First Light: Nearside

The sun is coming up on the Moon. Not quickly — the line of first light crawls north across the nearside at walking pace, and you are driving ahead of it.

You are CINNAMON, a squat six-wheeled cargo hopper carrying twelve live cinnamon saplings to the greenhouse at Peary Station, on the crater rim at the pole. The saplings only survive in the narrow copper band right at the terminator. South of the line the regolith is already cooking. North of it, in the earthlit dark, it is cold enough to kill them just as dead.

So the run is a chase you have to lose by exactly the right margin. Stay in the band. Stay ahead of the sun. Do not get so far ahead that the dark takes you.

Earth hangs over the whole drive, half-lit and enormous, because this is the nearside — the only face of the Moon from which you can see it at all.

One run is 90 to 150 seconds.

How to play

1. Drive north. Push forward to throttle, left and right to steer. The corridor runs north; the rim walls hold you in.
2. Stay in the copper. The dawn line crawls north behind you. Fall behind it and the sun cooks the saplings; run too far ahead and the dark freezes them. The rail on the left says where you stand.
3. Hop the craters. Burn xylidine — the hypergolic hop fuel — for a lunar arc over a crater or a boulder field. Land in a crater without hopping and you stall while the light closes on you.
4. Take the cans. The yellow drums on the plain refill the hop tank. You will not reach the airlock on the fuel you start with.

Reach the airlock with the cargo alive and Peary Station cycles you in.

Controls

Play it with whatever you have. Every action is on all three:

	Mouse + keyboard	Touch	Controller
Drive	WASD / arrows	left on-screen stick	left stick
Hop	Space or left mouse	HOP button	A / Cross
Pause	Esc or P	PAUSE button	Start
Menus	arrows + Enter, or click	tap the row	d-pad + A, B to go back

The menus carry a visible focus ring, so a controller alone gets through every screen, and the on-screen stick and buttons appear the moment you touch the glass.

What to look at

• The light. Two lights fight over every frame: a cinnamon-orange grazing sun from the south, indigo earthlight from above and north, and hard black shadow between them. The band you drive in is the seam.
• The leap. A hop at full throttle throws the rover high enough that Earth fills the frame behind it. It is the best thing in the game and it costs a quarter of your tank.
• Peary Station. The greenhouse dome comes up out of the dark for the last eighty metres, lit strips on the approach, and the airlock opens on a run you brought in alive.
• The keeper. Somebody on the station radio watches your whole drive and has opinions about it. Captions are on by default; you can turn them off from the title screen.

Headphones are worth it.