Tales from The Dancing Moon’s fantasy world doesn’t draw from the usual suspects like Tolkien, Dungeons & Dragons, and Game of Thrones. Instead, its setting was born from a family trip to the Welsh seaside town of Rhossili, a striking place gifted with looming clifftops, pristine beaches, and the Worm’s Head tidal island, connected to shore by a treacherous path that vanishes beneath the waves at a moment’s notice. 

Hearing solo developer DjMonkey’s description of this fascinating location, where the rotted frame of a mysterious 19th century shipwreck provides an unusually morbid tourist attraction, it’s hard to disagree when he claims, “Wales is somewhat underrated as a location.”

Long before he even knew how to make games, DjMonkey was writing stories which combined Rhossili’s rich sense of drama and mystery with the portal fantasy genre—otherworldly coming-of-age series like The Chronicles of Narnia, The Wizard of Oz, and His Dark Materials—which were hugely popular in his childhood as a shy and fantasy-loving '90s kid. “I identified with these characters, with a feeling that there was more to life than just school,” he says.

He’s a technical artist by day, with Hollywood productions like Venom and Maleficent on his resume. Spending the pandemic getting to grips with Unreal Engine inspired an interest in game development, so he could tell his own stories and not a film director’s. “It had the perfect blend of technical and artistic skills that would allow someone like me to tell my own story in a unique way, and not in the service of someone else's vision,” says DjMonkey. As a result, his Welsh parallel universe named Ïllisor came to life as the setting for Tales from The Dancing Moon.

Don’t let the fantasy aesthetic and isometric viewpoint fool you into thinking this is Baldur’s Gate or Neverwinter Nights. It isn’t, although DjMonkey feels it could serve as a “gateway drug.” Tales from The Dancing Moon is a story-driven life-sim RPG that takes place across four seasons, where hack-and-slash monster-slaying holds equal importance to village-building, cooking, fishing and brewing tea. The cozy-game mechanics of Stardew Valley and Animal Crossing are reinvented for the isometric RPG, with the developer adding a dash of the capable characterwork you’d expect from the Critical Role cast between quests.

“You have heavy episodes with a lot of combat and die rolls. It gets very strategic and technical. After those moments, the cast go back to the village for a debrief. They just chat and go to shops. That was the part I enjoyed, those intimate calmer moments,” he says.

A 2D approach typically makes perfect sense for a solo developer—for instance, letting ConcernedApe create the depth that made Stardew Valley such a success. Working in 3D seems like it’d naturally be harder, but DjMonkey found the opposite was true when his own strengths lay in system design and storytelling. “I tried 2D,” he says. “I tried the Octopath Traveler games' [style] where it's 3D using 2D sprites. But then I realized that art was just not my strong suit. If I were to do all the art as well, it would have taken three times as long to get this game out the door!”

As you’d expect from a game so immersed in British culture, Tales from The Dancing Moon is a game with an enduring love for a steaming cup of tea—especially when the seasons change to a biting cold winter on the blustery coast. In Dungeons & Dragons, if you want to run at pace you concoct a Potion of Speed or memorize a Haste magic spell. Tales from The Dancing Moon achieves the same effect by preparing the right blend of tea leaves. 

Players are also invited to indulge in one other very British pastime: being a regular at the local pub. Ïllisor’s watering hole is called The Dancing Moon. “It's probably where I started to do the initial design because that was a very real place in my mind,” he says, recalling the 18th Century Worms Head Hotel he used to visit. Like many a local boozer in the remote parts of Wales, it’s the heart of the community where townsfolk congregate after dark.

When you’re not getting to know local characters like The Dancing Moon’s warm landlord Fergus (described by the dev as “a Santa Claus figure”) or the town’s anxious fisherwoman, you’ll often be out questing. There’s dangers in the form of the shadow-beasts roaming the fields, but you’re more likely to be gathering materials once you venture forth from the handcrafted town into a range of procedurally generated zones.

They may be randomly generated, but DjMonkey explains that their identity is still firmly rooted in the distinctive landscapes of the Gower Peninsula. The Dewiland Meadows is based on the tiny village of Llandewi, the Stocknel Swamps on Knelston’s salt marshes, and the Noneye Desert on Port Eynon’s vast sandy beaches.

With its focus on story over RPG stats, DjMonkey puts the game in the “discovery-based gameplay” category of Return of the Obra Dinn and The Outer Wilds. “As you play through the game, you're learning about things. That is your progression!” he explains. For instance, all you need to do to progress in Act 2 is learn to brew a specific tea—but the journey to discover the exact ingredients is far from straightforward to the uninitiated.

There’s a deeply personal touch to Tales from The Dancing Moon. DjMonkey’s brother produced the soundtrack and a friend provided 3D modeling support for assets he couldn’t find elsewhere. And the mysterious, fragmented storyline which occurs in the background about modern-day teenagers intruding into a strange world was inspired by his own school friends.

Their adventures shadow Tales from The Dancing Moon’s protagonist—the same way the story’s cast has long shadowed their author’s own thoughts. He even wrote a prelude to the game on Substack, which swaps Harry Potter’s famous train trip from Kings Cross Station to Hogwarts for a less romantic Great Western Railway trip from Paddington to Rhossili. “It's sad to say I don't actually talk to them that often, but I almost feel like they've lived on in my brain as these characters I've written for this story,” he says. 

Now players have started to piece together DjMonkey’s story for themselves, and he’s been relieved to find it’s resonated with them. Those characters and Rhossili—one man’s sole obsession for a long time—now live on in the imaginations of others.

Tales from The Dancing Moon is out now on the Epic Games Store.