Moonlighter is one of those games where the concept alone had me nearly smashing the preorder button the second I read it. Not only is this a game where you dive into randomly generated dungeons within portals, you get to use that loot to upgrade weapons, craft potions and even sell it in your very own upgradeable shop! Part rogue-lite, part action adventure RPG, part shopkeep sim, it was all of my dreams come true!
Rynoka is a small town that formed near the discovery of portals to other worlds that they call dungeons. Adventurers would dive into the portals, get all sorts of treasure and eventually get booted out, wounded and beaten. As time went on and things became more dangerous, people started leaving town. Now, as the adventurous and curious shopkeeper AND hero, you’ll take the portals on, one at a time, seeking to uncover clues about a potential fifth portal, draw people back to town and become a master shopkeep all at once. To do this, your days are split into two parts – day and night. You can only open your shop during the day, but if you don’t care much or selling items, don’t have much to sell one day or just want to kick some butt and grab some loot, you can dive in a portal during the day and then do it again at night. You can also pass time by sleeping in your bed, giving yourself your well-rested bonuses and skipping ahead for things like timed quests.
The real meat of the game is in dungeon exploration. There are four portals to unique dungeons, although all but one is locked to begin with and each one is only unlocked through defeating the boss in the previous dungeon. Each dungeon is themed and has its own enemies and items. Battle and movement are akin to the classic 2D Zelda titles, but your only equipment at any given time is whatever’s in your bag, two weapons you can swap between on the fly (bows, swords with shields, spears, etc.) and healing potions. Each enemy has a particular type of item it can drop, and there are treasure chests scattered through each floor as well. The deeper you go in a dungeon, the better the odds for not only better items but items with better effects. See, in Moonlighter, many of the items you pick up have effects on one another or where they can be placed in your bag until you get out of the dungeon. Items might have to be placed on the top or bottom of your bag, for example, or they might break if you take too many hits, or even destroy an item in a certain direction from it once you leave. These negatives are somewhat easily avoided – you can just make it so that the negative effect is pointed at an empty spot in the bag or place it on an outside edge where it points outside the bag. Some of these effects can even be good, such as turning the stack of items in a certain direction into it when you leave the dungeon (potentially turning cheap items into very valuable ones), removing bad effects from items or automatically sending an item in any given direction to your shop. This last one is especially helpful as you can only hold a very limited number of items at any given time and you’ll almost always find far more than you can hold in a single journey. You do have some magical items to help out: one allows you to escape the dungeon with all of your items at any given time for a price, another allows you to sell items and receive a small portion of their value, and one will allow you to not only exit the dungeon, you’ll leave a warp point right back to where you were so you can return, say, right outside the boss’s door instead of having to fight through all three floors first.
Once you’re safely out of the dungeon, time will have progressed. If you left during the day, it’ll be night; if you left during the night, it’ll be day and you’ll have your sleeping bonus again. Items can be used to craft weapons and armor, enchant your weapons and armor (to give them permanent buffs), craft potions or be placed in your shop. Selling items is essentially a guessing game: when you get a new item you’ll have no idea how much it’s worth and can put it up for sale for any price you want. Mark it too high and people won’t buy it; mark it too low and people will be more than happy to snag a bargain. You automatically track these in your journal, and people’s facial expressions make it easy to tell how they feel about the price. So if you try to sell an item for 5,000 and they think it’s too much, and then mark it down to 2,000 and they think it’s a great bargain, you’ll easily see even weeks later that the sweet spot is clearly between 2,000 and 5,000. Sadly, that’s most of the game as far as selling items goes. You can put various decorative items in your shop for all sorts of bonuses, you can put items into a discount bin to sell them quicker, you can tackle thieves and eventually you’ll even get quests to kill a certain number of enemies or have a certain number of a particular item, but basically once you know the correct value of all the items you’ll just be putting items out and selling them. I personally enjoyed this, as the game is set up to where you’ll likely still be finding out the proper prices of rarer items when you get to the next portal, but those looking for more depth may be disappointed.
My biggest issue with Moonlighter was easily the number of bugs I found. There are secrets to be found throughout each floor of each dungeon, but coming back out of secret rooms often left me unable to attack in one or two directions for 10-20 seconds. Once when I was heading into a boss fight the game crashed on me; luckily it was just a matter of restarting the game and taking the short journey back to the boss again, but it was still frustrating and nerve-racking that it would happen again. Worst of all, though, was the shop assistant. You only get your assistant after upgrading your shop a couple times, and their job is to automatically sell any items for you during the day that are in their chest while you go dungeon-diving in exchange for 30% of your earnings. I never once earned a single piece of gold from them! I tried three separate times and always lost my items without earning any money at all. I searched online and multiple people had this issue; some had fixes that forced the assistant to give you the money through specific orders of actions, but it never worked for me. Finally, while not a bug, I would’ve paid a ridiculous amount of in-game gold to be able to automatically sort my items. I’d end up with multiple stacks of the same items and would want to put them together, but to do so I’d have to individually swap items around one stack at a time. This is made even more annoying when you have multiple chests with items and your big storage chest has multiple screens (which were also a bit buggy).
Overall, Moonlighter has a lot of great ideas and fumbles several others. It feels like a game that just wasn’t quite done, and that last little bit of polish would’ve gone a long way. With that said, if developer Digital Sun Games ever makes a Moonlighter 2 I’ll be all over it.
Moonlighter is available on PS4 (reviewed), Xbox One and Steam (Windows, Mac)
I received a free copy of this game in exchange for an honest review.