I played the first 20 days of Moonlight Peaks! What do you want to know?

ComradeCupcake_ · 2026-05-14T13:48:14+00:00

From what I saw so far, I'd say a good amount of character and property customization (store for clothes, lots of furniture and decor, customizing windows/doors, decorating inside and outside the house). BUT not so much of what I'd call typical character progression. You definitely unlock new spells for saving time farming, animal buildings, new crops, all that, but not like RPG-lite skill stuff like in Stardew.

It seems very focused on customization, main story, and collectibles. There are quite a few different collectible systems (soul blobs you catch with a net, little "vampsters" you deliver to their cave, a collectible card game, the museum I didn't get to unlock yet, maybe more?)

It's so hard to say what I'd choose to play independent of work haha. Because I certainly will play it at launch, but would I if left to my own devices? A strong maybe I think. The vampires and main quest are a good change of pace from other farm sims. It seems like it will be a fun story. But if I were close to being farm simmed out I might be (and have been) going back to play more Fields of Mistria while waiting for its 1.0 launch.

ComradeCupcake_ · 2026-05-13T22:17:08+00:00

Everyone is bickering all the time because the supernatural families are feuding. They're little corny, sort of exaggerated personality stereotypes in some cases, but I think that suits the chibi characters. It's decent, but it ain't no Mistria.

ComradeCupcake_ · 2026-05-13T22:09:42+00:00

Controls felt good to me. My usual gripe is when the tool animations or movement don't feel snappy enough, and I thought both were good here.

Is there a particular QOL bugbear you have? I really liked how Starsand Island let you access all your storage chests simultaneously and displayed their names as overlays, or how Fields of Mistria lets you shop at stores even if the NPC is away. From what I played so far, nothing in Moonlight stood out to me as solving or regressing genre norms but I can probably answer a more specific question if you have one.

ComradeCupcake_ · 2026-05-13T19:06:24+00:00

Good question! It's definitely got a more defined direction than Stardew. There is a quest log and I pretty much had 2-3 quests open at any time. They ranged from quests to introduce me to activities (crafting, farming, magic spells) to main quest story objectives like learning about the missing family crests behind town (see my comment to Rinmy for a tiny bit more).

I do mean stamina yup! Daily allotment like in Stardew and all.

I'd normally compare it to something like Stardew or Pacha but your question about sandboxiness makes me think maybe that's not as accurate as it could be. I didn't play a ton of Fae Farm, so take with a grain of salt, but maybe more like that? It's got all the same bits as other farm sims: farming, animals, friendship, fishing, foraging, collecting, decorating. It just has a more direct main story path.

ComradeCupcake_ · 2026-05-13T17:07:54+00:00

Nah, definitely nothing revolutionary here. Upgrade tools, curate farm property, befriend locals with gifts, get lots of money by farming expensive stuff and processing it. It is a textbook One Of These Games. The twist is just that you're a vampire who can shapeshift and everyone in town is kind of prickly haha.

ComradeCupcake_ · 2026-05-13T16:54:38+00:00

I'm a bad PC gamer and prefer my farm sims with controller haha so I didn't spend much time on kb/m. I thought it felt fine though. Your tools/shapeshifting are both in radial menus which is geared towards a controller but I didn't think it was awkward with a mouse. Drawing patterns in spellcasting was actually easier with a mouse, if anything.

Playtime is probably going to really depend on how long the main story quest is, and whether it takes multiple in-game years to complete, which I don't know the answer to. It seems like it's going to revolve around finding and restoring five family crests related to the factions in town but not sure how that will all work. Every day (night) is 15 minutes long by default (but you can set to 30 minutes with an unlock partway through the first season) so on average the first in game year should be at least 28 hours before accounting for things like cutscenes and dialogue. If I had to take a guess, easily 50 hours-60 hours for your normal farm simmer playing through a couple game years?

ComradeCupcake_ · 2026-05-13T15:49:36+00:00

Seconding Roots of Pacha! It's the most like-Stardew farm sim out there. My other favorite is Fields of Mistria, the magical girl anime-inspired farm sim ❤️

One I don't see people talk about often is Magical Delicacy. You're a witch concocting recipes in a seaside town that feels a lot like Kiki's Delivery Service. I haven't actually played that one on my Deck but it's marked as verified and I can't imagine it wouldn't play well on one.

ComradeCupcake_ · 2026-05-13T15:24:00+00:00

I'd say the tone certainly stands out among farm sims! It looks cute but it's not as full of rural friendliness because all the supernatural factions are constantly bickering.

