Moonstone Island

While I 100% recommend this game as I've had fun with it, this may come across as a bit of a mixed review as while there's plenty of pros, there's quite a few cons that I feel should be considered before buying.
On the positive side, I've really loved spending time exploring in this, collecting all the different crops and seeds, hunting for the psychic storms and most of all, finding and capturing all the different creatures. I especially love that while the creatures have different levelling, other than maybe dark and psychic, none are particularly better than the others; so which ever ones you think are the cutest, you can stick with them and level up.
I was very surprised at how well I got on with the deck/card combat system. I have never played a game with this before, bar maybe one or two free mobile games, so while I have no knowledge to compare the system to, I think it shows how accessible this game is for all audiences given how easy they made this mechanic for a total newbie to pick up.
Overall, the collecting, exploring, the combat and the small amount of farming contains plenty of hours of fun.
My negatives so far are being forty hours in and not feeling much more motivation to continue. Most games with a simulation, farming, social element are games you can get many, many more hours out of where as it feels like in this time, i definitely could have done everything. I'm also not even done with the first in game year yet and normally, that's barely the surface.
So far I have managed to discover all plant and seed types, collect all spirit types, explore the entire map, visited all the islands along with having absolutely no trouble with the combat on the most difficult ones. I found the progress didn't feel particularly gradual either, i went from having a set of creatures all in the level 20's, to immediately a full set of dark/psychic creatures in the 60/70's, easily evolving them and causing some of the most challenging areas of the game to go from very difficult to quite easy - I'm unsure if scaling becomes a thing later but so far, it doesn't seem like it.
I still have to work my way through most of the dungeons to collect the 'seals' and 'shards' but so far it seems like collecting these things doesn't actually benefit your character in any way or even effect anything? I'm hoping to find the motivation to actually bother with the dungeons, but currently, I don't see much point.
My only other negative is the town and villagers. It feels quite empty and the villagers feel very hollow and devoid of life, almost like they had nothing going on until the player character came along - there's no couples, no parents, just a bunch of single shopkeepers yet the town is old enough to have a historian? The dialogue doesn't always make sense either, especially not at first - they'll comment on how great you are at cooking or growing plants meanwhile I had cooked one dish and grown like three plants at most. I also find the dialogue feels a little repetitious and the npcs seem to have no story or development - other than go get me this to improve our friendship but it wont really effect what i say.
I will say the quests given to you by the villagers are fun, collecting the specified spirits, seeds, fishing and completing the cooking quests have all been very enjoyable. They aren't timed, they aren't annoying fetch quests, instead they give you something to figure out and have fun with. The levelling system for friendship itself is also one of the most enjoyable I've found in a game with this mechanic as you can actually level it up just through completing quests and events. You can still give gifts, but it doesn't turn into a exhaustive grind like it to often can be.
This is definitely a game with pro's and con's, I would love to see a little more depth to it. But the price is reasonable for what you get, and there's plenty of enjoyment to be had with it, so I would still recommend it.

