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!).
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!).