Moonstone Island

It's funny how times change; because until 2015, the Story of Seasons franchise and its little sister Rune Factory were more or less the only representatives of the farming simulation genre, or at least the type that places big emphasis on interacting with people. This would change drastically with the release of a little game known as Stardew Valley, which you may or may not have heard about. Following that game's success, a ton of other developers, indie or not, started following suit and released their own takes on the genre, to varying degrees of success.

Moonstone Island is another such attempt, released during a time where the market was actually somewhat oversaturated already, with 2023 having been a particularly stuffed year for the "cozy farming sim" games, which, sadly, caused this gem to get somewhat overlooked. However, due to faithful video creators and an active Reddit community, it did slowly but surely manage to garner the attention it deserves. Perhaps one of the coolest things about this game is how the development was (and still is) fairly open - the developers are happy to answer any questions on Reddit and are super helpful. The Switch port, which will also be covered in this review, took several months to develop, but it was well worth the wait.

The game puts you into the shoes of an alchemist trainee, about to embark on a quest to study alchemy away from home. After your parents teach you a few things and provide you with basic gear, you take off on your magic broom in search of a place to call home for the next year. Unfortunately, your character's inexperience with flying causes them to crash on the titular Moonstone Island, breaking their broom in the process. Thankfully, you're saved by the local innkeeper, and major concussions and compound fractures aside, seem none the worse for the wear, with you being warmly welcomed into the town by everyone, and setting up base camp right outside.

Beyond this introductory cutscene, the story of the game is fairly open-ended, as you will regularly receive quests telling you what to do, but it's entirely possible to finish these in any order you please. In the end, it's not a game you really play for the story anyway, as it's nothing special, although it does make up for that with good writing and one or the other surprise. The first thing you'll notice when exploring the town is that it's actually rather small, both in terms of size and population, at least when compared to other similar games. This does work to the game's benefit, however, as it allows each character to be explored far better and show more personality. The game is also rather inclusive, including two non-binary characters.

What wasn't so great, at least in my opinion, was that the townsfolk were a bit too friendly and wholesome. Yes, it's nice to live in an inclusive environment where everyone appreciates each other, but it's quite removed from how real life works, and with everyone being pretty nice from the beginning, I felt rather little incentive to actually improve my relationship with any of these people, with only one person being remotely interesting in that regard, but she's shy rather than aloof, so it's a moot point. Either way, relationships are improved by talking to people and giving them gifts. In a unique twist, there are three social interactions you can perform, all of which come with varying rates of success, but also higher payout if they do. However, in the end I only found myself talking to people, because despite the small boost, it was the most reliable method. And even if you give gifts regularly, relationships build up very slowly in this game.

The writing is good, though, if not quite Pulitzer material. Much like the general vibe itself, it's very cute and charming. One thing I enjoyed is that the text was kept to a minimum, avoiding unnecessarily long conversations, which is a blessing since you'll be seeing the same dialogue a lot.

Beyond social interaction, you will spend a lot of time outside the town, with plenty of things to do. The first thing you'll want to do is set up your tent, which serves as your spawn and anchor point for the early part of the game, and then get your hands dirty with some agriculture. Planting seeds involves tilling the soil, putting the seeds in it and keeping them watered for several days. What I find remarkable is that, for one, your watering can never runs out of water, but also that pretty much every crop, regardless of season, has a use beyond getting sold for money - lilypads and stonefruit, two of the earliest things you can plant, serve to restore your monster's health and your own stamina, respectively. Flax flowers are used to recruit new monsters - and so on. You can sell your crops, naturally, but there are other sources of income that you can make use of early. This means that farming, while definitely still a core aspect of the game, does not carry as much urgency as it does in other farming sims, and it's an oddly relaxing thought that goes well with the rest of the game's philosophy.

Beyond farming, crafting is also an important part. And naturally, in order to craft things, you will have to go foraging. Whether it's cutting down trees, smashing rocks or just finding stuff out in the open, such as the (once again) titular Moonstones, resources are important. You can even unearth several caverns which contains ore deposits, which is, you guessed it, necessary to forge ingots which are likewise crafting ingredients. There's also plenty of things to craft, and even more blueprints to unlock. One of your first tasks is to repair your broken broom, but there are also many other things, from a barn that houses your recruited monsters, to nests to hatch more eggs, to just simply decorative items to deck your farm and tent out with - so if you enjoy designing things, this game definitely is for you - kinda, we'll get to that.

