Moonlight Peaks (NS2) - Review

by Evan Norris , posted 15 hours ago / 593 Views

Is it possible for a fanbase to be spoiled? When it comes to fans who follow farming/social sims on Switch 2, the answer is yes. In a little over a year, they've been treated to Rune Factory: Guardians of Azuma, Story of Seasons: Grand Bazaar, Pokémon Pokopia, Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream, and, now, Moonlight Peaks. Thanks to a clever twist and a supernatural setting, Moonlight Peaks stands out from the crowd. But is it as essential as the others?

Moonlight Peaks starts dramatically. The child of Dracula (yes, the Dracula) storms out of the family castle. Fed up with their father's nonsense, they hop on a midnight train to Moonlight Peaks, the hometown of their mother. There, they start a new life on the old family farm, surrounded by woods, rivers, caves, and many interesting locals, almost all of whom belong to some supernatural community: vampires, werewolves, witches, etc. Imagine Story of Seasons mixed with Wylde Flowers, and you'll get the idea.

Overall, the story of Moonlight Peaks is quite nice, not to mention flexible. There is a major through line — that of the protagonist (designed and named by the player) bringing the town's clans together and helping them recommit to the larger community — but it never gets in the way of those smaller daily decisions that help make the world your own. You choose how you maximize profit, how you deal with requests, how you respond in conversation, and how you pursue romantic interests. There is a fixed framework in place, but lots of wiggle room within it.

You'll always be bound by the rigid demands of time, though. Like most farming sims, you'll have approximately 12 hours to conduct your business, after which you must rest. In a clever inversion of the norm, however, developer Little Chicken Game Company set the starting time each day at 6pm, instead of at the break of dawn. The main character is a vampire, after all. Once you're up, you must pay attention to crops, farm animals, and equipment. Mechanically, this is all quite simple. Farming takes place on a grid, so it's easy to plant seeds on individual plots. The same goes for chopping down trees, breaking apart stone, picking flowers, fishing, etc. Fishing is perhaps too easy; all you must do is cast the line and press Y when the fish bites and takes off.

Farming isn't just a matter of harvesting crops and selling them for profit in Moonlight Peaks — at least not if you want to make the big bucks. There are many ways to modify and combine ingredients to craft more interesting, expensive items. You can use Wily Wheat in a keg to make beer, or grind it into flour at the mill to make bread. You can even combine those two things to make øllebrød. What about rice? It's worth a good amount of money on its own, but if you combine it with tomato and cheese (earned by placing cow's milk in a cheese press) and wrap it in a corn tortilla, you'll have an even more profitable consumable.

Then there are the magical crops. Not only can you plant onion and eggplant seeds, but otherworldly things like Drikkers, Gobblers, and Moonfruit. You'll need your magic wand and a spell to water them properly, and in some cases other unusual items. Gobblers, for example, must be fed fish and critters in order to reach maturity. You can sell the mature plants, or use them in other applications, primarily to create mana vials, which refill your mana slots and allow you to cast additional spells. Thanks to all these magical and non-magical crops, and the synergies among them, there are lots of opportunities to feel like both an expert farmer and a clever tactician.

When you're not tending to your farm, you'll spend your time chatting with your neighbors. This is Moonlight Peaks at its best. You'll encounter many characters with unique personalities who are great at some things, but struggling with others. Fiona, a witch, is a perfectionist who carries on her shoulders the weight of the entire coven. Orlock, a vampire with an inferiority complex, struggles with alcoholism. The characters aren't simply interesting on their own; they're interesting in relation to each other. Each clan in town is made up of three or four family members. As the player, you must forge relationships with each neighbor, and also serve as an observer or mediator when it comes to intrafamiliar conflict.

If you're so inclined, you can also start romantic relationships with certain citizens. As you chat with individuals, and give them gifts and physical affection, you will add more hearts to their profile, which will take you from acquaintance to friend to partner to fiancé(e) to spouse. Deepening each relationship triggers meaningful character-specific scenes, which is great, but the process to reach marriage is a little repetitive. You'll have to give a lot of gifts and read the same dialogue again and again to make progress. The most egregious part is dating. Each romance candidate has a single activity they enjoy, so every date plays out the same way. The first date is magical; the sixth one is boring.

This speaks to the game's largest issue: pacing. Moonlight Peaks is a slow burn. In some ways this is good, since it spreads the good stuff across each season. In other ways it's less ideal, as it tends to stall the momentum of the journey. I pushed the main quest line forward as quickly and urgently as possible, but still found myself treading water for days at a time as I waited for some important milestone.

A few slow, uneventful stretches weren't enough to stop me, though. I still spent over 50 hours in Moonlight Peaks, which took me through a full calendar year: spring, summer, fall, and winter. I expanded my house, nurtured farm animals, crafted furniture, participated in celebrations, learned spells and transformations, got married, and helped bring the townspeople closer together. This isn't the end of my journey, of course. Like any good farming/life sim, the game encourages its players to live out year two, year three, and so on. If you're looking for a serious time commitment, you've come to the right place.

You've also come to the right place if you're looking for an enchanting, cozy aesthetic. The world of Moonlight Peaks is filled with vampires and werewolves, but that doesn't stop it from being a warm, welcoming place in which to settle down. Every area is filled with enchanting fixtures and decorations; even the trees are charming.

As for the music, it's appropriately homey and soft. The two best tracks are the summer theme, which has a breezy, open-air quality to it, and the winter theme, which benefits from the chilly sound of bells. You can almost hear the snow falling.

On the performance side of things, Moonlight Peaks acquits itself fairly well. The only problem is the frequency of loading screens. Every time you leave an area or move between rooms, you'll have to pause for three to four seconds before proceeding. These load times aren't long, but they are ubiquitous. Note: the developer is aware of the issue, and is working on a solution. In fact, Little Chicken has been active and upfront about post-launch patches and bug fixes, which is admirable. Apart from load times, the only technical flaw occurs when you reap too many crops at once: the frame rate tends to buckle for a second before correcting itself.

When it comes to comfy life sims on Switch 2, the rich get richer. Moonlight Peaks is a worthy addition to the growing library of cozy games on Nintendo's latest hybrid, thanks to solid mechanics, a satisfying gameplay loop, dozens of hours of content, and a clever supernatural twist. It's not the best of the best, due to some pacing and grinding issues, but it's worth your time and energy, particularly if you enjoy games like Story of Seasons and Wylde Flowers.