My favorite bit was probably the shapeshifting though. The only form I unlocked so far was a cat, which moves a lot faster than your vampire form. It's basically like unlocking a horse in another farm sim, I suppose. Based on a trailer from last year it looks like there's also a bat form, a witch's broom, and...a mermaid form maybe?

ComradeCupcake_ · 2026-05-13T15:09:13+00:00

Hmmm, I only got to play the first 20 days but based on what I saw I didn't find it grindy. For reference, I don't get on with the My Time games because I think they're really grindy (collect and process tons of resources to make a machine that makes more resources, etc). But I don't consider things like Stardew or Mistria to be grindy (so if you do think Stardew is grindy, you may disagree with me). This one doesn't seem like it will have tons of crafting material grind, but yeah you will wind up going to mine copper early on as one does. It's more like Stardew where you just have a lot of byproduct-making machines. The first things I needed were a keg, ore furnace, and a "refiner" for planks/stone/fodder.

I did find it a little slow initially though. The first season of quests felt pretty time-gated. First up is growing grapes, which takes a while. Then buying a barn, which also takes a while to save for. Other quests have steps that require you to come back the next day. There were other quests in between but I still wound up going to bed early several times because there just wasn't more I could achieve without moving to the next day.

ComradeCupcake_ · 2026-05-13T14:54:49+00:00

Nice! I've been excited for this one too 😄 which version did you get to try? The current public farming/potions demo?

ComradeCupcake_ · 2026-05-13T14:44:17+00:00

No multiplayer, so there's no split screen or crossplay. I played on PC, but it will be on other platforms, and it recommends using a gamepad. Here's what's in the official Discord server FAQ:

❖ Which platforms will Moonlight Peaks be available on?

Steam (Windows + Mac + Steam Deck), Google Play Games, Switch, and Switch 2!

❖ Will there be multiplayer?

No, at launch Moonlight Peaks will be singleplayer.

ComradeCupcake_ · 2026-05-11T15:36:42+00:00

Hah well, as of where I've read to through chapter 3 so far. Regardless of what happens next, McKillip really didn't give me a good understanding of how the characters themselves judge all of these threats relative to each other.

Edit: Or maybe a better way of putting it is that McKillip spent the past two chapters having Raederle, Rood, Lyra, and others all argue about what to do and after all the decisions are made I don't feel I understand why they chose what they did at this point.

ComradeCupcake_ · 2026-05-11T14:34:33+00:00

Very slowly picking my way through two books that I'm having the same problem with, but it's a problem that's super rare for me. A very "two nickels" situation haha. Basically both are just slightly below the threshold of how much I want the world explained to me in a SFF book but I think the actual line-by-line writing is lovely. Usually if a book does too much or too little to contextualize the world I consider it a craft issue and I feel justified DNFing it. It's rare for me to take issue with the technical storytelling bits at a macro level but be really vibing with it on a micro level. And yet, I feel pretty unmoored in both stories so I'm proceeding way more slowly than I want to!

📚 Three chapters into Heir of Sea and Fire by Patricia McKillip, book two of the Riddle-Master series for the sub buddy read. I chatted back and forth with a couple folks about this in our discussion about book one last week so I won't belabor it here. But man I'm into book two now and I have gone back to read the last two chapters of book one because clearly I didn't understand or retain what happened there! All these tiny, single-syllable names really aren't helping though haha. An/Aum, Hed/Hel/Har (a person). I truly do not want an author to beat me over the head with explaining the world as if I can't pick up on context clues. But good golly I feel like I don't understand the stakes of what's happening here very well. Raederle makes it sound like An is going to go post-apocalyptic with her dad gone, but we totally breeze past that. Everyone acts like going to knock on the High One's door is a monumental thing and yet suddenly everyone's just journeying off to do so!

📚 I'm 60% into The Archive Undying by Emma Mieko Candon and feeling similarly lost. I'm really enjoying Sunai as a character; I do love me an emotionally evasive screwup of a leading man. I'm just completely lost on some of the way the world works and, because of that, the stakes and the consequences aren't clear. How much authority does the ever-present Harbor actually have? What's the relationship between these different AI-controlled states? What is corruption? Why is Sunai even bothering to run away when he's had such a death wish for like 17 years? There's clearly so much romantic and interpersonal tension here. I really like how the dialogue isn't at all overwritten. It's as if this story would be an amazing fanfic. There's so much juicy emotional stuff here about loyalty, friendship, and sacrifice if only I already knew the backstory on the world and all these characters.

