A frightfully fun farming experience
Moonlight Peaks is a farming sim and RPG unlike any other. Create your own vampire as you play as the child of Dracula. Having just left home to make your own way in the world, you settle on an old farm owned by your family, in the supernatural town of Moonlight peaks.
Moonlight Peaks takes place entirely at night as it is inhabited by a range of supernatural beings, including witches, werewolves, seers, other vampires and even Death itself. There are some characters that turn up only for specific seasons or events, and some such as the Merpeople and the human Henderson family that show up much later in the game as permanent residents. Interacting with the townsfolk is much more in depth than just going to the shops or completing personal quests. The characters are very well written with their own quirks and strong personalities, a few of them feature prominently in the main story, Orlock, the head of the vampire family being one of them. You can get to know all the others though by talking to them regularly and giving them gifts, if you do this regularly enough you can start dating them. Most of the characters in Moonlight Peaks can be romanced, and even married (yes including Death), and if you marry a mortal you can turn them into a vampire, in order to spend eternity with you. Before you get that far though you have to actually go on dates, this is worth doing with all the townsfolk as you can get unique blueprints for crafting from them, just be careful when dating more than one person at once as they wont like it and may break up with you.
The story’s progress is paced throughout the year, which leaves plenty of time for farming. When you first arrive the farm is in a state of neglect, and you will need to clear some space to start planting your crops. You start with all the tools you need available except the fishing rod, which you get very quickly anyway. These are the basic versions, you can upgrade them through copper, iron and eventually gold versions. The upgrades to the axe and pickaxe allow you to chop larger trees and logs and mine larger rocks and metals, while upgrading the scythe, shovel and watering can means you use less energy when performing actions. The fishing rod can only be upgraded to gold so you can catch the huge fish that sometimes appear, but you won’t be able to reach the rocks with gold ore until much later in the game when you unlock the bat transformation.
Once you have cleared some space and bought some seeds from Luna’s stall north of the town, you can begin planting. Of course you need money to buy the seeds, and the main way to make money in the beginning is to comb the beaches for shells and to fish, then place them in Chester, the living monster chest that you are given just after you move in. Anything you place in Chester will be sold at the end of the night. This won’t make you a lot at first, the real money comes from making things with your crops, but this will take time. When you buy seeds each packet tells you how long they take to grow, how much they produce and whether they yield only one bounty or continue to produce. Continued production time is always less than the initial growth period, but it still takes several nights and time does not move as quickly in Moonlight Peaks as in some other farming sims. Once your crops are grown you can sell them or you can make foods and drink with them to increase their value, white and blood grapes are best for this in the first few seasons as you can make wine once you have built a fermentation keg, and this sells for several hundred coins per bottle. Grapes are also one of those plants that keep producing so you can make a nice sum every few nights.
As well as ordinary crops you can grow magical plants, but first the story must advance to the point where your mothers old wand is fixed for you. Magical plants cannot be watered with the watering can like regular plants, you need to cast the aquaflux spell to summon a magical watering can or they will not grow. Casting spells is quite fun, when you attempt a spell a magical grid appears and you have to perform the correct sequence to cast it. If you forget the sequence, which is likely once you get more spells, you can look them up in your grimoire. Aquaflux is the first spell you will have access to but you can buy others from the witches shop Webb of Wonders in town. All the spells are farming or resource gathering related, such as summoning a magical axe or pickaxe which work on their own, or summoning spectral hands to help gather crops faster, you can even make it rain the following night. Magic comes at a price though, beyond buying the spells. Each spell costs mana, you start with three mana points but can increase it to four, and mana regenerates at a rate of one point per night. If you are growing magical crops though this means that you aren’t regaining anything, as aquaflux costs one mana to cast. The other spells cost two or three points, so you won’t be taking it easy and letting your wand do all the work.
There is a way however, to regain mana more quickly. Fiona, who is the head witch in town, teaches you how to build a mana extractor which can draw mana essence from magical plants. Every vial of essence you drink will restore one mana point, and once you unlock potion brewing you will be able to make mana potions as well. Mana essence can also be used for making certain recipes, which will come in handy as gifts if you hope to romance Fiona. Food and drink in general can be used to restore a portion of your energy which depletes as you use your tools, the only two that do not use energy are the watering can and wand. More recipes become available as the seasons change and the crops you can grow change with them, but you can also buy extra recipe books from Mina who runs the coffee shop.
