In the beginning, there was nothing.
And then, there was Stardew Valley.
And so, the Cozy Game was born.

This is a narrative written and retold countless times in the minds and bodies of games-players the world over. It is the foundational text upon which a million pixelated seeds have been sown. It is a narrative written and retold by those with no memory.

Stardew’s popularity and immense financial success has spurred multitudinous imitators: the once-short lineage from Story of Seasons (nee Harvest Moon), to Rune Factory, to Stardew Valley, has now expanded to a monstrous family tree beyond comprehension.

And yet - the Farming Game / Life Sim remains a genre buried beneath a mountain of tropes. It is elaborated via a school of game design best equated to a bingo scorecard.

There is a fundamental strangeness to the homogeneity of farming games’ ‘cozy’' tone. It abstracts farming into something it is not -- into the kind of farming imagined by a gradeschool child.

I have a close family friend who worked on a farm in his younger years. He has taught me which animals sound most human when they cry for their mercy at the end.

Farming is difficult. It is unforgiving. It is unglamorous. It exists across an immense gulf from its beloved gaming facsimiles.

This has upsides. There are people in my life who have become avid players of games entirely because of the welcoming tonality of "Wholesome Games". Video games are a historically male space dominated by Gun Dudes with gravelly voices, and I'm glad to see a shift towards something more welcoming.

But another part of me feels like I'm watching an industry consuming and regurgitating the same video game ad infinitum. A cutesy farming ouroboros.

The Cozy Farming Game is to the early 2020s as the Brown Murder Shooter was to the early 2010s. Neither flavor of game is inherently bad. I enjoy partaking in both from time to time. But both reflect a failure to explore the depths of the medium.

The latter half of the last decade saw the brown shooter finally evolving. Games like Titanfall 2, Dusk, Doom Eternal, Wolfenstein: The New Order, and Spec Ops: The Line marked a shift in market tendency. The genre was in conversation with itself - for better or worse.

Regardless of whether or not these games were good, many games-players, me included, were happy to be playing something Similar but Different. A development upon genre; a genesis of new subgenre.

Before the Green Moon makes me excited about the future of the farming game. It is the first of its kind to make me feel something meaningful, that I will carry with me forever.

Its foundation is that of standard farming game fare - there are seeds to be sown, dead weeds to be mown, rocks to be excavated, and relationships to be navigated. But Before the Green moon appears immediately distinct from its peers from the moment the game begins.

Stardew Valley begins with your player-character escaping to the countryside to work on a farm of your own, inherited from your grandfather. You are absconding from a corporate office job where the fruits of your labor are enjoyed by uncaring C-level executives, so you can instead grow literal fruit to your own benefit.

Farming is portrayed as movement away from systemic capitalism; as an idyllic and self-sustaining method of enjoying one's life; as a movement towards a personable community that rejects the anonymity of city life. Every citizen of your small town is an individual whose inner life you are encouraged to understand for both narrative and mechanical benefit. You can fall in love. You can get married. The late game is an everlasting dream of love and small-town living. It portrays this world of cute chickens and fishing minigames by way of a vibrantly colored and super-nintendo-esque render.

Before the Green Moon is rendered in a blurry-textured N64-like manner, with blobby characters and sharp environmental vertices. You are not going to farm for fun - you are farming to get paid. This is not your farm - it is a corporate farm, in a ruined town, whose population is largely faceless. Some stranger used this farm before you, and you will never know so much as their name. It is overgrown with weeds. Only the bare minimum tools remain. It is the farm of someone who maybe once loved it, but who has since moved on and left it in a state of disrepair.

The planet is dying. It is a desiccated husk of what it once was, and the rich have already left it behind. They have learned to terraform, and live now on a Green Moon. Your planet still has some use, though: farming. Seeds are sent down a space elevator to be planted, and are then sent back up in exchange for money. More cynically, you could consider it company scrip. This scrip can then be exchanged for tools and resources, which are also sent via the elevator. Characters around you remark on occasion that, if the moon folk could ever learn to farm efficiently up there on their green rock, then they'll have no further use for those who still live below. In this way, the exchange of your crops for scrip allows you to survive on your barren world, but simultaneously funds the research that would ultimately doom its inhabitants.

