< < back
(this review was originally written March 1, 2023)
moon is a self-described "anti-RPG", the premise of which is that you go around helping monsters and collecting "Love" instead of killing them. If that sounds familiar, it's probably because it's the game that inspired Toby Fox to make Undertale. I also recently found out it was translated into English by a guy named Tim Rogers, who wrote several novella-length internet essays I like. The combination made me curious enough to try the game, plus I thought it would make an interesting contrast with Modern Warfare 2. Unsurprisingly, I like moon better.
In moon, you play a small child who gets sucked into a "GameStation" video game he's been playing. Inside, he learns that the 'hero' of the game is, in fact, a deluded sociopath who goes around killing small animals for basically no reason. A mysterious queen speaks to you in a dream, telling you to stop him by collecting as much "Love" as possible. You collect Love in two ways: by playing little overworld minigames to help the souls of the dead animals, and by doing favors for various quirky characters. The influence of this game on Toby Fox is not subtle; the story is pretty much a Pacifist and Genocide run of Undertale happening in sync, with you controlling the Pacifist half.
One important difference: Where Undertale mixes up its combat with a clever little bullet-hell system, moon eschews it entirely. The only game interface is the top-down overworld. You can 'level up' by collecting Love, but the amount of Love in the world is finite and levelups have harsh diminishing returns. The upside of this is that there aren't any random encounters and there's no such thing as "grinding". The downside is that, without anything solid replacing the combat mechanics, moon is desperately wanting for a primary gameplay loop. The only systems moon can use to express its puzzles are a day/night cycle, a time-based 'energy' system, money, and an inventory. That's not a lot to work with for a 20+ hour game!
Now, that's not to say moon is a walking simulator. It's more like... well, to make up a genre on the spot, call it a "contextual puzzle game". Some puzzle games, like Baba is You or chess, rely on a discrete set of rules, and the fun comes from learning to manipulate them into the outcome you want. But there are many puzzle games that aren't like this. Text adventures, point-and-click games, and talky games like Disco Elysium have puzzles, but they rely entirely on narrative context. They're more like tests to see if you're paying attention to the story, or understand the mindset of the author; you have some set of plot-relevant items or dialogue options, and you have to pick the one that seems like it'd advance the plot. In moon's case, each piece of context is a quirky RPG character, and the puzzle is using context to figure out how to squeeze the Love out of them. Unfortunately, these puzzles are mostly bad. They're either too easy, and feel like a waste of time, or they're too hard, and feel frustrating and unfair. The option pool is, by necessity, limited enough that trial-and-error is always a tempting choice, and if the player doesn't catch the solution after ~2 minutes they've probably already exhausted their tiny set of visible options.
If there's a reason to come to moon, it's the writing, not the puzzles. The writing is great; it has Tim Rogers' fingerprints all over it. This is certainly a loose translation: I'm guessing the line "Bubby, if you ain't got love, you'll fall over and pass the heck out" was mostly Tim's doing, for example, unless there's a perfect Japanese analogue to 'bubby' I don't know about. There are other little quirks, internet-isms that didn't exist in 1997 and language games that couldn't possibly have exact translations, which signal to me that Tim is willing to take the wheel and keep the game fresh for modern eyes. I was worried moon would take a sanctimonious or moralizing tone, but instead he correctly treats the ridiculous premise as a vehicle for tongue-in-cheek self-parody. At one point I went to sleep, and the Queen informed me that I had collected enough Love to reach "Love Level 7: Love Intern". Later you advance to Love CEO and then the President of Love.
The best part of the game is the "Voice Grunting" (thanks tvtropes). You'd think this wouldn't be important, but you'd be wrong. It's like this: each character has a unique set of real-world soundbites, most in English, some not. Those soundbites play, chopped up and scrambled around, on loop when they talk. Sometimes, a whole sentence comes through; sometimes you can only make out brief snippets in the stew; some characters are too muddled to understand. This is SO FUCKING GOOD. It's like a peek into the chaotic noise of each character's mind, incoherent yet dense with meaning. The thoughts are never directly relevant to the subject at hand, but they always seem to catch my attention just as deeply as the written text.
The Baker's lines are the best. As he tells you he's selling fresh bread, he's also saying "Having a sto-- Satisfy you?-- orial, what, eh-- I'm the reason they wrote it!". That last one is especially powerful. The pompous lilt in his voice expresses a thousand times more personality in under a second than every single character in Modern Warfare 2 put together. Now you know that this baker is someone who would smugly confide that he's the reason they wrote it, that's the kind of guy he is, and that this is true irrespective of the 'it' or the 'they'. The King's lines sound more like a high-pitched "wheeky-whee-WEE-woo-wee-wheeheewoo-WOOwho". Now you know something about both characters: you can see through the contrast that the Baker's mind is verbal, but the King's is not. All this is accomplished ambiently, without interrupting the game for even a second. Jesus, I wish I could come up with something like that.
moon is full of moment-to-moment delights, but it loses a little something in tying them together. The first few hours have you semi-linearly shadowing the 'hero', cleaning up his messes with The Power Of Friendship. But the game stalls when you reach a certain quest where you have to assemble a rocket. The rocket has five parts and there are no hints; you need to scour basically the entire game world, solving every quest you can, hoping one of them will give you what you need. As a result, the second half is open-ended. This is good for a while, letting you can play around in the quirkiness sandbox, picking up whatever leads you happen to find. It feels natural. But past a certain point, poring over every detail of the map with a fine-tooth comb gets frustrating. It's not hard to amass enough money and Love to basically do whatever you want, so from there the game is only as engaging as its ability to keep charming you.
On the other hand, the developers didn't make moon for a world of endless digital novelty constantly screaming for attention. I think if I was 14, and moon was the only new game I'd get 'till next Christmas, it could really hit me. I can imagine slaving over the last couple quests for hours, running the game's obtuse hints over and over in my head. It's not cruel, so I doubt I'd give up; there's no missable content and there's little threat in failure. I'm probably too old now to be a moon cultist, though I was happy to pretend to be one. For a little while, at least.
8/10