Moonstone Island - A replacement for Stardew Valley!?

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Moonstone Island (Reviewed)

Developer: Studio Supersoft

Publisher: Raw Fury

Released: September 20th, 2023

Price: $18 USD

Moonstone Island is a beautifully pixelated open world adventure with a mass of islands floating in the sky to explore, as well as many elements like farming, deck-building, spirit taming, relationships & more to keep you occupied. Despite its pleasant appearance, it feels janky at times, as well as tedious and repetitious. Frequently failing to be anything other than a game wearing numerous features, to the point of failing to be anything unique for itself as a game as a whole.

Story

You fall into a town Your parents are proud of you and want you to live the life of an alchemist. They show you the ropes before sending you on your way. Things don't go as planned, and you fall from your broom and crash land on an island, which happens to be the island where you were supposed to be on as their new alchemist. However, the mechanic of manufacturing potions and being the town alchemist doesn't feel like it belongs here and ends up looking like another tacked-on feature on top of a slew of others.

It's a rather straightforward plot that doesn't appear to go anywhere from here.

Presentation

It fails to be itself Visually, it's wonderful with its pixel-art and animations, but the music, while good, doesn't play very often, and there are stretches of lengthy drawn out ambient quiet, which makes the game feel rather empty, when you really would like to listen to some chill and relaxing music while you fly through the air on your adventure of exploration.

When you look at this game from a distance it tries to be so many distinct games at once that it fails to be anything for itself as far as I could see on my own.

I don't want to suggest the game is stealing concepts or anything like that. It's more that they use so many different elements from so many various games that you can't really distinguish what's from another game and where this game's features begin.

The primary issue I see is that it has heavy Stardew Valley influence along side other titles like, A Link to the Past, Pokémon, Deck Building tied to Spirit-Taming, Farming and many others, making it difficult to tell what it is aiming to be for itself other than a mishmash of different genres rather than being something unique.

What I enjoyed most about this game was that most of the towns folk while severely limited to only a handful, had personality. Even if they do repeat the same words. Their visual look and personalities are all distinct at capturing your attention. This doesn't make up for the many hours of laborious blocked progression and glitches I encountered, which is terrible given how nicely it started but it's nice.

Features

Catch and tame spirits This will allow you to train them to handle a lot of the more difficult content. The fighting, on the other hand, isn't all that exciting. If you enjoy collecting, this is a good game to play. However, deck building and battling feels poor.

Deckbuilding I don't get it...

There are shrines all around the world where you can charge with energy (no cost) to obtain a charm that can either remove, upgrade, or add a card to your deck. The issue is that these seem to refresh so frequently that you wind up with more than 20 of each and it doesn't feel like much of a strategy game with deck building when you can just max out all the rare cards or all of them in general. It feels boring.

Grow your relationship Instead of everything being gated behind 8 hearts, as in games like Rune Factory 3 and others. You can converse, gift, date, and flirt with everyone in town, but based on your hearts, you have a % chance that it will work or a large probability that it will not. Making gambling enjoyable and strengthening your relationships with them in order to reap benefits later on. They even get unhappy if you stand them up, which makes your heart levels lower! I like it, but the heart-rate is still horrendously slow.

Issues

Normally this isn't an issue The game includes a progression system where you have to do the actual activity tied to that feature. This issue only relates to the taming ability. You must actively tame spirits from the start of the game. If you don't, you will have a difficult time finding any spirits of a lower level (1-3) until Spirit-Mancer is leveled up.

You can still find low levels, but it's hidden in the settings, which allows you to adjust the difficulty and the spawn rate of spirits, which by default most likely removes the chances of lower levels so you can continue to level up. This bothers me greatly. It's not at all enjoyable, spending 4 hours trying to tame spirits that will never show up.

The problem is that you have a lot of tasks that come in every day, and if you don't accomplish any of them, you'll rapidly become bogged down with quests and tasks that you probably won't do anytime soon. The majority of them are finding spirit creatures for the townspeople. You can't tame them until you have a higher level in your spirit skill category, and you can't utilize spirit taming on anything greater than level 4 which, as noted, is an issue if your settings are not enabled for them to appear.