You have come to town to farm. You have come to town to farm for money. You have come to town to farm for money so that you can buy a ticket to the moon, and leave it all behind.

What do you invest in that sort of transient life?

It is, in a way, a bit like going to college. From the moment you arrive, any friend you make will almost certainly one day be a person you Once Knew, but now know only through distant photos. Perhaps an occasional phonecall. Perhaps a rare visit, to reminisce upon the people you were then, but can scarcely recall. It is a place Between. A place After. A place Before. As all places are.

Before the Green Moon makes this far more poignant in that, in order to properly attend to your farm each day, you rarely have enough time to connect with the people around you. A daily communion, a moment fishing with a friend, a conversation with the strange kid out back, an afternoon hunting for chickens to bring home and care for - these moments are all there to be had, but there's so little space for them when you're busy watering tobacco plants.

Better yet - the game never forces you to leave. During your first week at the farm, you're told the price of a Ticket to The Moon. You do not ever have to buy this ticket. Even if you do, your only reward will be seeing the game end. You can spend every day talking with your neighbors and grilling up fish from the reservoir, forever, if you like. You can spend every dollar you make on chicken feed and bedroom decor. You can find love, and spend every day visiting your partner.

Even so - as you continue to rake in the moon-scrip, there will eventually come a moment when you realize you nearly have enough money for the ticket. You can look at the calendar, see the next scheduled day when the elevator will come and go, and realize that, if you want, you could leave along with it.

I had this moment, and considered staying, just for one more season. And then, in the coming in-game days, perhaps by coincidence, it seemed like I had started to exhaust the game's content. A new feeling set in - that there was nothing left for me here. That it was time to go.

So I bought the ticket.

I said my goodbyes to everyone I'd met. My in-game partner cried. They knew, deep down, that I would leave one day, but had hoped against hope that I would stay for them. I still had five more days - but every day, I'd receive the same dialogue from the other characters, over and over. I stopped planting seeds. I let my remaining crops die. I dumped my tools into storage. I left the farm as I'd found it: Dead. Abandoned. Overgrown. The last two days, I went to bed early. There was nothing to stay awake for.

On the final day, I ran through town one last time. I shuffled through the anonymous crowd of other moongoers. I made my way to the elevator. It was already evening.

A character who had gone missing earlier in the plot suddenly returned. No matter what I tried, I couldn't get them to trigger a farewell dialogue. I realized that it might not be possible to trigger both their return and their farewell dialogue on the same day. If I was right, I'd have to stay til the morning to say goodbye. I checked the calendar. I could stay a while longer, just to get closure with this one friend, my favorite character in the whole cast - but I would have to spend two weeks in an empty town of people with nothing to say to me; with a farm I'd already let wither.

I still don't know if there actually was a farewell dialogue to trigger or not. I'd rather never know. With just an hour left in the day, I rushed onto the elevator.

Once on the elevator, you get tucked away into a small room. The decor is sparse, grey, utilitarian. A single window gives a view out into space.

The elevator's ascent is slow. It is quiet. There is little to do but watch the planet fall away from view.

At the end of each in-game season, the town gathers to watch the green moon rise. A moon-viewing party. The cast of characters takes a moment to reflect. It is a quiet moment of companionship.

As the elevator approaches the peak of its ascent, the green moon falls into frame from above. Here, alone, in a sterile box a quarter-million miles above the earth, you hold a final moon-viewing party for one.

The moon fills the frame. Its atmosphere is as thick, green, and opaque as it was from the earth. And then, having never seen the moon's surface, and without ever learning what waits for you there, the credits roll.

You've already seen everything the game has to offer you. It's offered up everything it had ever promised: the digital facsimile of a farm, of a town, of a home, of a ruined wasteland, of where you left your friends behind, where you lived back then, in a different time, Before the Green Moon.