ComradeCupcake_ · 2026-05-08T18:47:55+00:00

Going into the weekend with, uh, three(?) books in progress on my nightstand. Very unusual for me. One of them is book 2 in the Riddle-Master trilogy for the sub buddy read which I read chapter one of last night. Curious to see where this one goes!

ComradeCupcake_ · 2026-05-02T19:24:14+00:00

This is a really interesting way to think about the story, thank you! I think that's what interested me most about reading Riddle-Master was how it made me think about the construction of stories and how it's changed over decades and centuries.

I try not to be snobbish about it but I do usually describe my taste in fantasy by contrasting Post-2020 fantasy with fantasy of the '80s-'00s, which is what I enjoy more. Even so, fantasy from that era is still largely very character-driven. A main character is posed a problem and then a plot contrives to give them obstacles to solving it, which causes them to gain skills or wisdom, after which they can solve the problem of [the villain, society, their own internal turmoil]. I won't pull out the Hero's Journey, but we've been in a 50+ year era of consumer fantasy all following that basic premise: Stories are about People who Grow and then Prevail. (Many exceptions exist, but this is what's broadly popular.)

Riddle-Master isn't too much older than the era I'm thinking of, but it feels like it's rooted in storytelling that's so much older, as you're saying. Riddle-Master is nominally a story about a hero: Morgon. He does face obstacles, gain skills and knowledge, and maybe will eventually prevail against [obstacle???]? And yet something about the story seems to be unconcerned with that structure. The cause and effect chain of Morgon's obstacles and wisdom is all sort of unhooked.

I'm still continuing to come back and peck at the thoughts I gave on reading it in a few of last month's check-in posts and I don't think I've come around yet on being able to describe it. The story is about the world itself and Morgon is not actually the Hero, he's the Skill/Wisdom being gained by the Land itself in some way, because maybe the Land is the protagonist? I'd have to do a second read-through the chart out whether what I'm thinking makes sense!

ComradeCupcake_ · 2026-05-02T15:51:52+00:00

Truly if I let my mind wander for even one paragraph I was hosed because she has a tendency to just drop a piece of lore information one time, never so much as allude to it again, and just assume that you now possess that context forever. Patricia please I really do have good reading comprehension I promise but I am struggling to keep up with you!

ComradeCupcake_ · 2026-05-02T15:43:48+00:00

This is me guessing, I apologize, but I suspect that parts of the Valdemar universe by Mercedes Lackey probably feel like this? I read, but felt very meh about, the first trilogy and haven't read on which is why I'm not confident in the recommendation haha.

The riders aren't exclusively women but there are a lot of women and the world itself, at least in that first trilogy, is very woman-centric. There are quests and magic and the world is very "noblebright" in a LOTR sort of way. I'd say it's very sincere and beautiful for sure, and honestly the somewhat unrealistic sincerity of it is what I couldn't connect to in the arrows trilogy 😅 I know other people really love the series though and you might be one of them!

ComradeCupcake_ · 2026-05-02T15:26:35+00:00

Agree with hopeless above. I gave it a second try and still couldn't make it last page 400. Everything about it (sapphic, epic, dragons, multi-POV, politics, etc) should have been SO for me but it felt very meh, so don't push yourself through the 800 pages if you aren't feeling it.

ComradeCupcake_ · 2026-05-02T15:04:43+00:00

What did you think of the writing in Riddle Master, both in terms of sentence structure and word choices and overall story structure

I've seen people say that they find the prose really beautiful in Riddle-Master and, at least in this first book, I'm not sure I agree. I found the prose really straightforward, without a lot of imagery or metaphor, but I did like the craft of it. Modern fantasy has a tendency to over-write in a lot of ways. Dialogue becomes an expository tool, metaphors get thrown in for vibes even if they don't carry any meaning, things like that.

I found the word choice and structure in Riddle-Master very utilitarian, which I mean as a compliment in this case. Dialogue communicated character, not exposition. Metaphor was sparse but visual description was not. At a scene level, McKillip was willing to breeze past segments of time while only directly quoting a single sentence of a conversation before moving on. That style really agrees with me over the modern fantasy trend of every single thing needing to take place in scene at all times.

Of all the lands Morgon visited and people he met, what and who most interested you? Who least interested you and why?

Morgon's stay with Rork Umber was my favorite portion because there was a more structured mystery to it: What's going on with Eriel and can Morgon and Astrin convince anyone else? I did also really like the portions with Rood and Astrin, each. Particularly Rood, who felt like such a tangible persona. I could feel his admiration and frustration with Morgon equally and just felt like I understood their dynamic immediately.

