What’s a cozy farming sim without a little bit of paranormal activity? In a genre that becomes more and more saturated with each passing year, it’s hard to distinguish titles, especially if you’re only expecting a run-of-the-mill farming game.
That is, until Little Chicken’s Moonlight Peaks arrived to shake things up. You play as the vampiric child of Dracula who’s run away from the family castle to start a new life on a farm. Your mom tries to convince you not to, but at the end of the day, we’re a young vampire who needs some space. It was absolutely worth it, as our farm, although full of weeds and fallen trees, is the perfect spot to grow any food we desire.
Before starting your playthrough, you’re able to customize your character through a player creator screen. Every option fits the game’s cartoonish art style well, with the outfits, in particular, matching the supernatural theme. Although there are plenty of customization options, I still found it slightly lacking, especially in the hair and accessories department. You can buy more cosmetics through one of the villagers’ shops, though the prices are slightly high until you get your farm up and running.
At first, Moonlight Peaks follows a near-identical gameplay loop to most traditional farming sims. You’ll spend most of your early nights—you’re a vampire, so you’re only awake between 6pm and 6am each day—meeting the locals, growing crops, and clearing debris from your farm. You’ll start with a few seeds, with more available to purchase from another nearby farm owned by one of the game’s characters. Along the way, you’ll follow a linear questline that you’ll help the town solve, ranging from trivial bickering to conflicts that affect the entire town. Oh, and there are cute animals, including a Hellkitten you start with.
Over time, you unlock more and more features, with mechanics like museum item gathering, fishing, and potion making appearing over time. By now, I’ve gotten used to farming games having extras like mining, dungeon crawling, and foraging to make money, making Moonlight Peaks’ extra features like flower arranging and embroidery a nice change from the norm. They add substance to the progression, giving you multiple ways to spend your days in between storyline questing without feeling like a never-ending grind.
Magic takes center stage in Moonlight Peaks, letting you make nearly every aspect of farming, resource gathering, and even designing your farm’s layout much easier. If you like planning out your days of what crops to plant on which days, how much energy you’ll need to accomplish everything, and what activities to do in between, magic can help make certain tasks easier. It adds another layer of complexity in deciding which spells you’ll unlock first. I immediately loved this extra bit of strategy, and often found myself relying on magic to advance just a little quicker before moving on to my next task.
The early game felt especially slow initially. While you can make good headway into the main storyline each day, I often found myself on standby while waiting for certain quest items to finish processing or after hitting a “wait until tomorrow” mission objective. While this gives you time to clean up your farm, check on your crops, or socialize with the village’s residents, I still spent several evenings going to bed early after expending all of my energy before reaching midnight. Unlocking more gameplay features throughout the story helps resolve this, but getting through those first few hours felt monotonous at times.
Despite that, my favorite part of my playthrough was interacting with Moonlight Peaks’ townies. The game’s cartoonish art style and goofy emotes contrast with a surprisingly mature theme you discover over time after getting to know each character. Right from the beginning, you’ll meet folks who constantly bicker with each other, several characters disliking your character’s father, and a fellow vampire who struggles with alcoholism. Most of this is played off as lighthearted comedy within the game’s world, but it still paints a picture of how dysfunctional Moonlight Peaks and its residents are when your character first arrives, and how you’ll shape it over time.
Although my fellow townies were fun to interact with during the main story, they don’t leave much room for socializing outside of this. There’s little to no dialogue between you and Moonlight Peaks’ characters during regular days, aside from them briefly commenting on recent events before bringing you right to gifting or saying farewell for the day. With how cartoonishly expressive folks are in the game, I was slightly disappointed over how little they interact with the player character outside of main story quests and friendship cutscenes.
Overall, I enjoyed getting to know Moonlight Peaks’ characters, exploring its world, and trying out different gameplay mechanics that I’ve yet to see in any other farming sim. With a hefty runtime, a deep storyline with both serious moments and comedy mixed in, and goofy townies with a wide range of interests, there’s no shortage of fun to be had in the game’s magical world. While it has a slow start and its characters aren’t always the most interesting to talk to outside of friendship events and quests, it’s still a worthwhile title to try out regardless of whether you’re new to the farming sim genre or are already deep into the rabbit hole and want to try something a little different.
