This is a crosspost of my Backloggd review for the game Before the Green Moon. I wouldn't actually call it a review since I don't touch much on the feel of the gameplay.
I've had this game in my backlog for a long while and now that I've finished it I can say that people's recommendations of it are right, and that this is one of the best farming games I have ever played.
I've seen at least one person call this game an "anti" farming game and I'm not sure if I agree. This is pretty much the essence of farming as a form of labor in the modern day. You're tasked with growing a single crop (in this game, rice) that will be ground down and atomized and deconstructed into fuel matter for all of society. Whatever crops you end up growing between the beginning and the end are secondary to the monoculture the people in control actually want you to do. After a few days you have one harvest of rice per day and it stops feeling like payday and starts feeling like just another part of the process, especially because you can't automate harvesting and it's what'll steal most of your time by the endgame.
The small amount of stamina you have and the shortness of the days also help hammer in that farming is labor. If you want to farm big, it'll cost you all of your free time. You physically cannot sustain large harvests without better tools, and the people selling you those tools are the same ones providing you with the rice seeds. And at some point, you run out of upgrades. Because they don't want you farming down there in a middle of nowhere stagnant town, they want you 'up there' where they will squeeze every last ounce of labor out of you in their controlled environment domes.
Going to the moon did not sound pleasant at all. Every single NPC other than Carol, the person whose job it is to get you on the moon, subtly tried to dissuade you from moving up (in Pony's case, very explicitly). And even in your interactions with Carol you get to witness the bureaucracy hellscape that is life on the moon.
So why are we going there in the first place? That's something that frustrated me a lot in the latter half of the game. I'm fine with staying. Everyone would be very happy if I stayed. Life in the town isn't bad. You get free meals, a romantic partner, friends, neighbors, a quiet life. I would have stayed. So why is there no ending where I choose to stay in town and credits roll?
Because despite allowing you to customize your name and appearance at the beginning of the game, your character is not you. They're not a blank slate, they have a backstory and their own desires and feelings. You can choose many things for them, but you're never allowed to tell anyone that you don't want to go to the moon. The best you can make them muster is "I'm not sure" or just nothing at all when the question comes up.
And, in my final hours, I think I started agreeing with them. I exhausted Pony's dialogue first, and then Elvis', and then Carol's. And I couldn't bring myself to do the same for Marie, Marshall and Int. With no more things to spend my money on and no more new conversations to be had, every day was starting to feel the same. And with the rice demand always rising, sooner or later all my time would be dedicated to farming in exchange for money I couldn't even spend. And then I come home to what, the same small talk from the same people?
It's not like the town is stagnant. After you arrive, you inspire Pony to start working on her plants again, and Elvis to organize weekly campfires at the top of the mountain. But every character seems to have become complacent to their way off life which is not unsustainable but certainly not as lively as they'd like to. And I also can't blame them for not making an attempt at improving their own conditions because I'm pretty sure I'm the one being paid the most between all of the NPCs.
But I can't fault my own character for not wanting to stay either, because I certainly didn't anymore. I think the game uses the gamey experience of "running out of content" to put you in the same mindset as the protagonist, whether intentionally or not. And I think that's excellent.