Moonlighter is a gorgeous-looking game with an unfortunate number of flaws that still do not change how much I love it.

Gameplay
The gameplay loop of Moonlighter involves you running a shop during the day and crawling dungeons at night. This is an excellent concept and both features are executed well but have the same issue of being a bit monotonous over time.
That being said, I still enjoy both aspects of the game, though I was ready for it to be over before it was.

The shopkeeping sees you running back and forth between keeping your shelves stocked and making sales, in addition to helping customers and stopping thieves. You have the option of setting your own prices on items which can be really in-depth if you want it to be. I personally didn't care to get too into the price adjustments so I just looked up the best pricing for the items. But if you want to you can do price testing by adjusting the price of items based on customers' feelings toward them.

The dungeons are weaker than the shopkeeping but still enjoyable. The enemies are fairly varied in each section, but the problem comes from how long you'll spend in each dungeon. When you beat one, the weapons you take into the next one aren't going to be up to snuff. So the start of the next dungeon is going to be tough and time-consuming, with enemies dealing a lot of damage and taking way too many hits to kill. And of course, you need the materials in that dungeon to buy the next best weapons and armor so you can't really do anything about it except grind. This is the major issue with the game and why I stopped playing for quite a while when I got to the 2nd-to-last dungeon.
The combat is also slow. Sword swings are deliberate and a bit difficult to chain together. If you've read some of my other reviews you know that I don't care for 3-hit combos as it is. The attacks and dodges all feel a bit heavier than I would like, but I can't fault them too much because this feels like a stylistic choice and, even if I would have preferred it to be a bit different, it still works and is fun.
As an additional aspect of the dungeon-crawling, there is also inventory management. You must manage your backpack to make sure that you bring back the best stuff or stuff that you need for upgrades. Fortunately, the game has a very good favorites system to make it very easy to tell what items you are looking for. Plus, there are some fun aspects to the inventory management, like cursed items that can only be placed in certain places, or items that teleport items next to them home right away. There are also secret areas including one that contains a chest that teleports back to your base, freeing up your backpack space.

Story
The story to Moonlighter is good, if a bit sparse. Your character lives on a world where they delve into these dungeons to recover technology beyond their means. As the story progresses you learn more about the origin of these dungeons, but I won't spoil it here. I'll admit that the ending is quite unexpected, and probably not in a great way.

Characters
Personality-wise, there isn't much to the characters. There isn't a whole lot of dialogue either. But the character designs are spectacular.

Art
Moonlighter has probably the most beautiful and detailed pixel art and animation I've ever seen. Everything is animated so smoothly and has a wonderful sense of movement. From the shop assistant putting up her hair to the enemy attack animations, you will never get tired of watching things happen in this game.

Music
The music in Moonlighter is by David Fenn who previously did Titan Souls and would go on to work on Death's Door. If you've played any of these three games you'll know that his music is beautifully atmospheric and matches the game's aesthetic perfectly. In Moonlighter, he focuses on simple melodies with clean rhythm and understated harmonies to make something that is not too complex but always a great listen. Even if you haven't played the game, I'd recommend checking him out on Spotify. I think he'll be going places after this and Death's Door.

btw, you can play this for free on mobile if you have a Netflix account (at least at the time of writing this). Definitely worth trying!

This game has a very simple yet addicting game loop of looting and selling, and each dungeon is unique and fun to explore. I enjoyed manning the shop and getting upgrades for the town; it felt incredibly rewarding to finally see Rynoka fully developed by the end. Side quests are a fun way to get a bit of extra cash if you're running low, but for the most part I ended up ignoring them once I'd entered the fourth dungeon as my focus shifted to collecting materials to upgrade my gear.

The Golem Dungeon was tough and served as a brilliant introduction to the game. It allowed me to learn the mechanics of combat through trial-and-error (as both a souls-like and rogue-like enthusiast I was a huge fan of this) and helped set the scene for the rest of the game. The increasing difficulty of each floor balanced it out fairly to ensure it's still a challenge by the time you've figured it all out.

The Forest Dungeon was a bloody nightmare, and that's what made it so much fun to push through. The added poison damage on top of regular enemy attacks hitting like a truck made it a gruelling challenge on my first runs. I believe this is the dungeon I died in the most (though I still managed to beat the game for the first time in under 40 deaths). It only took a couple of tries to beat the Guardian, but the fight left my heart racing by the end of it—the best kind of feeling a game can give you, in my opinion.

However, once I got past that second dungeon, everything became... significantly easier. I don't know if it's because I'd got really good at the game, or if it was my switch to using a bow, but I tore through the last two dungeons in a matter of hours. In fact, I beat the fourth dungeon on my first run (provided I used the catalyst right before the boss to bank all my stuff). Are bows just overpowered? Did the game fail to scale the difficulty in a meaningful and challenging way? I'm not sure. But this same problem persisted even to the final boss, who I beat with an almost-entirely full health bar. I'm not saying it wasn't fun—I had an amazing time playing—but in the latter half of the game I really missed that sense of wonder and challenge I felt in the first two dungeons.

On the road to 100%, I've found I'll be experiencing a few roadblocks. Mainly, the fact that once you've beat a boss you can't challenge them again unless you want to play the entire game all over again (or reset your save). This means that getting the achievements for beating all four Guardians hitless will be absolutely agonising and will involve a process of try, reset, try, reset, repeat. I understand part of why this is put in place from a lore perspective, but giving players no way of attempting these achievements again but to replay the whole game was a poor choice in my opinion.