There doesn't appear to be a feature that tells you if you're making any progress with the abilities you're attempting to master; they feel random even if you spend all day chopping wood, breaking rocks, and farming. It simply comes and goes as it pleases.

The Music dies all the time The music will stop playing every now and then and not re-loop or play a new song, making the long drawn out silence while flying to other islands and travelling through dungeons kind of annoying as all you hear is the pitter patter of your obnoxiously loud thumping feet on certain soil, while also being surrounded by the loud whooshing of the wind. This could be a bug and not a big deal, but it is when you just want to feel the pleasant tranquil music while you calmly explore the world and do your tasks.

There is a scarcity of knowledge This may vary from person to person, but a game like this that doesn't have a list or a book that you can look into to find specific biomes or locations you've visited, or even the seasons that specific items spawn, would be nice rather than having to enter the wiki every 15 minutes to find the next elusive thing needed to progress the game.

Some people like exploration and finding things over time, others like myself like to read through books and know exactly where things are, rather than waste hours upon hours trying to search for them or with a sped up look through a wiki page.

It doesn't feel rewarding The game feels rewarding for completing tasks, the things that are constantly filling up your mailbox every single day, where as opening chests in dungeons feels empty because you literally get nothing of merit. It's like playing a looting game. Shiny.

No evolution The spirits you can capture cannot and will not evolve because this never was an intended feature. It just feels horrible and exemplifies the prior comment about it attempting to be everything but fails to be anything but a mash-up of several things.

Gameplay

Consists of doing a chore and exploring In my 12 hours of playtime. In terms of advancement, I felt myself regressing. I couldn't do anything, couldn't produce anything, couldn't even find or tame anything because I wanted to explore, but the game kept instructing me to do this and that without actually telling me how important these things actually were, making it more of a chore than an actual adventure, even though it does let you go anywhere at any level, which I love as it breathes freedom to the player. It felt horrible because nothing you did on those high level islands, whether from chests or dungeons, was worth anything. You would only be rewarded with decorations or coins; everything vital is hidden behind quests, which I find tedious. I appreciate having unlock options not being gated by progression.

I couldn't build some items or crafting tables since I hadn't finished the assignment that unlocked the blueprint for them and I couldn't find some items for that assignment since I didn't have a specific item (clay) to manufacture a charm for visiting perilous islands. The game, on the other hand, does not notify you or assist you in determining where you need to travel to accomplish this. All you have to do is keep looking which burns time.

This may be biased, but I personally don't like doing quests in most games unless they are extremely rewarding, however the quests here feel more required and pushed on you with very little in terms of benefits outside of actually being able to play the game properly because this is the only way to progress.

Think of it like this. I would rather spend money earned a specific way like picking flowers or farming, to buy a blueprint rather than to unlock it doing demanded work.

The main amount of your time will be spent exploring islands, with better equipment as you progress. You may not be able to access the dungeons fully or even access most of the temples because everything is locked behind some fetch quest for you to go off and find a specific item in some distant season, such as in Fall or Winter, and have nothing to do until then, other than level up and tame spirits while raising your relationships with the townsfolk. It honestly just feels lacking on so many levels.

Conclusion

Doesn't seem to know what it wants It pains me to say it, but this game requires so much to be anything other than what it should be. The concept of islands and spending hours exploring them is great but all you will find are pointless dungeons, temples, and tightly restricted progression behind fetch quests and spirit-taming fetch quests with no punishments.

Did you pass out? We'll just go to the next day, and you'll be able to pick up where you left off without having to return to your island because the Magic Man saved you!

There are hundreds of fleshed-out and really superb strategic and tough deck builder games dedicated to just one genre. There are thousands of excellent adventure games available. Dating sims? Farming simulations? You name it, and they excel at it because they know what they want to be, rather than smashing themselves against one another in an attempt to combine them all. Sometimes, less is more.

Think of Stardew Valley with several layers of genres. This is the kind of game you'd get. It lacks any meaningful direction or purpose other than to waste time. 

This concludes my views of this game; while my opinions may be met with criticism, that is what distinguishes gamers; you don't have to like the same things as others, nor do you have to agree with them.

If you want to catch me on one of my streams or locate me on social media, you may do so at the following locations, I'm always playing something new.

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- Pawkt