Oh,
wow. Like cosmic. Green Moon from Absolutist has got to be the most
mellow adventure game I’ve ever played. The sights, the sounds,
the story — the whole thing seems to have been assembled by
grizzled veterans of the Sixties Haight-Ashbury scene. The new-agey
story has “you” inheriting an old dilapidated house with
a special secret. It used to be the headquarters for some group called
the Children of the Moon and amid all the torn wallpaper and stale
food and debris lying around, there’s an ancient book of magical
potions and enough far out crystals and test tubes and silver medallions
to start your own head shop. These moon kids were trying to do something
really big in a cosmic mystical way, only they never got to complete
their task — perhaps they were caught in the subprime mess like
everyone else and had to forfeit the house. Anyway, as the new owner,
it’s now up to you to finish what they started.

I don’t want to give
away any more than that because the plot, as laid back and groovy
as it is, unfolds well and is one of the best parts of the game. In
a gaming industry that glorifies violence, this game is a sweet change
of pace. It sends out almost nothing but positive vibes. Okay, strangely,
there are a number of places where you can die and have to revert
to your last save, but even this barely dents the overall atmosphere
of brotherly love and universal unity. The death scenes are like the
occasional bad acid trips the hippies suffered during the Summer of
Love — bummers, man. But the overall trip is a beautiful one.

Though
I confess I have some doubt as to whether, strictly speaking, Green
Moon is a bona fide adventure game. There’s exploration and
an inventory and that nifty story and even a bunch of NPCs to interact
with, but the game really plays more like one of those newfangled
hidden object games that have swamped the casual game category on
the web of late. There really aren’t any puzzles, per se, in
Green Moon, just a heckuva lot of scavenger hunting. There is some
combining of objects in your inventory, and later on you occasionally
have to remember to use the several mystical powers that you’ve
spent the earlier part of the game manufacturing, and you’ll
even run across a handful of arcade mini-games (what adventure would
be complete these days without those?), but mostly you’ll be
roaming the available areas looking for that one missing ingredient
for your next concoction.

The visuals are lovely
but the game is comparatively low-tech. I wouldn’t be surprised
if it ran on a netbook. The whole installed game is less than two
hundred megs. These days, the trailer to your average commercial adventure
is bigger than that. It’s first-person-perspective and, aside
from a few brief cut scenes, entirely 2D. You peer out at the various
Green Moon worlds through a fixed rectangular frame, with your inventory
and other controls arrayed across the bottom. Arrows in the sides
of the frame light up green when you can shift in that direction.
Green Moon plays, in other words, like an oversized, updated early
Sierra adventure — King’s Quest I — rendered in
Flash 10. With its throwback interface and bright and cheery color
scheme it also brings to mind those puzzle games I played on my Mac
in the late Nineties from Freeverse — Enigma and Burning Monkey
Puzzle Lab.

Like
Freeverse, the Absolutist
website offers quite an array of casual games to download. All
seem to be offered on the quasi-shareware basis of one hour of free
play before pay. I am not normally a fan of casual games, at least
not of the hidden-object or match-three variety, or those endless
variants on Tetris. And I didn’t particularly like Green Moon
at first. The difficulty level was too low, the game play too familiar.
And I still dislike dying in a game. But soon the gentle atmosphere
and fluid navigation won me over, and then, to my surprise, the story
started to branch out to interesting places. The official
website claims there’s fifty hours of game play here. That’s
a stretch. It took me about ten to twelve hours to complete Green
Moon. There is almost nothing to interrupt the flow of the game. A
couple of times I had to stop to think where to go next, or where
I’d dropped that bottle of ketchup. And one or two of the nicely
implemented but quite familiar mini-games (yes, the 15 puzzle and
three-card monte both make their appearance!) provided a bit of a
challenge (beware the Wild West “drunken” sharp-shooter).
I should mention that, like those old Sierra adventures, you can pretty
much drop your inventory items on the ground anywhere. Your inventory
only holds a dozen or so objects so you will have to manage it, especially
later in the game. My advice is — try not to pick up anything
until you know you need it.

The music in the game is
just as soothing as everything else — a nice burbling stream
of new-agey, wind-chimey sounds and tunes. Ditto for the sound effects.
Really, the whole game is like a digitized version of Xanax. As I
say, it’s a relatively small download from the official website
or any of a number of other shareware game dispensers. This game is
also intelligently priced to move. Attention shoppers! The Absolutist
main games webpage has it listed at $20 but that must be a typo because
if you click on the “Order Now” button the price is $7.
(Big Fish games is also hawking it for $7.)

If
you’re looking for a game to challenge your brain or your graphics
card, Green Moon is not it. But if you’ve just gotten home from
a hard day at the office and are looking for a few pleasant, colorful
hours of roaming around beatific nature scenes, and charming if abbreviated
journeys to atmospheric historical locations, and, of course, a trip
to the moon, then this game may be just the prescription you’ve
been searching for.

Oh, man, I was so blissed
out there I almost forgot the grade. I give Green Moon an overall
B. It’s too easy, too short and too “casual” to
rank up with the big commercial adventure releases, but for a more-ambitious-than-usual
casual game, it is well done.

System Requirements:

• OS: Windows XP/Vista
• CPU: 800 MHz
• RAM: 256 MB
• DirectX: 7.0
• Hard Drive: 179 MB