Hi there, moths! I'm in love with this game's dreamy, floaty aesthetic and I want to explore it someday. I am a little afraid it'll have free-to-play game tendencies and demand more time or money than I want to give it. Should I be worried about playing it as a filthy casual moth?
This artwork's original source is 下次再相见时，一起去水母飞舞的夜空中赏月吧 by Claudiaaa叶蓟: Weibo, Twitter, Instagram
TL;DR, sorry for the ramble: it's a beautiful and mostly relaxing game with a great in game community and vibe, and if you know that you are able to avoid FOMO and just do your own thing and enjoy it - I say go for it, you won't regret it.
I'm not sure this is the best time for me to answer since I've just found out about a change they've made that is really making me angry, but I'll try and not let that influence what I have to say too much:
Remove the game from the company that runs it, and you have a beautiful refuge to escape to when life is too stressful, you just want to fly around some fantastic scenery for a while, find a quiet corner and play some music, or hang out with real life/in game friends and be silly.
It can be completely free to play, and the absolute best thing about it is that there are no ads.
Once you hit the actual game mechanics though, things get a little more frustrating, and are very obviously geared towards getting people to spend money. There is a constant stream of new cosmetics to buy, and while they do come back, it can take a year+, so people feel pressure to buy everything at once just in case, which is why people feel the need to grind daily, but which can only really be sustained if you buy candles with real money (or if you don't give in to the FOMO and buy all the things and instead just stick to things you actually like and can afford).
The greed is also obvious in their removing features players enjoy and use regularly, to ensure candle running doesn't become too "easy", which it isn't even with the work arounds they've removed. They like to claim it's a game about cooperation, but when people cooperate in a way they didn't intend us to (in this case by using an in game feature - shared memories, to help solo players through multi-player doors when no one else is around to help), they have a massive "NO, not like THAT!!11" breakdown and ruin it (meanwhile, the "chibi fall" which lets you glitch through the doors on your own and without helping strangers, and only after you've spent a large amount of in game currency on a chibi mask or spells, has been left as is, so it really isn't about the cooperation at all, it's about control).
They've been known to "fix" any issue that results in players getting more candles as soon as humanly possible and taking back the extra candles, but game breaking bugs that can even stop people logging in altogether often remain unresolved for weeks or months at a time, and their "compensation" when this happens is to extend the times events stay around so you have more time to buy their items, or the double wax cakes event, which, without increasing the max candles you can collect per day, only helps you shave a couple of minutes off of your daily candle run.
Now, you absolutely can ignore the pressure to spend money, I have and intend to continue to, but it does mean you have to invest more time playing if you want to get max daily candles, and put up with That Game Company's shenanigans. The first part works for me - I was looking for a game I could log in to 2-3 times a day and still have stuff to do each time, and which doesn't demand much from me mentally, and Sky perfectly fits that brief. As for the shenanigans, I can't lie, the frustration is growing, but as long as I don't spend money on the game I can't really complain too much, so I'll just keep playing until it becomes too much (or they change their ways and start listening to players and how we play the game instead of to stakeholders who just want more profit).