Moonlight Peaks strikes just the right balance between cutesy and deep

Everything about Moonlight Peaks is so tailormade for cuteness that it almost turned me off the game at first. It’s a cozy farming sim like many others — your first task is to create a character, who soon leaves home to embark on the adventure of restoring and moving into your old family home, conveniently located on just enough land to start a homestead. It’s a tale as old as time, or at least as old as Harvest Moon. In Moonlight Peaks, though, your mom is a witch and your father is Dracula, which makes you an unusual mix of witch and vampire, and your new neighbors are werewolves, seers, deities, and a few regular humans. And while a lot of the mechanics of the game are familiar — growing crops to process and sell them; becoming friends with townsfolk by way of gift-giving; filling a museum with every unique creature you can catch — Moonlight Peaks finds its footing in its personality, which is unapologetically dramatic.

Often, when I try new cozy farming games like this one, I bounce off them after a few days. I’ve played Stardew Valley and Fields of Mistria and Coral Island and Palia and My Time at Portia and Fantasy Life and Harvest Moon and Story of Seasons — should I continue? In short, as both a cozy game fanatic and a video game critic, it’s tough to make me feel like one of these games is doing something interesting and surprising enough to continue past the first few days. And while I have plenty of notes on the pacing of Moonlight Peaks, in which I have yet to resolve several storylines or reveal the entire map, the game is notable not just because it’s different enough from the similar games that came before it. It’s notable because it’s fucking fun to play, it’s cute as hell (literally), and it has magic.