MGC Reviews: Moonlighter

Picture this. You’re a small business owner that just wants to make an honest living working the store your family has built, but in order to do this you need to venture into dangerous dungeons to collect artifacts to sell in your store all the while trying to keep your clientele happy by making sure your prices are a fair market value (who sets this market value, we will never know) and nothing is overpriced. Welcome to the world of Moonlighter! This gem of a Roguelite game is set in the magical little town of Rynoka where you play as a shopkeeper that has to delve into dungeons that get more challenging as the game progresses all while telling a cute narrative about why the dungeons are there and how this town came to be.

Photo credit to IndieGameWebsite.com

You start the game with a short tutorial walking you through the mechanics of the game and then it lets you go. Half of your time is spent in the dungeons collecting loot and the other half is managing your shop, town and equipment as you venture deeper into each dungeon. I love games that let you manage a town and this adds in the shop that you have to run if you want to make any money in game. It doesn’t hold your hand with the pricing of the items in your store and it’s a lot of guesswork centered around a notebook that gives you certain thresholds of prices for items. This item may be worth over 150 gold, but it won’t give you the exact amount the right price is, so it’s up to you to set the price and hope it’s not too high or too low and you either make your customers angry or lose out on some gold. (Not to mention the the supply/demand mechanic that means demand for some products fluctuates from day to day.)

There were some small gripes about the combat in the game as far as certain hit boxes were concerned and some of the weapons that I used. I mostly stuck with the tried and true sword and shield combo for the vast majority of the game. I didn’t feel the need to venture out from that formula and it didn’t push me to want to try anything new even when there would be a weapon dropped in a dungeon. I think Cult of the Lamb does a really good job with making you try new ways to play that you may like even better, but that’s a review for another day. I just powered through each dungeon with my same weapon and upgraded as soon as I could to keep my damage output higher than the enemies. I will say that the difficulty scaling in the game is very well done. I always felt like the next dungeon was more difficult than the last (as it should be), but it was fair. The game would add things like poison or fire damage and it felt right for the scale. I was never bored with this game because of that.

The other minor gripe I had about the game is that I could power through it so quickly. I had just gotten to the point where your last towns person is unlocked (the banker) and I only used him once before I was done with the main story. It almost felt like the last dungeon was almost like the last drop on a roller coaster. Very exciting, but comes to an abrupt end. The final “Dungeon” door opens and you enter and end the game (after a final boss of course). It left me wanting more, which isn’t that bad of a thing and there is DLC I can get to go further in, but I just wanted to be able to enjoy my town a little more before the end of the game.

Promotional Screenshot for the game

One MAJOR like of this game is the design work the developers put in. I love the designs of the characters, the towns, the dungeons and especially the boss fights. Each boss has its flow and learning from each fight was an awesome experience. My favorite was the desert dungeon fight. I don’t want to spoil anything, but you can definitely tell there are classic Zelda influences in that fight and it filled me with nostalgia. They put a lot of care into making everything in the game feel special in its own way from the weapons and armor to the smallest junk items in the dungeons. I have to applaud the art AND sound design teams for this game for sure! I haven’t even talked about how great the music is. Absolutely perfect for this game.

Overall, if you like Roguelite/Roguelike games and haven’t checked out Moonlighter yet, do yourself a favor and go grab it! It’s a ton of fun and you can’t go wrong with this gem of a game that I feel needs more attention.

Rating: 8 out of 10

-Andrew