Comfort and Before the Green Moon
I live on the second story of an apartment building that's situated next to an interstate. I hear vehicles all day long and into the night, and sometimes the sounds of them coalesce into a constant eerie rumbling, something out of a horror game. It's strangely comforting to me, because horror games are comforting to me. Horror is comforting to me. I'm sitting here listening to that sound right now while typing this on my laptop in bed. It's a cozy scene.
But comfort and coziness are privileges, something I try my best to keep in mind when listening to that rumble, or when playing a game like Stardew Valley. As someone who is struggling with debt, I'm never truly fully comfortable. Finances are almost always niggling in the back of my mind. My income combined with my husband's puts us in the middle-class range, so we are privileged in many ways, but my debt eats at that income and makes some days feel unbearable, particularly those when an unexpected expense rears its ugly head and my bank account dips into the negative. I'm in debt because I used to be poor, and accruing debt was often the only way I could get by. Capitalism is designed so that only a "preferred" few are ever truly comfortable, in that idyllic, unending way that games like Stardew Valley set out to portray.
I read Mokkograd's piece called "Comfort is a weapon" not too long ago and have not stopped thinking about it since. I highly recommend giving it a read, as tldr'ing it feels like a disservice, but in short, it talks about how most "cozy games" are created with the intent of making players feel secure without exploring why and where that security comes from.
There is a game that I've written about before called Before the Green Moon. It's a farming sim, which upon first glance would put it in the "cozy games" category, but it's different than most farming sims. First of all, it doesn't really look like most farming sims, with its muddy hues and PS1-era graphics. Also, it has an end goal that informs every part of its gameplay and narrative.
Most cozy games, like Stardew Valley, intend for the player to go on playing it indefinitely. For that to happen, the sense of security that Mokkograd speaks of has to be a constant. It never goes away, and there's never really anything to look toward or think about besides escaping into an ongoing sense of aesthetic comfort and completing your daily tasks ad infinitum. I want to pause here and say that I'm not knocking Stardew Valley. It does explore things like post-war trauma, isolation and loneliness, and abject poverty. It has some degree of depth, but it's also one of the most widely recognizable examples of a cozy game, and it does fall into many of the traps that Mokkograd mentions in their post.
Before the Green Moon, however, introduces discomfort into the "cozy game" genre. For one thing, you're never fully allowed to become comfortable because you're constantly reminded that you live in a capitalist society. Instead of settling in the rural little village, you're trying to get away, because it's an objectively rougher life than living on the moon, where the privileged reside, all but ignoring the world below them. Going to the moon requires a lot of work, luck, and money that you don't have. You're not simply opening a business to earn enough capital to sit on your laurels; you're trying, tooth-and-nail, to dig your way out of your current situation in a world that is working against you.
There are other characters to build relationships with, but the fact that you will eventually leave is entwined with those relationships, so they feel bittersweet -- a small comfort in the midst of circumstances that are beyond the people you come to know and love. It's also clear that farming is hard, dirty work, reflected in the landscape and the dry season, adding challenges to your farming that you aren't faced with in the rainy season.
The moon is supposedly a capitalist paradise. It's implied that you will live a better life there, surrounded by amenities and creature comforts. But it becomes clear at the end that you may never be able to reach the same status as the inherently privileged who reside there. One of the first things you're faced with on the moon is a vending machine that you most likely won't have enough money to use because you've just spent it all on a ticket to the moon. Capitalism, it turns out, is a bitch. Moreover, the moon's inhabitants are assholes. Every couple of weeks or so, they visit the village as tourists, but they completely ignore you and leave a wave of litter in their wake, prompting you to clean up after them for a bit of extra cash.
It's a complex game that explores capitalism and the value of friendships amongst a hard life, and it hints at a wider world that is much more complicated than most cozy games care to touch upon. In Mokkograd's post, they say, "There’s value in people seeking and finding comfort and connection in a world that wants to deny both to them, but for that to work, you have to be very precise about who is seeking the comfort and who is being kept out in order to maintain it."
Before the Green Moon clearly illustrates that you are the one being kept out, and the moon is the true -- and perhaps ultimately unreachable except for a select few -- place of comfort. In that way, it turns the cozy genre on its head. It's political in a way that most other cozy games are not. It says that you are outside of the capitalist system of preference, and you must try to find comfort where you can, while the constant knowledge that there is something better, it just wasn't made for you, lies in the back of your mind.