Game: Moonstone Island
Genre: Simulation, Monster Catching, Farm Sim, Card Battler
System: Steam (Windows, macOS, Linux)
Developer|Publisher: Studio Supersoft | Raw Fury
Controller Support: Partial
Price: UK £16.75 | US $18,99 | EU € 18,99
Release Date: September 20th, 2023
Review code provided with many thanks to Johnny Atom PR.
Moonstone Island is a combination game that touches several genres. It’s part farming simulation, part life/dating sim while also having a whole Pokemon battle and catching system with card-based combat.
Moonstone Island is So CUTE
This Wholesome Direct spotlight game is one of the most adorable games I’ve played this year. Moonstone Island has that cutesy pixel art that makes everything kind of look like a 3DS Zelda game. The little Spirits, the game’s Pokemon-like catchable enemies, are some of the most adorable little catchable friends I’ve ever seen.
I’m not going to lie; I’m in love with all these little guys. I don’t know how many Spirits are in the game in total, but I hope to be able to catch ’em all, because I love them.
The Battle System Reminds Me of Slay the Spire
While I have spent hundreds of hours on many games over my gaming career, one of the more recent titles I’ve spent at least 500 hours on is a card-based battler called Slay the Spire. The cards in this battle system remind me a lot of everything I love about Slay the Spire; they seem pretty well-balanced, and you fairly often get the opportunity to change, upgrade, and add cards.
While Moonstone Island is nowhere near as challenging as Slay the Spire, its card battles have the expected difficulty level for this game style. I like that there are plenty of themed cards; I went with a card drawing deck that seemed to get pretty powerful fairly fast.
And it’s not just the Spirit battles that are customizable either; you can use the skill trees for Spirit, Combat, Archeology, Agriculture, Foraging, and Social to build your character into a flirt, a battle-hardened warrior, or whatever you want them to be.
The Chatting System Isn’t Great
When you walk up to an NPC to interact with them, the person will have a heart meter underneath their picture. If you choose to chat with them or give them a gift, it can raise your rapport with them. However, similar to other games in the farming and life sim genre, there is a penalty for giving an NPC a gift they don’t like. While this is a fairly good system to keep players from loading up their NPC friends with their trash in exchange for affection, it isn’t as great when it’s also extended to a conversation with an RNG element.
Each day, you can chat with an NPC three times. You get the choice to:
- Chat with a 70% success rate.
- Tell a joke with a 50% success rate.
- Flirt with a 10% success rate.
You can choose any of those options three times, and it will either raise your friendship points with the NPC or lower it, depending on how well your conversation went. This is completely random. I can’t even tell you the number of times I went up to an NPC hoping to raise some Nice Neighbor Points with them, only to fail at Chatting three times in a row and end up behind where I’d been the day before.
Thankfully, the skill tree has some ways to mitigate this; you can raise the percentage of the success rate with Social points. You earn these by interacting with NPCs.
The Mysteries of Moonstone Island
I don’t want to spoil anything of the story of Moonstone Island because I think there is a lot of magic in going into a story without any knowledge of what will happen, but what I experienced in the story has been fairly sparse. You don’t go from point A to point B to repeatedly talk to a specific person. You can choose who to talk to, what to do, what to build, and how you want to proceed. While you do get quests to complete, there is a lot of freedom to explore, get materials, build, decorate, befriend, and complete Spirit battles as you like.
Never once did I feel overwhelmed with the number of choices I had, like I always do in Stardew Valley. I felt like I could do as I liked and that the other things I was supposed to be doing would wait without running out of time or making anyone angry. The days are just the right length to ensure I get to do a whole lot of stuff before having to sleep, and it means that you don’t become too scared to explore or run around doing things just in case you get too far from home.
I Love Moonstone Island
The little houses are so cute, the shops adorable, and the NPCs are great. There are loads of people to chat with and flirt with. There are tons of little caves and things to explore. And Moonstone Island doesn’t rush or bully you into doing something specific. This wholesome, cozy, relaxing game is actually relaxing for once, and I’m here for it.
Did I mention that the world is procedurally generated? The world you get and build will be completely different from the one I got. So, each playthrough will be a little different, and I think that’s a massive boon for replayability.
Conclusion
Moonstone Island is everything I wanted from a little farm simulation that’s also a Pokemon battler that’s also a deck-based system. It is everything I didn’t even know I wanted; the graphics are beautiful, the soundtrack is soothing, the animations are polished, and the artwork is stunning. I love Moonstone Island and think you will love it here too.
Final Verdict: Two Thumbs Up:
