“Welcome to your new vampiric life in the magical town of Moonlight Peaks. Raise mystical crops, learn spell-casting and potion-making, and befriend – or even romance – the local werewolves, witches, and mermaids in this heartwarming supernatural life-sim. Eternity awaits!” – Steam Description

This will be a review of my experience with Year 1. There will be some spoilers.
I will try to keep them to a minimum and still get my points across.
If you just want to see the score and the final thoughts scroll to the end.

Moonlight Peaks is a supernatural farming sim where you play as the run away child of Dracula. You return to your parents hometown of Moonlight Peaks with hopes of paving your own way in the world. As with every farming sim the game is very freeform in how you go about things because of this everyone will have a slightly different timeline for when things happen. There are cutscenes and features locked behind friendship with different characters in town, not just locked behind getting to a certain day. Keep this in mind as your start on your own adventure.

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Back to Basics

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Like every farming sim you have found yourself with a decent sized plot of land that you can do anything you’d like to. You have a stamina bar that is pretty punishing in the beginning even as far as farm sims go. To do anything with your tools you’ll need stamina to do so. So this means cleaning up your brand new farm will be a slow process at first. Your tool wheel is separate from your inventory which is a nice change from some others I’ve played.

Your personal inventory space is limited, but you can always swing by your home and drop everything into your house storage. This storage is endless and extremely useful even if it can be a pain to dump your inventory. You can also use any of the items in your house storage on your farm without pulling them out again. No more making a bunch of chests and running round to find where you put that last bit of crafting material to make something. If you want to there is still the option for storage outside of your house, but I haven’t found a reason to.

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Along with farming there is animal raising. There’s a range of cute unique animals to place in your barn. The problem is the barns are not upgradable. They house four of your new farm friends and then you have to buy another barn. I didn’t end up going for a second barn in my speedy play through but all my little friends have hats and they are just to cute. They provide the normal milk, eggs, and wool from the ones I was able to home. The others are still a little bit of a mystery.

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Living Life with a Touch of Magic

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You unlock spells as you progress through the game which make your farm life a breeze, theoretically. From refilling your watering can to moving buildings around these spell are amazing. The magic system is done with a magic circle that you need to trace shapes over. If you’ve ever played Okami think that but make it witchy spells.

Spells are a backbone for making your life easier so make sure you lock in on making some mana restoring food as soon as its available. I will say that there wasn’t a lot of food options to regain your mana, and if you are not setup to make those items you can get yourself in a bind when you have more costly spells. Each morning you recover one of your mana points, not all of them. For a game with a magic focus that felt like a bad choice to me. Having something in the shop we could buy in a pinch would have made all the difference. Later in the game there is something that helps with mana regen, but I didn’t get that until Winter Year 1.

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On top of spells you also get to unlock different forms that you can transform into whenever you’d like. At the end of Year 1, I only have two of the three forms. I’m not sure if I just didn’t make friends with the right people or if the quests are locked behind a certain day. I’m excited to get the last form and unlock the last bits of my map. I will say when we got the first form I was very confused as to what the purpose was. It moves faster so I tend to use it to move around the map as quickly as I can. It is also smaller so you can get into a small cave, but there is another spot like that on the map elsewhere and it won’t let you go through it until you get to that quest which I feel if that was the case why even let us see that its a thing? Just have it hidden until we can actually go in it. Other than that it feels like a weird choice for your first form.

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Rebuilding Community Ties

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While you play through Moonlight Peaks you’ll interact with a wide range of characters and creatures. The town is brimming with personality and life. Befriend the local vampires, witches, werewolves, and mermaids while unlocking the secrets to the towns strife. In this game, unlike others I’ve played, you can’t really get away with being a hermit and doing your own thing as you build your farming empire. There are a lot of triggers that seem to be friendship locked, but in the end I wasn’t too upset about it. The characters are well written. Filled with desires and flaws like real people would be. As you go through and rebuild town connections you’ll unlock more areas of a pretty large map.

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Finding Love in Unexpected Places

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On your journey of friendship with the townsfolk you’ll come to find a good number of them are romanceable. Deep your friendship enough and you’ll be able to get married. This is a staple in a lot of farming sims like Stardew Valley or Sun Haven. With the option to change up the portraits to a style you like more it makes it easier to build a connection with the characters. There are a couple of things you can do to build friendship with everyone.

I felt Moonlight Peaks had a lot of lovely ladies, but the men fell short. None of them immediately jumped out at me as “Oh I want to get to know him more”. This took into account both looks, and their initial welcome to my character. A pretty face is all well and good, but someone that treats you right is more important. Sadly, I fear none of the men are for me. In my first year of Moonlight I haven’t built strong enough friendships with anyone to have been on any dates, but the cutscenes have been fun and do make you grow closer to the characters.

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Building Collections & Trying New Hobbies

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As you wander around Moonlight you’ll find there are a bunch of different things you can collect. Like both Stardew Valley and Sun Haven you know there is going to be a Museum at some point when you find the empty building. That means its time to hold onto a little bit of everything since we don’t know what’s going to be required. On top of this you have to catch all the little Vampsters hiding around town and the floating skulls when they appear. The worst part of collecting was the Vampsters. You have to walk them to a place on the map. If you set them down for to long they scurry back to their hiding place ruining your progress. Its slow going and very tedious. If we could have used other forms to travel faster it wouldn’t have been so bad. tracking down them all is a chore.

