who care about the community they've been placed in. It's really delicate and tender, and takes remaining a couple years of active commitment to see the bulk of and to truly get to know people (one character only learned my name on Day 40). There is great autonomy placed on the player that places them along the spectrum between community and capital-oriented, which importantly, are placed in opposition.
By the end, there is a genuine ennui that you've embodied and made a home in. The suffering becomes tolerable not for the chance at taking the elevator up, but by feeling loved and in shared struggle with those around you. I stayed for a year and three seasons and felt legitimately awful buying the ticket, yet my curiosity, my want to have beaten the game, was too strong. I abandoned my community, did what they never could and what the chuckle-♥♥♥♥♥ up there seemed to do almost weekly. What is home: is it where you endlessly toil, but everyone knows your name, or is it amidst thousands of endless faces, amidst innovation and thriving crafts? At this point in my life, I've come to realize, sometimes it's better to stay behind.
