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Website: https://rawfury.com/games/moonstone-island/
Price: About $10 USD
Blurb: “Moonstone Island is a creature-collecting life-sim set in an open world with 100 islands to explore. Make friends, brew potions, collect Spirits, and test your strength in card-based encounters to complete your Alchemy training!“
The game has Stardew valley vibes, and what I mean by this is that the game starts out like a farming sim. You wake up, you manage your crops and all the stuff that goes with it. You can upgrade your house, your greenhouse, etc, etc. You can also befriend NPCs, even get romantic with some – if you want to. Enter the pokemon creature collector. The twist is… you get to use certain crops to tame spirits to fight for you in card based battles (the Alchemy part). Enter the card battler. There is also a slight twist here, where certain spirits get certain cards, or should I say, different card pools. This entices you to get other spirits to access other card pools… quite clever. The spirits themselves are rather silly, much like pokemon and then some. There is also the case for the one hundred islands mentioned above; they are procedurally generated and randomly placed, so you will need to explore them too, as resources are scattered among the islands. This is especially true for moonstones – which are very limited per island. If I do not have it wrong, it is one per island. You also need to find new plants to plant, with which to capture the spirits, and these are also usually on another island. (I’m sorry Mario, the princess is in another castle.) You also need to grow, or level up, by finding “power-ups”. As you adventure, you also need to unravel the mystery of the “dark” spirits (the story). There are dungeons scattered around the map that I strongly suggest you complete. You may even be lucky enough to find a moonstone in one of the chests, or some new recipes. Did I mention you can upgrade your spirits?
You are not confined to the starting island; if you are willing to put some effort in, you can have more farms on other islands. Or… You can Baba Yaga it, and carry a magic house with you, cauldron and all. (Your camp away from camping, you will see what I mean.) Exploring will net you treasure maps that enhance the exploring experience.
All the aspects of the game seem well balanced, with no task taking up all your time. I will be upfront and say creature collecting and card battlers are my least favorite game genres; however the farming, coupled with the exploration, makes the game feel fun. You can explore and farm and have a chill experience if you prefer casual, but there is also a lot of content, should you pursue the main quest and all the side quests. Befriending the NPCs also has more options than other similar games. You don’t simply give gifts to be liked, you can also go on dates with NPCs. The dialogue is also better than average, especially when romancing (some options will make you chuckle under your breath). The game does have the pronoun cancer, so you have been warned. Maybe I should have mentioned that in the beginning, and maybe the steam tag should have read LGHDTV+ or whatever. If you want to steer clear of any woke nonsense, maybe do not buy this game. Date locations are also not all the same; you can choose from places like the beach to exotic locations like hot springs, and more. To stay “hip and happening”, the developers / artists equip your dates with nose rings, making them look like cows though, otherwise the portraits are also very good. This is the only area of the game I’d say needs work – more interactions and dialogue options – to get you more invested into the NPCs. Don’t get me wrong, the characters are written very likable and you feel you need more.
My other criticism is that the sprites feel 8-bit (they are not). It may be a conscious design decision, but I think it looks ugly in an otherwise polished world. I feel that one up, say 16-bit, (smaller pixels), could have made this game stand out graphically too. It is an ambitious project that comes together nicely… but nothing really stands out.
Usually with a sim game there is something that you really, really like to continue grinding. Otherwise the fun dies to repetitiveness. As I mentioned before, the farming and exploration is offset against the creature collector and card battler, and I think the creature collector and card battler is weak enough to bring down the pluses of the other two. (I may not like the genre, but I know what makes a good one.) I will tell you why. Deck builders need rare and unique cards, to keep you reaching for more. Each spirit has its own type of deck, but there are no special cards that would slot into any deck or make your creature unique. I had trouble trying to figure out why I would keep / need some of the spirits as they are the same as the next, or do not do anything really useful. Dungeons are copypasta stamped out, with no real variety, a crying shame. One thing I did not talk about is the skills tree, as we are all familiar with them. Skills should carry throughout the game, but some assist only in the beginning and are useless afterwards. I feel consistency is lacking.
On the plus side, the game is colorful, and the animations look good. The card battler gets better over time and can be really fun (other than what I have mentioned before), and it is very reasonably priced for a new (2023) game.
If you feel you want to get this game, it is available for Linux via Steam.