Settlemoon

I'm going to start with the bad: This game is really hard to comprehend. As a deliberate choice, it shows almost no glyphs at all. Part of the game is figuring out what to do and what's going on, and a lot of that is genuinely interesting and engaging. However, this game is also a slow-burn kind of game, where you're supposed to check in and leave and come back every so often, and that slowness of feedback to things you try, as well as how easy it is to forget what the controls are and what you were looking at/trying to figure out last time you were playing, does not mix well together with a game that tries to convey to you as little as possible to let you figure it out for yourself. That being said, it is a really cute game with a lot of fun elements. The basics are pretty clear with only a little experimentation, and you can have a lot of fun just playing around managing this little MMO-like town and letting adventurers come in and stock up before going off to fight bosses and go on quests for you. The visual style is gorgeous, the game feels like it's overflowing with charm and little semi-easter eggs, the way that the music swells and grows on itself as more is unlocked and adventurers join up to add to the soundtrack, and the genuinely intriguing lore drip-fed to the aspiring player is highly enjoyable. Also, cute bugs. Don't get to see that very often, but it's nice to see moths and things getting some time in the limelight sometimes. Be on the lookout for pop-up kobold barbecue grills.

Settlemoon is the anti-idle game. It is very much an idle game -- most gameplay mechanics amount to waiting for things to happen, and time advances even when you have the game closed -- but it's the inverse of what most of us think of as an idle game. Settlemoon is not an incremental number simulator that rewards you with an illusion of explosive growth for either waiting or doing literally anything, nor is it a Cookie Clicker-esque parody of such dopamine-exploiting machines. Settlemoon has a few numbers going up, for idle game standards at least, but the bulk of its essence is idly existing in a world that bustles around you, laying out new toys for that world to play with as it reacts to you and as you react to it. You idle because you wait for your little friends to do their business with your town and their quests. You idle because your little friends dance and prance all around the screen and it's fun to let them do their thing. You idle because you're mulling over what a few of those fancier friends show you, and you know they are leaving so much unsaid yet they won't answer your questions directly. You idle because the mysteries of Settlemoon will reveal themselves to you in due time... if you look for them. But honestly? No pressure if it takes a while. Settlemoon's a kind world, one that keeps reaching out to you with more clues. You'll be rewarded for putting in the effort to puzzle it together, but it will neither pressure you nor punish you for progressing slowly. The world's happy just to have your company, and it does everything in its power to be transparent about that. It's the antidote to the typical idle game. If you don't like idle games, you have a lot of reasons to like Settlemoon. If you do like idle games, play Settlemoon anyway, it's far healthier for your soul than Microtransaction Clicker 32 ReWaited EX.

I really want to adore this game, but I don't think I could recommend it in good faith, at least not in its current state. To start, the presentation is amazing. The sprite art is really good, the soundtrack is nice, the ambiance is good. I really enjoy the aesthetics of the game. The storybook way of telling the narrative of the game is cute, and the premise of building an rpg town is a promising one, I'm excited to see where you go with it. The main gripe I have with the game is mostly in how it teaches you its mechanics. Settlemoon mostly just throws you in and you're just left to guess on how the systems of the games work. Let me provide a few examples. For starters, you can place buildings down, which either offers benefits in the form of being able to sell certain materials, increasing the number of quests you can put up, or increasing the level of your town. There's also proximity bonuses, which further increase the level of your town. The issue is this is conveyed with a clock icon showing up, and a percentage increasing. The imagery of a clock showing up usually conveys something involving time, which also happens to be a major element in this game, and the player usually isn't going to immediately jump to "well this further increases the level boost I get". Additionally, what synergizes with which, and how much of a boost you get isn't exactly immediately obvious at a glance, and you're just going to have to tediously place down items to try and maximize the value you get out of these boosts. Another example. In my quest menu, there is a rectangular icon depicting a character (that I assume is an adventurer based on the fact that it has a level, but I couldn't tell you for sure, maybe it's a special enemy), with a level of 10. In that same menu, there are UI elements that happen to perfectly match the shape of the icon. So I drag it down and it lights up indicating that the two elements interact..... nothing happens. Ok, well maybe if I put it on a quest something will happen? So I click on the icon again, I drag it to a completed quest and the scroll opens, indicating again that they should interact...... nothing. I still have absolutely no idea what it does. The game would benefit from a more streamlined onboarding experience, whether that's a tutorial, tooltips, or some mixture of both. The nature of the game doesn't necessarily help the onboarding experience either, since the game encourages you to be relatively hands-off for large portions of gameplay, and you're likely not going to be paying close attention to it in order to get a good sense of what every system actually does, which exacerbates these problems. Additionally, there are some quality-of-life problems. For example, buying materials. The icons over the adventurers' heads can, and very frequently do overlap with each other and obstruct information. When you're later into the game and you have plenty of adventurers in your town, it gets really cumbersome since you can't drag adventurers' from that menu. you'll have to leave the menu, pick an adventurer, drag it away from a crowd, and go back to the menu, just to get a clear view of what they're actually selling. You have to do this one at a time, and also keep track of them because they'll move back into the town and blend in with the crowd again. It leads to click fatigue, very very VERY quickly. Additionally, picking up medium-large quantities of items from your inventory can also be annoying. There are no alternative clicks (as far as I'm aware) that allow you to pick up 5, or 10 at a time, so if you want to pick a specific large amount you'll have to hold it down until you land on the right number. The problem if you have too many, you can't just conveniently put one back in your inventory (again, as far as I'm aware), so you either have to suck it up or just back out of the menu to try again from scratch. To summarize, it has the potential to be a very pleasant experience, but it's bogged down by poor onboarding and a lot of small nagging quality of issues. I did still enjoy my time in spite of some of these issues, but it's hard for me to recommend the game as is, because of how much trouble it gave me.