I'd been playing this for the last couple weeks, and I just finished it last night. It's a wonderful and inventive game, and I had a great time with it.
Like everyone else, I had a difficult time getting started and getting into the groove of things— I think I got a game over two or three times before even learning about the monster catching mechanic, because I kept trying to explore the town and wasn't managing my time properly. Even so, sussing out how the game worked was intriguing and I quickly made to call to avoid using a guide and instead just feel my way through the game. While intending no shade to those who did use a guide, I found it to be incredibly engaging this way. moon can be opaque, to be sure, but there's so much going on in its world— so many events to see, animals to catch, clues to find, leads to follow— that I never didn't have something to do or check out (so much that I actually started jotting down notes). Granted, it did feel aimless at times— it took me a long time to reach Dr Hager, so I had no real sense of progression— but the upside is that it's a game that really rewards curiosity. For instance, Curio's shop has an animal corpse, Mackarther, that has no immediately clear way to catch its soul; not even the monster book gives much of a clue. Yet it was clear that the solution would be here, so I decided to simply wait around and see if something happened— an event that happens at a certain time, say. Lo and behold, not only does Mackarther appear at night, but it also revealed to me that Curio runs a different shop at night, with different items, which in turn gave me new things to follow up on. And this is just one example: following the clues, or just a hunch, is almost guaranteed to lead to something (and with that, some love points).
In a way, I think it was to everyone's benefit that moon took so long to reach our shores. Because for a game that's over two decades old, it feels shockingly contemporary— not simply in terms of its mechanics and expected play, but its themes and even its visual style. It is really difficult for me to imagine this game finding much of an audience circa 1997, but it fits in perfectly in our post-Undertale, post-Hylics world.
Though, it's kind of hilarious that this game is a stated influence on Undertale, because despite the similarities, they have massively different themes. They both work from the same premise of "deconstructing" the standard RPG narrative, by showing how behaving like the RPG Hero would actually be sociopathic: ignoring everyone's pleas, stealing their stuff, killing the wildlife, and otherwise leaving destruction in their wake. But they go in wildly different directions. In Undertale, the message— or at least what a lot of people take from the Genocide Route— seems to be that these characters are as real as us, and you should feel bad about killing them. Meanwhile, moon ends by saying that none of the good you did in the world actually matters, because this is a video game; it's all programmed and pre-determined scenarios and outcomes, and you can't find any meaningful love within— only from outside the game, in the real world. It has a point, but it's still a shockingly, remarkably cynical ending for a game of its ilk, and I love it for that.