Art can be loud. Most modern games are deafening, actually. They throw 4K textures at your face and demand forty hours of your life just to see the credits roll. But then there’s I Wish I Was the Moon.
It's tiny. It’s a literal blip in the history of web-based gaming, created by Daniel Benmergui back in 2008. If you weren’t hanging around portals like Kongregate or Newgrounds during the Golden Age of Flash, you might have missed it entirely. That would be a mistake.
Honestly, it’s basically a poem you can play. You’ve got a man, a woman, a moon, and a camera. That’s it. No health bars or skill trees. Just a series of snapshots that define a relationship.
The Mechanics of Heartbreak in I Wish I Was the Moon
Most games ask you to win. Daniel Benmergui didn’t care about you winning. He wanted you to feel the awkward, painful, and sometimes beautiful reality of trying to make two people fit together.
The gameplay is deceptively simple. You have a square frame—a camera viewfinder—and you click to "capture" an object. You can grab the man, the woman, or the moon itself. Then, you drop that object somewhere else in the scene.
It feels like a toy at first. You move the moon closer to the water. The tide rises. You move the man to the moon. He sits there, lonely, looking down at the earth. But as you start swapping these elements, the narrative shifts.
The "win" state isn't a high score; it's an ending. And there are several.
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Some endings are sweet. Others are devastating. You might find a way to get them both on the moon together, only to realize they’re still miles apart emotionally. Or maybe you drop them both into the ocean. It’s dark, sure, but the game is exploring the gravity of human connection. Gravity is literal here. The moon pulls the water, but the people pull each other.
Why Benmergui’s Minimalist Approach Worked
We talk a lot about "environmental storytelling" in $200$ million dollar RPGs, but I Wish I Was the Moon does it with a handful of pixels. Benmergui is a master of this. He later went on to make Storyteller, which took over a decade to perfect, but the DNA started right here.
The game relies on your own brain to fill in the gaps. Why does the man want to be the moon? Is it to be noticed? Or is it because the moon is the only thing that stays constant while everything on Earth changes?
There’s a specific kind of loneliness in the art style. The lo-fi aesthetic isn't just a technical limitation of 2008-era Flash; it’s a mood. When you see the tiny silhouette of a person standing on a crescent moon, it hits harder than a cinematic cutscene ever could because it’s a universal image.
The music helps. It’s a loop, but it’s the kind of loop that feels like a memory. It’s wistful. Sorta nostalgic, even if you’ve never played it before.
The Evolution of the "Small Game"
Back when this dropped, "indie games" weren't really a mainstream category yet. We had "Flash games," which most people thought were just distractions for office workers or kids in computer labs.
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But I Wish I Was the Moon proved that you could deliver a punch to the gut in under three minutes. It paved the way for games like Florence or A Short Hike. It showed that interactivity is a language for empathy, not just for power fantasies.
People still hunt for this game today because it deals with a feeling that doesn't go out of style: the desire to be somewhere else, or someone else, just to make love work.
The Technical Tragedy of the Flash Era
We have to talk about the elephant in the room. Flash is dead.
When Adobe pulled the plug, a massive chunk of internet history—including I Wish I Was the Moon—was threatened with extinction. It’s a genuine tragedy for digital preservation. Thankfully, projects like BlueMaxima’s Flashpoint and the Ruffle emulator have kept it alive.
You can’t just "Google and play" like you used to. It requires a bit of effort now. But that effort is worth it. Playing it in 2026 feels different than playing it in 2008. Back then, it was a cool experiment. Now, it’s a relic of a time when the internet felt smaller, weirder, and more personal.
How to Actually Experience It Now
If you’re looking to find I Wish I Was the Moon, don't just click on random sketchy "free game" sites that are riddled with malware.
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- Flashpoint Archive: This is the gold standard. It’s a massive library of preserved web games. You download the launcher, search for Benmergui, and it runs natively.
- The Developer’s Website: Daniel Benmergui often keeps links to his past work. While the browser version might be finicky depending on your security settings, it’s the most direct source.
- Itch.io: Many Flash developers have migrated their portfolios here, sometimes converting them to HTML5 so they run without plugins.
It’s a five-minute experience. You don't need a walkthrough. In fact, using a guide ruins the point. The point is to mess up. The point is to accidentally drown the woman because you wanted to see what happened when the tide came up. The point is to feel that brief flash of regret and then click "reset."
Final Thoughts on a Pixelated Poem
The title itself is a masterpiece of longing. I wish I was the moon. It suggests that the narrator—the man in the game—thinks that by becoming a celestial object, he can finally find peace or be closer to the person he loves. But as the gameplay shows, even the moon is bound by laws. Even the moon is lonely.
It’s a reminder that we often try to change our entire nature to solve a relationship problem, when really, we just need to figure out where to stand.
If you’ve got a few minutes, go find it. Sit with the music. Move the stars. Try to find the ending where they’re both happy, even if it feels impossible.
Actionable Next Steps:
- Download the Flashpoint Archive to explore this and thousands of other "lost" games from the 2000s.
- Play the game at least three times to see the different endings; the "true" experience is seeing how many ways a simple situation can go wrong.
- Check out Daniel Benmergui’s later work, specifically Storyteller on Steam, to see how these simple logic-puzzle mechanics evolved into a full-length masterpiece.