Watch the Review in 3 Minutes for Moonstone Island, a deep, entertaining, and cozy creature-collecting life-sim by Studio Supersoft.
Moonstone Island Review Transcript
Moonstone Island is a creature-collecting life-sim by Studio Supersoft in which you spend a year training as an alchemist by farming, crafting, and battling spirits against one another.
Each day works more or less like a farming game. You get out of bed, leave your house, and water your crops each morning, followed by whatever other tasks you find important. There’s a lot of typical farming stuff, like a calendar with seasons and seasonal crops, dating and relationships, and upgrades for your house and greenhouse.
But Moonstone Island is also a creature-collecting game, wherein you can use certain crops to tame spirits who will then fight for you in card-based battles. Each spirit has its own deck and stats that can be added to on level up, and each of the spirit types has a different pool of cards available. The card-based combat allows for some truly silly card combos, which are great fun to pull off, and also emphasize the unique traits of each type, like healing, multi-hits, or energy generation. Importantly, the spirit’s visual designs are overall fairly good.
The spirit combat is paired with exploration; Moonstone Island’s world is split into 100 floating islands placed randomly when your game begins, and you must fly between islands in order to find resources, expand your stamina bar, and solve the mystery of dark-type spirits. One of the most valuable resources, Moonstones, are only obtainable in large quantities by leaving the main island, as there’s one per island per season, plus they’re obtainable in chests you’ll find in dungeons or mines.
The exploration and farming could have been disparate, but the game ties them together in clever ways. If you want a variety of useful plants, you’ll have to find them by exploring so you can grow them at home. While exploring, you might as well tame some new spirits, pick up charms to upgrade them, and complete dungeons. This will result in you getting more moonstones, crafting recipes, stamina, and money. If you want to feed the newly-acquired spirits that live in your barn, you’ll need to grow crops, which are easier to grow with upgraded tools from mining. If you like, you can even set up your farm on one of the outlying islands, set up multiple houses and farms, or just carry a house around in your backpack, unloading and repacking it every night.
Each part of the game is fun on its own, and since they’re all tied together, you don’t often feel like you’re wasting time by focusing on any one part, or get stuck playing a single aspect of the game for hours. It feels like one of the freshest farming games in years because it integrates exploration into the game so smoothly.
There’s a main questline as well as a few sidequests, but the game has plenty of content even if you just explore, fight, and farm, which makes them feel like a fun extra. It also helps that the writing here is really good, especially in the dates. Each character can be romanced by talking to them regularly, as well as going on dates with them twice a week. The dates are written as little mini romance arcs, and they’re quite cute. There’s a solid variety of romance options, and I liked quite a few characters.
Sadly, I experienced quite a few softlock bugs during combat, meaning I lost progress several times. The only holographic spirit I ever found was lost due to a softlock. That said, I don’t have a tonne of criticisms of the game. I wish there was more to the romances, but that’s just because I like the characters and want more.
Moonstone Island is an innovative and enjoyable farming and creature collecting game I had no trouble playing for hours, always wanting to do just one more thing. If it looks good to you, you’ll probably enjoy it.
Moonstone Island is out now on PC for $19.99, and is coming soon to Nintendo Switch.
