This is a Ghibli inspired, deck building, monster collecting, farming game. That is the perfect combo for me. I've seen all the Ghibli movies and Nausicaa is my favorite manga. I love deck building games like Slay the Spire, Baten Kaitos, Battle Network, Chain of Memories, etc. I love monster collecting games like Megami Tensei, Pokemon, Digimon, and even Spectrobes. I love farming games and I've played most of the Harvest Moon/Story of Season/Rune Factory games, as well as all the major indie games in this genre.

I hope it's clear that I am very qualified to talk about this game. With that in mind, I can confidently say that each aspect of this game is executed very well. If all of those genres appeal to you then go play this game. If you only like a few of those genres but not all, read below.

Aesthetically the game is beautiful. Anyone who has seen Kiki's Delivery Service will immediately recognize the inspiration. Flying around floating islands defeating giant stone guardians gives a Laputa vibe. Then once you get a glider, you've befriended a fox-squirrel like Teto, and you're trying to balance nature then you'll feel like Nausicaa. Great pixel art all around.

The deck building allows for tons of different viable strategies. It is easy to add and remove cards so it's possible to often adapt to new tactics. There's also just a surprising amount of cards. Towards the end of the game I was still pulling new cards I had never seen before regularly. As each type of monster has different types of cards they can pull, and some monster types won't be see till the end of the in-game year, there's tons of incentive to be consistently changing your strategies.

The monster collecting is great. Taming isn't hard, just feed the monster while battling it. Each species of monster has a unique ability, some of which is useful in battle while some are useful in the overworld. There's no type chart. Every monster has two random weaknesses. This means it's worth catching multiple of the same species and using different party members. A Poison type dungeon will use poison attacks, but since you don't know what the boss will be weak to it's worth bringing a diverse team.

For the social aspects, I really like how the player can go on dates right away. The date dialogue is much more interesting than the daily greetings that make up the bulk of most farming game NPC dialogue. The cast is also diverse with multiple different accents to keep character distinct. I settled down with a 50 year old divorced mother. I love how this was an option as usually all romanceables in farming games are just teens/early 20s people.

Farming is primarily for feeding to your monsters for daily stat buffs rather than selling for money. I spent little time doing this actually as I got sprinklers immediately. All farmables appear in the overworld to be picked and this was fine for the early game. In the mid game though, using fertilizer and turning the crops into potions makes a huge difference.

A significant portion of playtime is spent exploring. The location of islands is randomly generated and the player has to fly everywhere to put them on the map. There's also thirty dungeons with some very simple puzzles. So the gameplay loop is usually checking on crops, uncovering the map, doing a dungeon, taming some new monsters, upgrading your deck, and having a date before the day is over.

The only problems, as of March 2024, is that the game has some annoying menuing and a lack of proper tips. Healing your party is odd. The player needs to equip an item, hold down that button, walk up to each monster, go to the third option to feed them, then choose the healing item in the inventory. Likewise, if I put ore and fuel in a furnace it doesn't automatically start as I have to click a start button, which gets annoying after doing it so many times. This stuff could be easily fixed but probably won't be too annoying as long as you don't play the whole game at once.

The bigger issue is the lack of tips. I've seen too many people give up on this game because they wanted a Ghibli farming game but they couldn't beat any more dungeons because they didn't understand the core concept of keeping your deck small. Too many players that like deck builders thought they needed to grind for better stats, when in reality their level was fine but they just needed to grow crops and make potions.

No aspect of the game can be ignored, and if you don't know how one of the genre works then you'll need to learn about it, possibly from outside sources. This isn't a hard game at all, but for the audience of a game that markets itself as cozy, people are likely to give up if they hit any kind of wall. If you're willing to learn then you'll have a great time. If you hope that you can just avoid one aspect of the game then this isn't for you.

Moonstone Island oferece uma experiência imersiva e divertida, repleta de possibilidades de customização do ambiente, interação e exploração. Embora seja uma homenagem aos clássicos do gênero, também introduz elementos originais e inovadores, como o sistema de alquimia, o mundo procedural e as batalhas baseadas em cartas. Com um encantador visual em pixel art e uma trilha sonora cativante, o jogo cria uma atmosfera envolvente de fantasia e aventura.
Review completa em: https://reviewdejogos.com.br/reviews/moonstone-island/

I'd seen some buzz about this game on Twitter a couple weeks before I decided to buy it. I'd recently gotten a Steam Deck and having taken on a lot of work lately, wanted something easy on the hands to just chill out with and decided to pick this up. I don't regret it at all, there's a lot to like! But man this shit draaaaged and as much as I wanted to finish it initially, I didn't wanna fall victim to the ol' sunk cost fallacy, lmao.

Moonstone Island is a bit of everything. It's part farming sim, part card game, part vaguely Pokemon/Digimon-style virtual pet game. It's pretty surprising how, despite having so much going on mechanically - all of these different gameplay loops actually work pretty well together and never become as overencumbering as they might sound! My other big piece of praise - this game is gorgeous, absolutely beautiful pixel art all over; very evocative of classic top-down Zelda games like Minish Cap. As far as indie game visuals go, it's up there with the GOATs like Stardew Valley and Owlboy.

