The farming simulator’s cycle of planting and harvesting crops, raising animals, building relationships with the locals, and improving your in-game life is engaging and endlessly repeatable. This successful system has led to an oversaturated market, giving fans plenty of options to find a title that fits their preferences, at the expense of having to sift through many mediocre choices during their search.
Moonlight Peaks brings an intriguing premise to the farming sim formula: the player is a vampire with magical powers and the newest resident in a town filled with other fantastical inhabitants like werewolves and mermaids. The magic dust sprinkled atop the game grants it a unique charm, and there’s a suitable and imaginative experience underneath the whimsy. But further within, Moonlight Peaks has some challenges you can’t resolve with the wave of a magic wand.
Moonlight Peaks wastes no time to alchemize the everyday elements of the farming sim with its occult inspirations. Small but necessary details enforce the unusual circumstances of the vampire player, such as waking from their coffin at 6 p.m. and returning to sleep when the rooster calls in the morning. The game’s visual style leans into the realm of creepy-cute; NPCs are depicted with art that mixes chibi proportions with realistic rendering.
The farm animals players raise aren’t the usual cows and sheep but instead Cowculas with wings and Draculambs with levitation powers. Even the shipment box, where players deposit items to sell, is a many-eyed mimic monster named Chester, an endearing chap with a wonderfully goofy set of sound effects and a dialogue box with letters jumping around erratically.
Working around the farm is also made more magical through the use of, unsurprisingly, magic. Although there are mundane tools like the sickle and axe for cutting down weeds and trees, respectively, spells are Moonlight Peaks’ main way of making everyday activities more convenient, compared to other farming sims’ processors or magical creatures like Harvest Sprites from Story of Seasons. The Ethereal Hands spell saves precious time as it harvests grown crops. To help the crops grow, the Aquaflux spell summons enchanted watering cans that traverse the entire farmland to water plants.
Sometimes these spells aren’t just convenient but necessary, as their magical nature is the only thing that will satisfy special crops. Besides the mundane turnips and potatoes, Moonlight Peaks includes crops that are more fantastical in theme, and only water from the Aquaflux spell will help them grow. Some may even have additional requirements to reach maturity, like a Venus flytrap that players must feed bugs or fish before they’re ready to harvest. These extra crop types add to Moonlight Peaks’ personality and help break up the monotony of basic farming.
To break up the sameness of their farms, players can buy furniture and other decorations, or craft them with recipes either from a store or found randomly when mining, fishing, or digging. Players may place these items freely around their farmland, within their home and barns, and even in some areas around town after completing certain quests.
While traditionally spooky designs are expected, Moonlight Peaks includes an impressive variety of furnishings, from rustic to cutesy and even tropical. Combined with unique overworld visuals for food items, players have incredible freedom to personalize their in-game space as they see fit. There’s also the small but welcome quality-of-life feature of moving furniture with items placed on top (instead of needing to take everything off first) that makes the decoration process even more seamless.
This same level of care in amenities isn’t present in other areas of Moonlight Peaks, however. When purchasing or upgrading a building from the Howling Hammer store, players can’t move anything else on their farm. If the intended purchase doesn’t quite fit where the player wants, they either have to place it elsewhere in the meantime, or run back to their farm to redecorate first. Some smaller inconveniences compound into bigger issues here, including how the Howling Hammer isn’t open every day and closes quite early when it is open, and the unappealing design choice that in-game time isn’t paused when decorating.
Placing structures anywhere just to complete the purchase shouldn’t be a big deal, since the Hoisthaven spell allows players to move their buildings later; however, if players use Hoisthaven to try to move something and again see it doesn’t quite fit where they want it to go, canceling out of the spell doesn’t return the Mana spent to cast it. Not only is this a hefty loss, but it seems like a mistake considering that if the player casts Maturio, a spell meant to speed up the growth of a crop, and it doesn’t work, no Mana is consumed.
Other nuisances pervade Moonlight Peaks, such as not being able to save at any time. Players must sleep in order to save their progress, as in Stardew Valley. While it is a questionable choice in Stardew Valley, that game’s creator has confirmed the save method was partially to prevent save resetting and partially due to challenges he faced as a solo developer.