So we already mentioned that foraging is important, and with that comes exploration. Not only does the game reward thorough exploration with gemstones you can sell for cash and other useful items, but the scope of the world is huge, and it's fairly open even from the very beginning! The one thing limiting you is the fact that the world is divided into several floating islands, and traveling between them is tricky. With your broom broken, you're forced to substitute a balloon, which can only go in one direction and drains your stamina quickly, meaning it doesn't travel too far. Once your broom is repaired, it becomes a bit easier and stamina-saving, but the broom still can only travel a limited amount before you inevitably have to take a pitstop or just drop down. Thankfully, this is where the game's dungeons come into play: here, you will typically find items that will aid you with further exploration, opening the world up more bit by bit. These dungeons were very clearly inspired by the Zelda series, featuring various puzzles you need to solve in order to move on. However, a few select ones are just enemy gauntlets that require items to enter, but in either event, the dungeons are worth conquering, because they also bestow a max stamina boost on your character, which is ever helpful.

Beyond your stamina being raised after clearing a dungeon, the game also awards you invisible experience for each of your skills, such as foraging, farming, interaction and so on. Once one of these is leveled up, you earn a skill point that can be invested into improving it in some fashion - such as gaining higher relationship boosts from social interactions, or chopping trees yielding more wood; there's plenty of stuff on the skill tree, which means that nothing you do in the ever feels pointless.

The other big part of the game is monster taming and battling. At the beginning of the game, you are given a choice of one out of three monsters, and will have to recruit the rest yourself. Monsters are found while exploring the world or dungeons, and coming into contact with them will initiate combat. From there, it follows a fairly simple but still elaborate concept: each monster comes with a card deck, with each card representing a move they can pull off, and you get three points of energy per turn. Most cards cost one energy to use, but some can be higher. The cards on your hand are drawn randomly at the beginning of each turn, and whoever has the highest speed stat will go first.

Each enemy (and ally) has a certain amount of armor points, which, the higher it is, will protect them from the full damage of attacks. Certain moves can wear this down, however, and a character who loses all armor points is incapacitated for the next turn and has their defense drop to zero, leaving them wide open for stronger attacks - naturally, this is something you should exploit, while also avoiding it happening to your own party. Instead of playing a card, you can also expend a point of energy to feed your monsters healing items or perhaps even throw a flax flower at the enemy, which is the way to recruit them. Once enough flowers have been fed to an opponent, they will join your team. Initially, you can only have three monsters, but once you build a barn, you can house far more and swap them out in-between exploration sessions - thankfully, any surplus you recruit before building your first barn will be stored for you elsewhere, so nothing is lost.

Level ups also work in a rather unique fashion: once a level is gained, nothing actually changes for your monster. What you need to do is use your medallion and interact with them, where you can then choose to raise a single stat (out of four) to raise permanently, one per level up. Also, you can add one new card to your monster's deck, some of which are quite powerful. As such, always remember to perform the manual level up, because otherwise you might find yourself beaten up quickly! While I understand that this was done to not interrupt the post battle flow, it can be a bit tedious having to switch to a different screen in order to do this, but it is what it is.

The game's difficulty is fairly gentle. Monsters tend to be a few levels higher than your party, but by strategizing properly, it's still doable to defeat them. Should the enemy levels completely be out of your league, the game will kindly give you a warning ahead of time. Should you fall in battle or run out of stamina while exploring, the game will simply end your day early and subtract some time from your next, but you do not otherwise lose any progress. If you fall off while performing aerial exploration, you're simply dropped back to where you left off with some stamina deducted. Also, very early on, you can find an item called Warp Whistle, (no, not that one. Also not this one either) which you can use once per day to return to town from anywhere, which is very much appreciated.

Also of note is the fact that, due to its open, quest-based nature, there is nothing forcing you to get everything done in a single day. If you so wish, you can dedicate an entire day to foraging, mining or dungeon diving. While there is certainly synergy between these activities, such as your crops being useful for exploration and in combat, they also don't impede each other, which allows you to go about things at your own pace. Quests also don't have time limits, which helps downplay the sense of urgency. As such, Moonstone Island is a rare example of a "cozy" game actually feeling cozy.

