Moonlight Peaks Review

If you’re a fan of farming sims, then you’ve been spoiled for choice for a while now. But while there are many out there (and more still to come,) one complaint that often pops up is just how… nice the general vibe is in them. Many of them feature little in the way of conflict or “mature” themes, opting to have a cast that will generally get along well with the main character.

Moonlight Peaks seemed like it wanted to go in a different direction, having you start out running away from home and moving into a town full of supernatural beings. While far from an unwelcoming place, not everyone gets along, and some of the cast feature personalities not often seen in the genre. And yet, having played through the main story content, most of what is here ends up being fairly shallow.

You’ll run into Orlock a lot during your time in Moonlight Peaks, for better or worse.

Creatures of the Night

After falling out with your father, your created vampire character moves to the titular Moonlight Peaks. Moving into your family’s abandoned farmland, it’s not long before you’re introduced to the area’s local drunkard Orlock. Dragged into making wine for him, this starts your slow life of nocturnal farming.

Out the gate, it’s obvious that Moonlight Peaks is trying to aim for something slightly different than a traditional farming sim. For starters, being a vampire means that you naturally can’t hang out in the sun. Each day instead takes place as the sun goes down, stretching out into the early hours of the morning. Everything is bathed in a purple hue, lending to the game’s unique atmosphere.

The town’s residents are also often not what you’d expect from farming sims, the aforementioned Orlock being the biggest example of this. He’s drunk most of the time, a nuisance to both the townsfolk and his kids, and generally unpleasant to deal with. Outside of just him, at least half of the cast has non-standard traits and backstories that could potentially lead to interesting storytelling.

There’s a subplot about family crests, though it doesn’t go anywhere.

I say potentially, because for the most part Moonlight Peaks doesn’t actually deliver. Key moments happen with little buildup, the tone is all over the place, and it feels like the moment anything potentially interesting could happen, the game just moves on with no fanfare.

I’ve already mentioned him a few times, but Orlock really is a good example of how odd Moonlight Peaks‘s tone is. He is written to be antagonistic, constantly causing problems that both his kids and the player have to fix. Some of the side events even delve into this a little, offering a look at a family that’s clearly going through a lot.

But in the main story, his drunkenness is mostly played off as a joke. I think some of this is due to the developers not wanting to lock story scenes behind progressing friendship events with specific characters, limiting how much they can do with either.

In general, I found the characters fairly weak because of this. The main story manages to be both rushed and stretched out across more than an in-game year (you often have to wait multiple days for new scenes to trigger) and characters events, while mostly fine, are generally predictable.

Farming works as you’d expect. It’s oddly mundane when compared to the setting.

A Standard Gameplay Loop

If the story and setting aimed for something new (regardless of whether it actually landed,) the actual gameplay is rather mundane in comparison. Everything you’d expect from the genre is here: planting seasonal crops, talking to characters and giving them gifts, and expanding your house with new rooms to decorate.

It all works generally as you’d expect, even with a few quirks. There’s not hotbar, but you can easily select tools from a radial menu. In place of mounts you get transformations, with the Hellkitten form unlocking early on to speed up traversal across the map.

As the story progresses you unlock new sections of the world, introducing more places to explore and forage in. This extends to more characters and facilities, though it takes a surprising amount of time before you can get this game’s museum.

You can get married to most of the cast, though there’s no option to have kids right now.

However, I don’t really have that much to say about the general gameplay loop, and that’s Moonlight Peaks‘s biggest flaw outside of the story. It just plays everything far too safe, offering very little variety day-to-day. There’s only a single event each month (one of which being a glorified cutscene,) and the amount of unlocks starts to grind to a halt halfway through the story.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing outright wrong with how Moonlight Peaks plays. It even has some decent quality of life like infinite storage at your house without the need for endless boxes or chests. But at the same time, it rarely makes use of the setting to offer something fresh.

Take magic for example, something that you gain access to early on. It runs into the same issues I have with the magic system in Fields of Mistria, where its mostly just limited to watering crops and other basic tasks. The transformations also seemed like they could be fun, but all of them boil down to different traversal methods over something interesting.