A farm is not complete without animals, but before you buy your first cheekin, cowcula, draculamb or piggoat, you much build a barn. For this you must go to Ridge the local werewolf handyman, but first you have to clear a space for it on your farm. Unlike similar games, the trees and rocks won’t automatically clear for you to place a building, the same goes for when you upgrade your house with extra rooms. Ridge asks you to not only pay for the buildings, but to provide the materials as well. Wood and stone are easy to come by, but later upgrades require planks and refined stone which you will need to use a refiner to make (you get given the blueprint for this), you also use the refiner to make fodder to feed your animals. If you keep your animals fed and pet them every day they will be happy, and happy animals make milk and eggs for you to use in your cooking, draculambs also produce wool which you can use in crafting items to decorate your house.
Moving around can take up valuable time as the town and areas surrounding it make quite a large map, this is where the transformations I mentioned earlier help. As a vampire you will eventually have access to three different forms, the first you unlock is the hellkitten which increases your speed and allows you to dig without a shovel, bat form allows you to fly around town and reach areas you cant get to on foot, and the mermaid form allows you to interact with things in the water. All three can only be unlocked by progressing in the story. I did find it strange that the bat form is not the first unlocked with you being a vampire, though running around as a cat is still fun.
There is plenty to do in Moonlight Peaks beyond farming. The seer Dragan invents a game called Nokturna, a simple but fun card game. He gives you a starter deck to begin with but you can build your own with cards that you win from the other residents when you beat them. The goal is to get a higher score than your opponent for two rounds, but some of the cards have abilities that can allow you to draw extra cards, keep cards in play between rounds or affect the value of cards on the board. You can challenge anyone to a game of Nokturna at any time. Another activity is catching things with your net. Death asks you to catch soul blobs for him, these are little spectral skulls that float around, and once caught they tell you a name and an often amusing way that they died. Once you have caught enough, Death will reward you with clocks that affect the passage of time, catching them is not easy though as they will attempt to escape. This is the same for the bugs that you can catch, though there is not much point in catching bugs early on as you don’t earn much from selling them. Later in the story one of the characters opens the museum, where you can donate the things you catch as well as a variety of items that you can make or grow.
Moonlight Peaks is absolutely full of charm with some great characters to interact with, and seeing their interactions with others makes it feel more like a close knit town than just individuals. There are regular town events that take place which you can participate in, from small things like making flower arrangements and cooking tournaments, to seasonal events like Evernight which is Moonlight Peaks version of Halloween. The balance between the story progression and farming is perfect I thought, my only complaint was how often you get ambushed by a cutscene when all you want to do is get to a particular shop or resident, but that is only personal opinion. I found it a little annoying at first that the shops are only open for a limited time each night, but I got used to it quickly as each shop states its opening times and it was nice seeing the characters that run them outside and in interacting with people in different situations. I have always been a fan of supernatural games and this manages to blend the darker themes I enjoy with light hearted characters and relaxing gameplay.
There are however a few things that let Moonlight Peaks down. The loading screen times are one of my biggest complaints, with how often you move between areas you spend a fair bit of time looking at a black loading screen, and the game itself takes a while to load. When moving around outside, the screen can sometimes appear a bit juddery as if the game is lagging a little, it doesn’t affect the gameplay at all but it is very noticeable. Swinging the net uses energy which it apparently shouldn’t do unless you catch something, which makes catching soul blobs and bugs quite frustrating at times. And there is a glitch where you can make infinite money, which I know many probably wouldn’t consider a bad thing, but i’ve never seen the point in exploiting them in games like this. That being said, the developers Little Chicken are aware of these issues and are working on them, some fixes have been rolled out on other platforms but nothing has yet reached the switch version. Don’t let these put you off though, the game is perfectly playable and very enjoyable even with the issues, and once they are fixed I can’t say there will be anything to complain about.