Moonlight Peaks has a bunch of hobbies you can try out, but if you don’t interact there seems like there is no downside. There is Flower Arrangements, Pottery, Embroidery, and from the trailer maybe some others I might have yet to discover. There is also one I didn’t add with the above because once you unlock it the activity acts differently than the others. Yoga has a short minigame but fully replenishes your mana at the end. While I find when I got this to be a little late into the year, that might have been my fault. As said before I’m not sure if the quest triggers are friendship gated, or time gated for some of these things.

Each of the above is a hobby you can spend money on to do. Its completely extra and to be honest I didn’t see a reason for it. The controls for the pottery were awful, and I’m not personally great at pixel art but the cat at the top is something you could create in the embroidery.

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Diving into the Year

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As with most farming sims the year is a 4 month calendar for the seasons. 28 days in each and there are some festivals throughout the year. Your calendar will be updated with birthdays, including portraits, and the festivals when you learn of them. They don’t give you a lot of heads up before the festivals, but overall there isn’t a whole lot that you need to prepare. Each festival has a couple different things that you can do at it, most of which doesn’t seem to effect you if you choose not to take part. Multiple times they asked me to bring a dish or dishes to pass but nothing ever was said about the things I brought. Some of the actual tasks it seems you can’t lose at even when you should. In the Cooking Competition you pick a dish and then have to make it from memory. All well and good if you know the recipes, but I didn’t. I guessed and even if I was wrong it gave me more chances instead of knocking me out of the competition right away. I don’t know if there was a set number of times you were allowed to make mistakes, but it felt to forgiving for no reason. The Halloween festival has a special currency for the festival shop which I struggled to get a lot of. I’m not sure if I missed something here or if the balance is off.

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• Graphics– I enjoy a lot of the art in this game. From the design of the environments, to the items you can make or buy for your farm, and the two different art styles for the character portraits the over all feel of this game fits that gothic farm vibe you are looking for in a supernatural world. I enjoy the feel of the world as a whole. The color palette shift from season to season is gorgeous. The one thing that I’m not really fond of is the character models themselves. While they did grow on me the more I played, without this lush and vibrant setting I don’t think they would work for me. Luckily, when you talk to people the portraits pop up so I could look at those instead of the models. I would like to note, that if this game only had the more realistic portraits, option 1 in your settings, it wouldn’t score as high. Make sure to check which style you prefer!
• Gameplay– Overall, the gameplay is what you would expect of a farming sim. Throw in some magic to make your life a little easier and it opens up a lot of the game. Instead of feeling bogged down by your stamina bar you could balance out your spells with your farm chores. The passive regen of mana felt very restricting. I didn’t find any options in stores to buy to regain mana. So those bigger spells are only doable from time to time and I find that to be a let down. The pacing of the game feels a little slow. I’m not sure if this was an intentionally play by the developer but ending Year 1 with more to unlock surprised me.
  Some of the minigames seem pointless or impossible to lose. When I say minigames I mean anything from the cooking minigame, which you can only cook one item at a time, to crafting which is just hold down the interact button, and the mini games during festivals. Some of them I truly don’t think there was a way to lose, looking at you Cooking Competition. If you stay out past 6am you just get teleported to bed. Nothing bad happens. I know this is a Cozy Game but it felt a little to forgiving of things. Even with these small things the overall gameplay was enjoyable.
• Sound– The soundtrack was good for the most part. Every once and a while I would notice there was no music, or other ambience at all but I’m not sure if I was just in areas to long and they were not looping or what happened. Some things that should have been under the SFX sound bar were not and that caused more than one jump scare when a sound was just very loud out of no where. Specifically at the end of a day when you unlocked recipes there’s a sound when each one shows up and even with the SFX bar OFF they were loud and unexpected.
• Controls– Its recommended by the developer that you use a controller for this game, and for the most part I agree with this. A lot of the actions and menu switching was seamless with the controller. There is a hitch when it comes to throwing everything in your inventory into your storage, where I found it to be quick to switch to keyboard/mouse for that. The movement feels good even as the other two forms I managed to unlock in year 1. The spells flow smoothly with the joystick.
• Story– The characters are well written and compelling. I don’t normally talk to NPCs very much in farming sims. I get my farm setup to make money, decorate, and do some quests when its convenient for me. I have a really relaxed hermit air about myself when I play things like Stardew Valley or Sun Haven. I don’t want to interact with people. I just want to do my own thing. However, in this game while I was more quest focused because I knew I was doing a review I also found myself going out of my way to try to build friendships with certain characters. Wanting to know more about their stories and backgrounds. I’m still not friendship focused when it comes to moonlight so I didn’t unlock scenes for everyone but I will say its more than I normally do. The characters are so well written that if you’ve ever had anyone in your life like Orlock its going to hit home. I will say I felt there was to much of a focus on Orlock in cut scenes. I couldn’t avoid him even though I wanted to.

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