Before the Green Moon is an excellent game for anyone interested in games as a form of storytelling.

This game is a masterpiece of character writing, a throwback to old BokuMono games like Harvest Moon 64, where the experience was about immersing yourself in the mundane lives of people you came to know and care about.

The vibe of the game is interesting, an odd mix of SaGa Frontier's grungey cyberpunk and Disco Elysium's existential anticapitalism. Finally, I've found the game I wanted Innocent Life to be 15 years ago!

You play as the Farmer, a member of the civil service Junior Farmers who enrolls in a program that provides farmers on Our Earth with a pathway to residency on the Moon. It's clear from the beginning that Earthlings are a second-class citizenry. The rich and well-connected have fled the devastated planet for state-of-the-art moon colonies, leaving only the stubborn or disadvantaged behind. The Moon Elevator will occasionally bring tourists to your small town; the tourists cover the place in trash no matter how many times you tidy up, and no one seems to care. When you arrive, the residents are frustrated, isolated, and listless, stuck with a world torn by warring and dominated by company towns stuck in servitude to the all-powerful Moon Corp.

Of course, in true BokuMono fashion, you can form connections with the few permanent residents, helping them to begin to connect with each other, forming a community out of the world-weary.

I can't overemphasize the quality of the character writing; the small cast feels so alive and warm that the town really does start to feel alive as your relationships progress. The Farmer so clearly has become attached to this place and these people that the question naturally becomes -- will they really leave? Is what the moon promises so great that risking losing these people is worth it? Can we trust the Corp to make good on anything the Moon offers?

I found myself looking for a way out, a way to stay. To live the same days over and over with these people. But that's exactly the question the game wants us to face: would that be worth it? Do you have to leave to move forward? Can the same daily drudgery be worthwhile if it comes with relationships that matter? Or is that a just a form of cowardice, a refusal to move on? Is staying just treading water, refusing the take a risk? Or is it refusing to live the life the Moon Corp demands they live?

The game gives no clear answers. You can, of course, choose to stay indefinitely, never see the "ending," run out of things to do, and live that life of sameness -- or you can have the Farmer take the risk, never knowing if it was worthwhile.

What does it mean to be happy, to be adventurous, to be free, when everything around you seems to be falling apart?

The game asks important questions about the human condition in brilliant and meaningful ways, using simple, repetitive gameplay as a vehicle to examine life under poverty, under capitalism, under the constant threat of your own obsolescence.

Brilliantly written, brilliant use of the genre conventions.