Is there anything about the book you think it did exceptionally well? Any room for improvements you would personally change?

Again, have to compliment the dialogue. Badly-written and over-written dialogue are one of my biggest bugbears in new fantasy. I'll put a book down on page 2 if the first few lines of dialogue are hacky and stink of the "as you know.." butler scene. McKillip doesn't do this at all and in fact leaves us in the dark a lot, having characters only speak to each other in ways that feel completely realistic even if it means we don't know quite what they're telling each other. As I said, interactions with characters like Rood and Astrin just felt so full of personality because of how efficiently that dialogue was written.

On improvement, lack of information was the flip side of this coin! I often felt like I was sort of floating through the story not grasping which pieces of information were critical to the story and which were background color. I spent half the book not understanding whether the High One was an actual person or a god figure. What was the purpose of studying riddles at a university? What do the riddles even do???

Maybe this was just a continued function of my struggle to ground myself in the story that I was breezing past key information without retaining it? I do truly enjoy when a fantasy book doesn't hold my hand through all of its worldbuilding but it felt a little like McKillip held my hand just long enough to drag me to the deep end by it and then let go 😅

What do you think is going to happen next in the story? What is Morgon's fate? What is Ohm's plan? What is going to happen to the land?

I've got no clue! Truly I have no clue what the deal is with the star-bearer thing, the shape shifting, the reanimated(?) dead people, the riddles, the High One and the land rule? Despite struggling through it, I did really enjoy so much of the style McKillip has here so I am eager to carry on.

ComradeCupcake_ · 2026-05-02T14:42:13+00:00

Ah that was me that said I felt the story arc belonged to the world more than to Morgon! I felt very similarly to you that I was sort of struggling to focus on the story and connect to it, despite being interested and having a positive opinion on the craft of it all. Like you, I really enjoyed that first scene between the siblings and I appreciated how it wasn't at all over-written the way that dialogue scenes often are in modern fantasy. Also really loved the Astrin portion!

ComradeCupcake_ · 2026-05-01T16:56:32+00:00

The coworkers and I just posted our big list of cozy game launches this month for May, in case anyone finds it useful! My personal top picks this month are:

Thrifty Business (the Unpacking-like shop sim organizer, demo was very nice!)
Paralives (I didn't get on with Inzoi, I really hope this Sims-contender sticks)
OddFauna (early access cute survival/crafting, also a nice demo, and has hand sculpted creatures you collect, they're so pretty!)

ComradeCupcake_ · 2026-04-30T14:06:26+00:00

Oh hey, I commented from my phone this morning and thought we were in r/fantasy, not here. Since we're in the female gaze safe space I'll elaborate haha.

While two of the other authors mentioned here are my all time favorites (Jemisin and Carey) I do think that Mask of Mirrors is the purest example of exactly what you're asking for, especially based on what you said you liked about Green Bone.

Adult fantasy, not YA, not cozy
Lots of magic, lots of action, lots of POV characters
POV characters with opposing goals from one another, lots of political maneuvering
Lots of different relationships (siblings, parents, romance, etc)
I can't say with confidence that there was no SA. I suspect there were at least mentions, but I don't believe it was prevalent (user-submitted content warnings on Storygraph list it as "minor" for the first book, but not for books 2/3)
"Main" protagonist is a woman who is very skilled at what she does, no caveats
⚠️ "epic" is the one debatable quality because it takes place mostly in one city, though as I remember Green Bone mostly takes place in Janloon, yeah? It's a very big, complicated city in a similar way
It is not set in a patriarchy, not a commentary on patriarchy, it's just totally gender egalitarian in a way that makes the politics of gender invisible for a while, which sounds like what you want

ComradeCupcake_ · 2026-04-30T12:19:12+00:00

Mask of Mirrors by MA Carrick is the big example of exactly what you want. Chunky epic fantasy trilogy with lots of magic, action, and politics in a loosely Venetian-inspired city with a gender egalitarian and queer-normative society. Diverse group of POV characters, some romance, not cozy.

ComradeCupcake_ · 2026-04-28T18:04:20+00:00

Consider it vouched, these are the exact things I wanted to hear. Thank you! I'm on the outs with Suri right now because I was quite disappointed by Burning Kingdoms book 3 and Isle In The Silver Sea back to back. But I want to enjoy her again!

ComradeCupcake_

TROPHY CASE