by Daniel Benmergui.

“I Wish I Were the Moon” is back! This is a HTML5 remake of Daniel Benmergui‘s classic 2008 artgame (which had become very difficult to play in 2021*). If you’re new to it, it’s basically a tiny toybox scene where you can move elements around, inspired by an Italo Calvino story. It takes just minutes to play.
I was surprised to discover that this isn’t just a 1:1 remake of the original – instead, it’s a remaster, adjusted to Daniel’s “current design sensibilities”. The original’s photograph idea has been simplified to a drag-and-drop system (which honestly makes a lot more sense), and the game explicitly tracks your endings now.
“I Wish I Were the Moon” is a beautiful game – back in the day, it used to be one of my go-to games to recommend to people who didn’t know what indie games were or what was interesting about them. I’m glad to see it back and playable again.
*Emulation projects like ruffle are slowly making progress – but for now at least, only a tiny fraction of flash games can be played in a modern browser. If you want to play the majority of flash games released after 2007, your best bet is to download the excellent BlueMaxima Flashpoint launcher, which has archived over 100,000 games, and counting.
I remember how much I loved this game when it came out, back when I first realized that indie devs were able to do things with games that major devs just weren’t interested in doing. Glad it’s back.