Moonstone Island is like a mix of Pokemon, Harvest Moon & Slay the Spire

Sandy Spink has refined the best parts of several games and combined them into an adorable, creature-collecting, life sim.

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For those that love Pokemon, Harvest Moon, and Slay the Spire, Moonstone Island looks to be the perfect mixture of all of these. Furthermore, the creator, Sandy Spink, has managed to take the elements he enjoys about these games and distilled them into their best parts. We spoke to Spink about his creation process, the inspiration between the mixture of genres, and more.

In Moonstone Island, players take on the role of an alchemist who must live for a year in a village in order to complete their training. Part of this training will involve collecting creatures, tweaking a house, and building relationships with some of the townsfolk.

A brief look at Moonstone Island reveals that the game has a whole lot of mechanics and systems at play. For an indie game, there’s a rich furrow for players to dig into. “I was trying to solve some of the problems of some of my favorite games, which is sort of a tall task,” Spink explains. “I don’t love the combat system in Pokemon but I do love the creature collecting.” This process of enjoying one element and wanting to tweak another resulted in Spink creating more systems and fine-tuning them for his game.

Spink continued on to talk about the various biomes in the game, how he thought about creating the deck-builder aspect, and much more. Head to Steam and add Moonstone Island to your Wishlist now. Like what you see here? You can find more developer interviews on the GamerHubTV YouTube channel. We’ve also got the Shacknews YouTube channel where you can discover reviews, unboxing videos, guides and so much more.

Guides Editor

Hailing from the land down under, Sam Chandler brings a bit of the southern hemisphere flair to his work. After bouncing round a few universities, securing a bachelor degree, and entering the video game industry, he's found his new family here at Shacknews as a Guides Editor. There's nothing he loves more than crafting a guide that will help someone. If you need help with a guide, or notice something not quite right, you can message him on X: @SamuelChandler 

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