Settlemoon is an interesting take on the idler genre. Rather than progressively getting better and upgrading yourself to get bigger numbers, you just come back every so often to check in on the villagers of your town. It has a pretty simple gameplay loop that can go on for a really long time, especially because it doesn’t run 24/7. You need to activate moon phases which have a limited time for your town to make progress. That means you can’t just leave it running for a week, come back, and powerlevel a bunch and repeat the process. This makes it different from other idlers because it really wants you to idle by leaving it entirely and checking on it hours later. Playtime will probably be anywhere from 5 minutes to an hour or so, depending on how much you plan on doing.
First and foremost the biggest problem this game has is definitely it’s lack of information. There’s basically no words at all in this game and so everything is basically just vaguely given to the player in the form of short little picture books that give you the jist of what is going on. Other than that you’re given nothing. You don’t get names for the monsters, the quests, the materials, the items you’re selling or their effects, the buildings you’re making or what those buildings do, the effects of- You get the idea. The game gives you literally nothing because it’s purely visual. On one hand it doesn’t need words, but on the other hand it does make me hate the game more than I probably would otherwise. I'm just constantly asking "what is that?" and "what does that even do?" with no answer other than to figure it out or ignore it.
While this game doesn’t need words to spell out the story flat out to the player and pad its already padded playtime with dialogue boxes, it is really annoying trying to figure things out with literally no feedback whatsoever. Unless you look up guides and you play this game blind, you’re gonna spend a lot of time looking at everything and not know what the heck anything means. You might eventually notice that certain buildings have certain tags but not know what any of them mean. You might take a while figuring out how the leveling system works, or how to start selling merch, etc. You’re bound to figure it out eventually, but it might be frustrating to be dealing with the pure vagueness that is the entirety of this game.
Still, without any information the base gameplay loop is there and easy to grasp if you give it a chance. It might take a bit to get a feel for it but you’ll eventually get it. Set a moon cycle if there isn’t one, collect your silvers, redeem quests for materials, deliver materials to shops for various items to sell, and that’s basically it. Expand your town over time, build new buildings for either utility purposes or to be cosmetic, grow your town’s level and slowly take on harder bosses to progress further. The town does everything, you just need to come back and check on it from time to time.
Other than that it's a cute and simple little time killer every so often. Settlemoon is designed to be played every couple hours or so, or whenever you feel like it honestly, and isn’t really designed to be opened constantly like other idlers. Although, while it's a nice game to play between games, I find that it’s price point is a bit steep for what it offers. On a sale, perhaps, but with how little there is to do combined with how little information is given to the player, I personally found the game to slowly grow more boring over time as I make my way deeper into the game but still be given close to nothing to really work with. I would really like it more if it wasn’t so vague and clunky by design. There’s just nothing for me to personally latch onto after a certain point of doing the same thing over and over again until I find the next piece of the puzzle.