I wish there were a neutral rating on steam, alas, there isn't, so I'll be nice and give it a thumbs up, even if honestly, I'd only recommend it with a big IF. I got it very cheaply (Without the DLCs - they're just cosmetic, and I don't care about them), which is one of the main reasons for that decision.
The graphics are ok. Personal taste, I don't love them, I don't hate them. Except for the player char, which I find terrible. Looks like a child, not a single hair style I liked, customization was an afterthought added recently and it takes forever to gather clothes as random drops.
For how the game looks, it certainly didn't run well enough. I was playing 100% on the steam deck, and it just felt sluggish, even though fps didn't really drop. Big islands full of (flaming) trees were an absolute nightmare.
The creature-deck-building battle system is the highlight of the game, even if it's very easy to become completely overpowered and very boring to keep resetting on levelup for a certain card. Once you unlock evolution, there are some spirits that are just SO much better than any others, it's pointless not to take them. Water can outheal pretty much anything, poison can easily be stacked and goes through armor, and psychic can give you a ton of energy. So, guess what my team was. Other elements just aren't worth it. Electro and earth only have a slightly stacking damage bonus. Burn is found later than poison, does the same damage, but loses HALF its stacks every round, while poison only loses 1. Make it make sense.
The world... didn't make much sense to me, either. What do they need an alchemist for if the world isn't randomly ending? Why are there only 10 other people? Why, by all diversity, is everyone 25-35 years old and single? Dating is lackluster, too. I went for the one character that has an assigned achievement, and all our dates were just him traumadumping on me, and me having to pick options that erase any kind of personality I could have envisioned for my char.
As for the progression, I have mixed feelings about it. It starts out very slow, with limited means to travel between islands, and you can only get one of the most important resources per island per season, so you're forced to prioritize. There are only a few biomes with a very linear progression - find new biome, tame new spirit, get new spirit drop, craft new resistance, do temple, rinse and repeat. Not much of a story, 4 temples and a final boss. Around midgame lvl 25-ish, I hit a bit of a wall, where combat either didn't give me enough XP or did too much damage to my spirits, until I realized I could just grow XP crops instead of healing crops and level them up that way. Once evolution is unlocked at lvl 32, I was unbeatable. The final boss folded in 2 rounds because I started with a lucky hand.
Honestly, I am mostly annoyed with 2 achievements: Catching 1000 fish when the minigame makes me want to throw the deck against a wall, and catching all spirits. The latter sounds fine on paper, but they later added evolved forms, which are a pain to get and turn a fun hunt into a hours-long session in spamming the same card for 15 minutes over and over. And while achievements are probably my personal problem, there is an ingame reward behind the catch-them-all one which is utterly pointless, because at THAT point, there really is nothing at all left to do. It just shows that the devs either didn't think about the implications of the addition or didn't care, and neither is a good look in my eyes.
So it's a nice game, especially for the price, but if you're an achievement hunter, I hope you have a high tolerance for frustration, because you're gonna need it (and a controller to do something else around the house while you fish by sound for 3+ hours.)

I love this game so much. I beat it on the Switch, and still decided to buy the steam version and do a replay because it's so great. It's basically a cross between Pokemon and Animal Crossing, and I'm a big fan. The devs also keep updating things and adding new features (for free!) that keeps me coming back for more.

Pros:
-Battle is beginner-friendly. I don't do a lot of "combat" type games, so this is perfect for me.
-It's a deck-builder, which is super fun
-Clear task list that helps you learn the game features
-The "dating" aspect is fun
-You can decorate as much or as little as you want
-Collecting all the creatures is SO FUN, they're so cute!! And I love that you can collect the sparkly versions of them, too.
-Super cozy game - there's not a lot of stress. Even if you don't do things the most efficient way possible, it's not the end of the world. Very forgiving.

Cons:
-You are forced to sleep every night. It kinda hinders whatever task I'm hyperfixating on.
-I wish you could teleport/travel easier once you beat the game
-I'd love to be able to gain the ability to go directly to the date location at the right time (could be a creature evolution ability maybe?). I often miss the reminder and end up missing dates a lot accidentally.

I'll support this dev team through hell and high water at this point haha. Love the game!!

Great game, would highly recommend for hours of fun. Spend the first few seasons building up your Spirits, and the 2nd year becomes a breeze. Not that I can ever settle on just who I want, so many, so cute. Came back to the game after a few years, it is even better than I remember. Now I need to do some cooking and learn about Evolutions.

I would recommend this game, but with a pretty large caveat. If you like crunchy numbers, deep systems, and wish Harvest Moon and Stardew Valley did MORE with their systems, then don't get this game.
This game has a great number of lovely mechanics, but they're all one layer deep. If you don't want to worry about crop quality and optimizing farm automation or complex pet breeding systems then this game is gonna be great for you. The only exception to this is raising your spirits, which has a series of systems that are more fleshed out than others in this game, but which are still too simple for my liking.
But I can say with definitive certainty that I hope this game did well enough for the devs to consider making a sequel, because this with more depth would be absolutely insane.

Most fun I've had in ages. Got this in the Critter Chaos Humble Bundle and this game alone made it more than worth it.... I can honestly see myself playing this more hours than Stardew Valley

Moonstone Island does so many things right. Do I have to go to bed before 2AM? Yes, BUT I can set the day length to "Longest" and I can also carry a tent on me. Or whistle to get back to the main island.