Moonlight Peaks doesn’t have similar justifications, especially when it comes to not including suspend saves or allowing the player to save while at their home like in Story of Seasons: Grand Bazaar. The urge to keep playing “just one more in-game day” that is so important to the farming sim isn’t as strong when players know they can’t stop whenever they need to.
Moonlight Peaks also lacks certain features standard to farming sims. A small but strange one is that the player character doesn’t have a birthday, which is made even more awkward when one character tries to guess their sun sign when they first meet. Another odd choice is the game’s UI not displaying the day of the week, making the passage of in-game time feel even vaguer. This was added as part of a major update more than a month after Moonlight Peaks’ launch, but there’s no reason this feature shouldn’t have been in the game from the start.
Beneath these temporary troubles is a more pressing issue that holds Moonlight Peaks back from feeling like the next farming game powerhouse: players can’t become truly self-sufficient. There is no way to harvest seeds from crops, so players always have to buy from the seed stand when their supply runs out. The stand may be open 24/7, but it isn’t a fun addition to the daily grind to have to visit it so often.
Significant amounts of the player’s earnings consistently go towards seeds, making it challenging to turn a profit to use towards other areas like house or tool upgrades. What players can produce, craft, and cook to subsequently sell is also limited by most seeds only yielding one crop. Animal byproducts that are typically obtained daily in farming sims, such as milk and eggs, are available less frequently in Moonlight Peaks, once again limiting profit potential.
Money makes the world go ‘round, and this is no less true in the magical world of Moonlight Peaks. Those essential spells for getting through the days in a reasonable time are all learned by buying them from the spell shop. Each spell can be upgraded to make its effects even stronger, but the upgrades are also purchased, not “learned” by using the spells a certain number of times, and the escalating costs can feel excessive when money is such a challenge to procure.
It was made even more difficult to earn money in the aforementioned update, as the sell price for products that take multiple days to produce, such as wine, and the game’s few daily collectibles, such as honey, was significantly decreased. The sell prices were reverted in a later patch, but the amount of daily collectibles remained low, so consistently earning money was still made more challenging than before.
The more challenging a game aims to be, the more satisfying it has to feel in return. Farming isn’t as fulfilling in Moonlight Peaks as in the big name farming sims it derives inspiration from due to the lack of self-sufficiency. Outside of farming, the game’s story also isn’t compelling. The ideas behind the main story and the individual character quests are interesting, such as a seer who has lost their ability to divine information as they’ve aged, or a seemingly perfect couple realizing they’re not ready to take their relationship further.
The execution of these stories, however, isn’t especially memorable. The lack of voice acting is understandable, but the fact that every character shares animations dilutes their individual personalities. Moonlight Peaks also features a bare-bones soundtrack, with only a few different musical pieces, further stripping distinctiveness from scenes that could have left an emotional impact.
Advancing through the story is also a hassle. Special events are helpfully marked on the map, and multi-part storylines’ progression requirements are noted in the game’s menu, but there are numerous times when players have no main story quest occurring. With no clear indicator of what the player needs to do to continue, they just have to wait and hope an event pops up, seemingly at random.
It’s possible for even the most diligent farmer to not complete the main story and unlock all the character transformations (which unlock more areas of the map) after more than an in-game year of play. The result is a story that feels strangely empty in spite of how populated and lively the setting is.
Moonlight Peaks is a neutral experience, and almost painfully so. For every fantastic festival, like the multi-night Evernight with tons of specialty rewards and goofy mini games, there’s a lackluster or even broken one, like the Moonlight Ball with the “best dressed” announcement never happening when characters get stuck behind furniture as they move around. Brilliant ideas feel sparse, shining like will-o’-the-wisps through a fog of averageness.
Sunny is one such example of a truly delightful design. This small creature, which can be caught with a net like other insects, has a fluttering egg white-body with an eye for a yolk. It’s simple but wonderful, and is only made more charming when displayed as a decoration, as it comes with its own frying pan to sit in. But the other insects and catchable critters, like mice and fish, have generic enclosures when displayed, lessening the uniqueness of their designs.
For those who find Moonlight Peaks’ subject matter or visual style appealing, it is by all means a competent game. It does have moments when it feels just compelling enough to get lost in its farming rhythm. But it’s an ultimately unsatisfying experience, with updates that are meant to fix issues (that shouldn’t have been in the game’s initial release to begin with) leading to new problems. Even with its distinct ideas, Moonlight Peaks struggles to stand out.
