Moonstone Island

I keep revisiting this game trying to like it. I love all the concepts in this game, but none of them are particularly well done. My main issue is that this game lacks heart, which feels very subjective of a critique but let me try to explain: The procedurally generated world combined with the emptiness of the general sky setting makes the world feel very flat. In Cassette beasts you're drawn in to a world that intentionally feels wrong, yet it feels alive and cozy due to the characters in it and the handcrafted nature of it/narrative drive. In terraria and minecraft you're invited to explore an untouched wilderness and make it your own. This game fails to trigger either sensation from me. Most 'hostile' environments you encounter don't feel hostile, they just straight up provide some environmental condition that kills you through a constant drain on your health. The in-game solution is grinding for better gear so that you can explore these small segments of land with a slightly different colour than the other islands you've already been on. The progression being locked being moonstones and those spawning once per island, and having them be difficult to find except at night, but you also need to get back to your home in time to not pass out is perhaps the least fun grind mechanic I've ever seen. I'd rather fish 1000 fish or play stage 1 of satisfactory a 100 more times than do this. The scale of how many moonstones you need for basic progression vs how rare they are as a resource is ridiculous. For example to get poison immunity (which is frankly useless), you need to gather 9 moonstones, also I'm sure the glider or greenhouse are cool, but I'll never bother to grind for them. This is honestly somehow more grindy than GregTech without any of the satisfaction, it feels like a mobile game trying to get me to pay for more moonstones. Further making things worse is that Basic functionality and quality of life of playing the taming part of the game are also entirely locked behind this artificial scarcity of the moonstone resource. You cannot colonise another island and build a house or a spirit storage (i.e. "Pokemon PC") far from town without spending your precious moonstones. The combat, as someone who loves games like slay the spire, is poorly designed and not fun. A new season comes, you fly around to all the arches to pick up purges and then purge the bad cards from whatever elemental spirits you need to beat the next boss fight. There's not a lot...