Moonstone Island is a stunning game, but it can also be a bit monotonous.
Studio Supersoft is another indie game studio that doesn’t reveal much about them. There is little history or press about the staff or their past work. Instead, many of their links point straight to publisher Raw Fury. Among their titles include the action shooter Friends vs Friends and the rogue-lite Dome Keeper. They are also set to release a Moomin-licensed game, Snufkin: Melody of Moominvalley.
Moonstone Island throws you directly into the tutorial without much setup. You play a nameless alchemy student getting ready for their big adventure. They receive tips from their mother and father, previously experienced adventurers. Dad shows off the basics of farming, including harvesting, digging, and planting seeds. Mom instead hands over her “Moonstone” medallion, a trinket that holds onto monster Spirits.
You will be presented with three different starter monsters to select from: Sheemp, a fire-breathing sheep; Ankylo, a rock-themed dinosaur; and Capacibee, a lighting-charged bee. If you skip the tutorial, you will be forced to take Capacibee. This choice can be crucial as each is weak to several elements and has a different stat spread among armor, speed, vitality, and power.
The battle in Moonstone Island is conducted by the use of drawn cards and healing items. Fights can be up to three versus three, and each monster has its own individual deck of cards. In most turns, you may play up to three cards to damage or weaken the enemy. This can include physical moves like tackling or striking. Other cards are elemental specific, like letting down a giant lightning bolt or beam of fire.
Using a healing item is done in place of using one of the cards and allows feeding a creature one of your grown or foraged foods. Most recover HP, but other stamina or grant additional buffs. This makes it important to always have a full stock of food before venturing out into the world.
The tutorial and other forms of dialogue in Moonstone Island are both restrictive and a bit inaccurate. NPCs will spout huge paragraphs of text presenting multiple ideas at a time. For example, the father will explain every food and tool they have on hand. They will repeat this entire blurb every time they are spoken to instead of a more concise summary or letting you ask individual questions. This can make things feel taxing to speak to anyone.
Additionally, some messages seem to only bind to the default keys. If you have changed any settings, the text and UI will show something different. At one point, there was a prompt to fly with the mouse button, but pressing it would do nothing.
After the tutorial ends, you will be sent off by your parents on a magical broom. However, things go awry, and you soon crash down on a mysterious island. This zone is randomly generated, with unique terrain, monsters, and dungeons each time you play. However, the load times can take quite a while. In one case, it took almost 15 minutes to generate a new world. With the simple art style, it is very unclear what assets or calculations needed to be made for this new environment.
The real game always begins at night, with no dwelling and little light in view. The first thing to note is that Moonstone Island is taking place in real time, with every few seconds converting to 10 in-game minutes. There is no way to halt the action and relax – things need to be figured out right away. This means the game tries to present a cozy vibe while constantly leading to anxiety and tension. The game does pause if the window is minimized, but then you can’t see any of the action or make plans.
Due to it being nighttime, you will soon collapse – you can’t stay awake past 2:00 AM. Thankfully, some of the local townsfolk will haul you to the inn and allow you to stay the night. There are many NPCs in town, each running a business ranging from a tavern, fishing shop, supply store, and more. Similar to classic Harvest Moon games, they all have their individual schedules and will be found in various parts of the map. However, this also means their shop will be closed for periods of the day.
But, for the rest of the adventure on Moonstone Island, you must set up base camp and live off the land. You are given some additional tools but must read the descriptions to see what they do. This includes an axe to cut down trees and a hammer for smashing rocks. It is strange that this wasn’t part of the initial tutorial.
There are some oddities about all of the tools in Moonstone Island. First, the menu to equip them – the Q key – sometimes doesn’t respond and needs to be pressed multiple times. Next, the UI to remove the item is far too close to the use option. This can lead to often taking off the tool when you want to quickly switch to it. Radial menus like these should use a hold-and-release scheme – rather than stay open and require multiple presses that could cause errors.
The next thing of note is that the young alchemist uses stamina to swing each tool. Mix this with the limited amount of time in a day, and you will need to rest up very quickly. It seems like the ideal is to consume food to restore said stamina. However, for most of the game, there is not a surplus of goods. You’re constantly in an endless cycle to make the food to restore stamina because you used so much stamina in pursuit of food.
There aren’t a lot of direct goals when starting Moonstone Island. You’ll soon receive a letter from Mom that suggests making a balloon but with no explanation of how to do so. Figuring it out requires digging through several menus, finding recipes, and then harvesting everything. It seems like the game mainly wanted you to roam the land aimlessly and sort of trickle in story beats.
What makes it even stranger is that the vast majority of quests are seasonal and will auto-fail if not completed on time. There is also a strict deadline of one year to complete everything. While you can still play in the sandbox afterward, there is no longer a goal or ending. This can be absolutely frustrating for those who actually want to take things slow. This gameplay design is akin to the punishing rules in Pathfinder: Kingmaker, which itself relaxed on with further patches and the definitive addition.
There also isn’t a lot of joy to be found in Spirit raising or the overall combat. You can only level up and customize these monsters by finding talisman items. Otherwise, new cards are often just added to your decks without consent. This can frustratingly create worse and worse party members as you trek along. For instance, they might be getting tons of debuff cards but no actual damage, flooding with wasted turns. This makes it feel more like a grueling experience like Iris and the Giant than a coordinated monster fight from Pokemon.
The main thing going for Moonstone Island is it does look gorgeous. All of the sprites are lovely to look at and fit well with the matching terrain. Animations are also smooth, with a great amount of detail for each frame. This gives it a nostalgic feel to 16-bit classics from the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis days. Character portraits are a bit more detailed, perhaps being actual drawings that have been digitized to look pixelated. Or the artists may just specialize in making such impressive 160-bit images by hand.
But Moonstone Island has a lot of hitching issues. The game will often stutter or even outright freeze. It is very confusing as it doesn’t use much CPU or GPU to run at all. It could be some kind of programming hiccup. It could also be due to there being no load screens once in the world, but parts of the map are loading anyway.
Moonstone Island doesn’t seem to make much use of Steam’s integration. The overlay does not come up, and there doesn’t seem to be any direct Steam controller support – though plugging in an Xbox 360 control works. Normal steam commands like taking screenshots or cloud saving don’t seem to function. There are achievements, but they tend not to automatically pop until restarting the game. Finally, Moonstone Island is not officially supported by Steam Deck, and it is up to you to decide if it is worth any extra bugs.
At present, Moonstone Island is mostly frustrating and has little fun to it. There are too many time restrictions, almost as if the developers were unsure if it should be a survival simulator or a causal sandbox. The card-based battles make fights a slog, especially when you can’t properly build a deck without using consumables. Moonstone Island is mostly for those who want challenging and obtuse grinds. Maybe Studio Supersoft is making more balancing changes, as the team is very responsive on both Discord and the Steam forums.