So I spent way too much time praising this game already. Where's the poop, you may ask? While it's a very polished affair, there are a few things that didn't quite sit well with me. Remember how I said you could deck out your farm and house with items? Well, you can, but trying to do this with a controller, on both the Steam and Switch versions, can be a bit of a headache, because precise placement of items, especially smaller things like fencing, is extremely finnicky. One pixel too close to the right? Sorry, can't place. While this is remedied by using a mouse, Switch players do not have this option, which does make the otherwise fun part of designing your own farm inherently unappealing. You can use the right stick to make small adjustments, but mouse control is still sorely missed. Secondly, the fonts used in the game are way too small, whether it's for the dialogue or the interface, I always found myself having to squint to make out what is being written, which sucks, because most of the time, the text box isn't even filled out, so the fourth line could've been easily sacrificed for a bigger font. Naturally, this is exacerbated when playing in handheld mode, where everything is even smaller. It's games like this that make me realize I'm approaching my thirties, and not in the best of ways. Finally, the game has no character creator or even a gender option. Instead, your main character was designed to be as androgynous as possible, so you can put yourself into their shoes. However, they still veer very much into the feminine side of things, especially when wearing their pajamas. The creators did confirm that they had to choose between having a lot of detailed animations or having character customization, and ultimately chose the former, which is forgivable and was probably the better choice, but it might still rub some people the wrong way. The fact that you cannot enter a name for your character, though, is a big bummer and should've been the one bit of minimum customization provided.

Which also makes for an excellent segway to talk about the game's graphics: in short, small font size aside, they are a masterpiece. Harkening back to the heyday of pixel art gems, this game's sprites are a love letter to the likes of Minish Cap, the third generation Pokémon titles and other pretty games of days past, although the color palette definitely evokes the GBA directly. Everything is beautifully designed, shaded and animated in a careful manner to fit the world perfectly, between all the various animations your character does while performing actions, all the way to the adorable monster designs and animations, all the way to how the environments are laid out and presented. There are several types of islands and biomes, and they all come with their own flora and fauna, and look absolutely fantastic. But my favorite part by far is how the game closely adheres to the sentiment of being purely pixel-based. Many games that try to pull off a similar trick end up abusing high-res fonts or particle effects, or perhaps other mismatched assets which ruin the immersion, but absolutely everything in Moonstone Island is pixel-crafted, and the dedication and love put in definitely shows. Literally the only thing that wasn't my cup of tea were the character portraits, which, while fine, are done in a semi-90s anime style, and it's personally not my thing, but I'm sure it has its fans too.

The soundtrack takes a bit more of a minimalist approach, as it tends to cut in and out randomly, and mostly relying on piano and other "small" instruments. It is completely fine for establishing the atmosphere while you're exploring the world, but I also found that some of the battle themes weren't particularly fitting, especially the one that played against the golem boss. I understand that the game is supposed to be a relaxing affair, but the battle theme during said fight sounded more like a bubbly cutscene track than anything else, which is a bit of a shame. Beyond that, though, the music isn't bad at all, but when stacked up against the gorgeous pixel art, the soundtrack is perhaps the more forgettable part. Sound effects are fine, a lot of them also sounding "bubbly", very similar to the ones found in Stardew Valley, and they fit wherever they're used.

Finally, since I played both versions, I'd like to bring up the Switch port. While it took quite a bit longer to come out than the average indie game to PC conversion, it was well worth the wait, as the developers and QA team very definitely put a lot of effort into making sure the port is stable and bug-free. I've played the Switch version for about 12 hours and have not encountered any bugs, performance issues or glitches, beyond having a single instance where the protagonist's running animation didn't work, and they instead slid across the screen, which was harmless and rather amusing and was fixed by simply entering a different area. Otherwise, this is a competent and polished port, and it's portable!

Also of note: the game contains some paid DLC. It is mostly on the cosmetic side, not a pay to win affair, but whether the additional furniture and goodies are worth the extra money is up to you to decide - I haven't been particularly enticed to purchase anything beyond what's already included, as the game has a lot of content as is, but it could perhaps be my own stance against DLC as well. With all that said, and having purchased the game twice now, my final verdict is:

 80% - perfect blend of genres

Pros:

• Excellent mix of three very different gameplay styles
• Masterful pixel art
• Rich in content

Cons:

• Fonts that are way too small
• Controls not fully optimized for controllers