Moondrop

Harvest Moon with a Majora's mask type twist! Keep restarting your farm and unlocking upgrades until you figure it out. The farming aspects are unique and interesting. It was cool doing trial and error until I figured out what was the best use of my days each reset. Addicting! Sat down to play and played for 4 hours straight first shot; still plenty of gameplay to go!

Moondrop is a really interesting game that combines the activities of farming from Stardew Valley but with a twist. You need to be strategic about where to place your plants so that they are able to generate more money to buy other resources with. Each day is a run like run-based games, and slowly you learn the systems well enough to be able to go further and further up the mountain. It's a fun game loop that combines genres in neat ways and I look forward to when it is out of early access.

The roguelike strikes again! Put some game mechanics in a blender and throw it at the wall... I think this one sticks! Moondrop is sort of two games in one: the first is the farming, collecting, and crafting progression, and the second is a scramble to clear obstacles, grab items, and solve puzzles in a procedurally-generated maze. Each gives the player tools to succeed in the other. The roguelite progression system worked well for me at meeting me in the middle of my learning curve, with a win on my sixth run. I played the Early Access 1.41 build, breaking my "no Early Access games" policy because I like the podcast! Glad I did, and I intend to come back and play the finished game. As it stands, it's unique, interesting, and lots of fun, though of course it isn't in a fully-polished state yet. I shy away from farm sim games usually to protect my time from getting sucked away by a slow-paced game with lots of filler... Moondrop is NOT that. Everything is on a clock, and while the farm days are almost always long enough to get everything important done and then some, I was always on the scurry trying to make the most of each day. It's fast-paced but (usually) not frantic, and overall very charming and chill to play. One suggestion: autosave after Trail segments. I took a break at the beginning of a farm day after a Trail, then when I reloaded the game I was back at the Trail.

https://youtu.be/1Z_kGztnJGo Moondrop is an awesome night day cycling game with a relaxing vibe, resources to gather, mineing,exploration, and upgrades. Its harvest moon on steriods, as far as pace. But at the same time you dont feel rushed playing it. The game is actually pretty fun when you get a few upgrades that make farming a bit easier. Maybe an endless mode would be a great addition that you could build a farm and actually play as you would playing stardew valley or a similar game. The end Goal is getting as many upgrades in your town as you can and making your self a farming god. I play it in this youtube video, I thought I had previously made a youtube video on this but the save got corrupted or something. So I debuted it on my channel with the latest update :D

Harvest Moon on crack. No boring nonsense and engaging exploration. Do it.

TL;DR: Relaxing game to end the day with. Its certainly a different type of game. There is no combat, enemies, or greedy corporations trying to take over your grandpa's farm. Its just you, some mountain trails, a cozy little farmhouse, an occasional field of chain reacting bomb rocks, and a mist that is presented as soft and dreamy and not at all an eldritch horror DESPITE its documented all consuming nature and how it can only be temporarily held at bay by magical moonlight powered barriers... As I said, different type of game. At its core, most of your time will be spent in a freeform puzzle of your own complexity and design; one that happens to wear a farming sim skin. Like most farm sims, plants need to be watered daily to grow. Unlike most, time is not as much a factor; instead its about matching plants together with other plants based on their types, arrows, and random abilities. If you plant two seeds together that compliment each other, they will grow a little every day. If they interfere with each other, they will shrink a little every day. Plan your farm out correctly, and you can be harvesting from the same plant every day, but plan it poorly, and your plants will never grow at all. As you progress, you'll unlock more plant types, attributes and abilities that you have to plan around... or not. Its entirely possible to "win" on the first farm with only the starting plant types, so how large and complicated you want your farm to be is up to you. Just make sure you keep your farmland lit; the mists will swallow up anything not properly lit and you will lose whatever work you did in that area. The second part of the game involves exploring the mountain and completing trials (minigames). The area is chock full of resources to gather as well, but it can only be accessed on certain days. Each trip also gets more and more expensive, so poor farm layouts or poor RNG can cause you to miss vital trips. All in all, its a relaxing game suitable for when you're trying to wind down. Its possible to create sprawling fields of profit if you want, but its also possible (but not as easy) to win with as few as 8 plants. This one will only be as challenging as you want it to be.

Enjoyable. It's not a game where I feel there's much point in playing after you've gotten all achievements, but I found getting all achievements to be fun. I found a lot of my fun in figuring stuff out, from initial confusion and failing, to heavy optimisation at the end. There's not really much to say, if it looks fun, it probably will be. Its not an endless time sink, but not everything needs to be. Solid 7.5/10 for me.