With Stardew, the increasingly large list of tasks became unbearable day to day. I always give up once I unlock the second island.

But Moonstone Island lets you be an adventurer who makes home wherever you can plop it down. I don't feel as much pressure to talk to everyone all the time. Yes, I can still do that if I want to focus on it, but just popping by the tavern on Friday evenings feels like enough to keep everyone happy.

I like how you casually unlock more features as you go and that you can place and move your mailbox wherever you go once you craft it.

Monster taming? YES. AND THE DESIGNS ARE SO AMAZING. Barkbyte brought me back to my childhood days of the Poo-Chi robot dog I took with me everywhere. Only 90s kids will understand.

Alchemy? Also yes! It's pretty simple and lets you combine crop stats into one consumable. At first you find potions in chests, but eventually you do get to make your own. The personalized letters from your parents gives wholesome vibes. It's pretty different from "inherit abandoned house bc of a deceased relative." Rather than feeling like an outsider who just happened to show up, you feel like you belong there. Your status as an alchemist makes you wanted and valued by the community. And the letters from your parents let you feel like what you're doing is meaningful. It's a small shift, but meaningful.

Farming? Simple but awesome, and being able to carry a greenhouse in your pocket to farm no matter where in the world you are makes it so much better than having to stick to one place. Also! Sprinklers are amazing immediately. I didn't even feel like upgrading my watering can until it was the only tool left to upgrade.

Fishing? Still the meta way to get rich and have stamina early on. And if you level up the right skills on the skill tree, you will also be farming good resources without having to travel too far from the main land. I play on PC with keyboard and mouse and didn't find the fishing too tedious. But I'm also a weirdo who likes fishing minigames that make most people rage-quit... so not sure if I'm the best benchmark to judge this.

The quest log feels free from time restraints. You immediately get quests that are MEANT to take the whole in game year to complete, so you never really feel like you HAVE to do certain things before season ends.

Also FESTIVALS! There's only one per month, which is nice because keeping track of so many always was a headache to me. And the day of, you get reminders throughout the day to make sure you don't miss it!

I haven't finished the "main story" yet because I've been taking my time, and lowkey restarted a few times because I wanted to try out the different starters and wanted separate files for different romanceable NPCs anyway.

The NPCs in Moonstone Island feel more my speed. In other farming sims I've played, I feel like some characters fell into heavy stereotypes where they almost feel like partly a real person? Like... they fit the stereotype too well and that's all there is to them? Moonstone Island residents have a charm to them, kind of like old 90s games where you came to care about an NPC in no time at all because of their quirks.

Might just be a guess, but I feel like the devs must have played a LOT of games in the 90s and put all that love and experience into this game.

Just thought I'd leave a review in case anyone else sees Moonstone Island in a Humble Bundle or on a sale and is on the fence. Honestly, even with full price, it's worth your time.

This game is adorable and addictive but it is the epitome of jack of all trades and master of none.
It has so many parts to it: cozy farm sim, crafting, deck building, creature collection, exploration, etc. It's the perfect game for someone who just wants something cozy and doesn't mind the repetitive grind. It's not made for players who are very task oriented or want to create an in-game empire.
Pros:
- The spirit design is adorable
- There is some synergy between farming, alchemy and battle
- There's a lot freedom when it comes to house location (or multiple houses)
- You can go on dates (or miss them) which is a cute touch
- No punishment for failing
- You can very much go on your own pace
Cons:
- Nothing is really fleshed out. Even the combat and deck building is simplistic if you compare it to other deck building games. The individual spirits don't have unique cards, it's just different cards depending on type. Alchemy is basically just mixing two crops together and that's it. it's like that for almost every feature of the game.
- Story progression is tied to the seasons, so if you just want to advance the story you are kind of waiting around
- Storyline is short and there is very little lore.
- The entire town is just people in your age range waiting to date you...
- The game stops scaling early midgame... then it you are just stuck in the same cycle if you want to progress. There isn't really an endgame.
So, while I would recommend this game it definitely isn't for everyone. If you enjoy cute aesthetics and playing around with cute spirits then it'll probably be great for you. If you need tasks or in-game progression to keep you hooked, skip this one.