But SPEAKING of Stardew Valley, man this game wants to be Stardew Valley so hard. Taking inspiration from a source is one thing, and I don't wanna accuse the devs of anything as serious as plagiarism here but, like...the stuff this game takes from Stardew Valley is really hard to ignore. I'm not just talking mechanics; having romanceable NPCs who you give gifts to and go on dates with is one thing, but I'm saying this game has the exact same relationship mechanics as Stardew Valley down to a T. NPCs have rooms you can't enter until you're close enough with them, you get to talk with them a limited amount of times a day and give them gifts a limited amount of times a week - it works exactly the same to the point where this game even uses the same fuckin' UI elements. Like, the same "8 hearts in a row" thing, the same menus, it literally just works and operates the exact same way as Stardew Valley by every conceivable metric. Great artists steal, yes, but usually they innovate in some small way, they include some kind of small variation on the thing they're "taking inspiration" from and just don't lift them wholesale from said thing. It's really egregious and particularly frustrating because these are clearly competent devs with some original ideas. They're better than this and I hate how much we excuse artists just copying eachother so flagrantly by saying stuff like "all great artists steal" and "everything is inspired" etc. because that doesn't excuse such blatant imitation imo.

To a lesser extent, this game then also does the exact same thing with Slay the Spire, its card-battling mechanics are heavily inspired by it, taking mechanics and keywords from StS entirely and operating with the same "3 energy" system. There's at least a bit more innovation on the formula here, but it's still pretty blatant. Again, these are competent devs, they pull it off reasonably well and it's surprising how well they manage to make these styles gel together - but you gotta dock points for originality, man.

And even then, these styles only gel well together for so long! Moonstone's Island main objective is simply to make it through an in-game year. Well I'm mid-Fall (the 3rd of 4 seasons, 20+ hours in) and I feel like I have well and truly run out of things to do and it has all just become boring for me. The fishing is grindy and tedious, the farming is simplistic and super unnecessary, the dialogue, writing and characters are nothing to write home about. This isn't a bad game, but it feels a lot worse than it is because of what a time sink it is, how much it asks you to commit to a game that is ultimately a bit barebones in content, and doesn't have enough in it to make a year-long in-game playthrough feel worth it.

These devs could make some really good stuff, but I'd implore them to learn from this game. Just lifting mechanics and UI elements from other games isn't good enough. It isn't "taking inspiration", when it's done this blatantly, it just speaks to a lack of imagination. This game was fun and charming for a bit, and then playing it just became a chore.

En sevdiğim 4 oyun türünü birleştiren oyun: Kart oyunu, tarım sim, Zelda vari macera ve canavar yakalama. Her bir türün eğlenceli yanını seçmişler ve güzel bir bütün oluşturmayı başarmışlar. Tabi ki kart mekanikleri bir Slay the Spire, çiftçilik ve sosyalleşme mekanikleri bir Stardew Walley değil ama oyun zaten bunu hedeflemiyor.

Oyunun eksikleri contentin hızlı tükenmesi ve NPClerin kötü tasarlanmış olması bana göre. Oyunda düzgün NPC yok amk, farming sim oyun yapacaksan en başta bunu halletmen lazım.

Moonstone Island combines the simple charms of a farming game with pet monster collection and deck building mechanics.

On the surface, this sounds like a winning combination, but is it? I ultimately was left feeling like I wish they had doubled down on some of the farming and crafting elements and cut back on the combat significantly as it was the most frustrating part of the game for me, even as someone who enjoys deck-builders.

Positives:
- The art style across the characters, world and monster design are all fairly lovely.
- The villagers are all fairly lovable weirdos. I think a lot of these farming sims fail to create a cast of characters you may actually want to get to know but Moonstone Island does a pretty good job of it, at least in comparison to other games of its type this year.
- The speed at which you can automate sprinkling, removing one of the more tedious elements of these types of games, is perfect, especially as the loop of the game really is more about the adventuring.

Negatives:
- The NPC dialogue system is unnecessarily grindy. Each day, you'll have three chances to speak to an NPC and to either Chat, Joke or Flirt, and with each having a specific 'chance' to succeed. Success will mean you gain relationship points while failure means losing relationship points.

As you increase your relationship score, the chances of success will increase as well. But I'm not sure this ever added any depth to the conversations. NPCs do not actually react differently based on which option is selected, and does not prompt any additional dialogue from the NPC. It is instead just a way of adding RNG into a system that probably doesn't need this friction.

- Outside of the titular Moonstone Island, other islands in the game where you'll need to go are randomly generated when you first start the game.

This makes it hard to feel like there's any strong authorship or points of interest on these islands - which is a bit of a shame. Each island is themed to a type of monster (water/electricity etc) and is either:
- empty,
- has a dungeon,
- has a mini-shrine that lets you add/upgrade/remove cards from your monster decks,
- has a hot spring,
- or a combination of the above.

This created pacing problems for me where the game was indicating I should be doing or seeing things that I simply wasn't or couldn't.

- While conceptually interesting, mixing pet collection and deckbuilding doesn't seem to work, at least in this instance.

Card decks are loosely tied to a monsters 'element' type but mostly seem to not be unique to a specific monster type. So you'll have a Water-deck, a Lightning-deck, etc. depending on what monster you're fielding.

Each monster type is instead unique in the passive buff they bring, allowing you to use whichever monster provides the most beneficial passive or which you like the look of the most. This is pretty smart actually!

Where things start to get a bit muddled is that the key to most deck building games is the ability to effectively control the size of your deck and Moonstone Island is no different.

But, as you capture new monsters, they start with huge decks (especially as you get to higher levels) and the cost of trimming these decks down to make them effective is prohibitively expensive and a hassle to do.

Another problem comes in the form of introducing the concept of armour into fights. Each monster (yours and those of the AI) will have a certain amount of armour which prevents taking damage from under its value. There are abilities which allow you to temporarily reduce and break armour, resulting in two turns where the affected monster cannot act and will take extra damage.

While this seems neat, it does mean that you begin having to make decisions around always including at least one armour-reducing monster into your line-up to effectively allow other types of monsters to do more unique damage (Technically, poison monsters can get around this in almost an unfair way but that's a different story!).