Overall, I'd consider Moonlighter to be a very fun casual rogue-like with an addicting gameplay loop, simple combat and a satisfactory amount of build variety. I'd recommend playing it on the hardest difficulty if you're looking for a bit of extra challenge past the early game, but if you're just in for a fun ride and interesting story then playing the game on the intended difficulty is still a rewarding experience.

Hit a point with Moonlighter where I realized the game wasn't getting harder, the numbers were just getting bigger.

Everything you get in the next dungeon makes you double the money, enemies do double the damage and have double the health, weapon upgrades cost twice as much, and until you upgrade to the next tier you're going to be useless - but once you get the next sword and set of armor, you'll tear through the dungeon in one sweep. It's a shallow stat check masquerading as progression.

While you aren't doing that, you're manning the shop which is a mind numbing loop of guessing prices and trial and erroring your way to successful capitalism. Once that's figured out you just toss everything on the shelves and occasionally tackle robbers while you wait for people to buy your shit already.

These two elements are the core of the game, that while I don't really enjoy them, they are very playable and intuitive at least. So many other elements this game has to offer feel just straight up unfinished.

There's a handful of weapon status effects, which all just do damage over time to the point where I'm not actually sure if there's any real difference between them.

There's a town building 'minigame' - you can invest in 5 shops/services that open in your town. Two of these (potion/weapon shop) are absolutely necessary for progress even in the very early game, one is actually a really nice QOL thing where you can buy previous dungeon's items at a premium instead of crawling back through them over you've moved on. The other two I couldn't tell you, one was a banker and I finished the game before he even set up shop.

There's people walking around the town at all times, and people in your shop, but they serve basically no purpose outside of being set decoration - from a trailer or description it looks like there's a dynamic little town you're in charge of cleaning up a la Stardew Valley, but in practice it's just two or three static NPCs you talk to once you have enough money to upgrade your equipment.

There's an inventory management system - when you're in a dungeon, your inventory fills up completely on the first floor every time without fail, so you have to be constantly managing what you want to keep, or toss for a little bit of money. Some items also have 'curses' that affect adjacent items. This is a pretty cool mechanic at first but it just gets old pretty fast once you consistently end up spending around half your dungeon time in an inventory screen.

And I haven't even mentioned the story which gets a bit of attention in the first 5 mins, gets neglected for the entire game and then gets wrapped up in maybe the most unhinged and baffling way possible in the game's final 10 minutes. It really has to be seen to be believed.

As much as I'm ragging on this game, I will say that it looks and sounds absolutely fucking gorgeous. The pixel art and animation throughout this game, while nothing groundbreaking, is incredibly well done. No visual aspect feels undercooked at all - menus, shop screens, the journal pages, enemy and character design all feels so consistently good that it genuinely makes the game much more enjoyable to get through. While the dungeons play pretty repetitive and boring, they at least all look super unique and interesting. The music and sound design is also great. It does a good job of fitting the world and dungeon settings, and the sound compliments the look of the animations really well.

But all the heavy lifting that these can do just end up keeping this game on life support. It made me think about the influx of indie games I've seen being promoted online recently that have a description like "have you ever wanted a game that's like Stardew Valley meets Hades??" And it's like, yes, but those are also very polished and very big games - if your main marketing point or inspiration reference is other games that are really, really fucking well made, it's usually going to put your little Frankenstein monster in the sniper's sightline of harsh criticism, putting it up against what you've already established as fair game for comparison.

Moonlighter feels a lot like this. On its own it's a playable little game that has some unique ideas, but when you look at it next to its obvious points of reference, it gets completely eclipsed. The way it earnestly wears its influences on its sleeve only makes it look all the worse for wear when all you can think about is how much better those games do what Moonlighter is trying to.

Okay, I think I will eventually come back to this and try to progress a lot further than I did but I just... felt so underwhelmed a disappointed in this game especially as someone who LOVES shopkeeping-style tycoons and dungeon-crawlers. The idea of tackling complex dungeons with multiple floors to ransack for items to sell in town had me HOOKED. Unfortunately, while the premise is great, the concept ultimately just falls flat.

First of all, a minor(?) nitpick but who the HELL releases a game on steam with no actual keyboard controls? I literally could not navigate the menu because it was so unintuitive that I had to google controls on steam discussions to start. The devs even acknowledge this and explicitly have said they do NOT want to accommodate for keyboard & mouse players, and that the game was designed for controllers. I feel like I wouldn't usually care, except like? You're on steam, appealing to pc gamers, and don't explicitly tell me on the steam page that I won't have fun without a controller. Straight up wtf LOL

But whatever, you know. Its really not that big of a deal and I mean I had a controller anyways so oh well. Except... the dungeon elements were incredibly, incredibly easy after just 2 or 3 runs. I died to the boss maybe once before I was able to beat the first floor every single time & went on to clear the subsequent levels just as easily. Its not like I expected Hollow Knight levels of difficulty or anything, but this definitely feels like you will only find challenge/fun in the dungeoneering if you are new to the genre. I also want to say that I DO consider myself decently good at games that test pattern-recognition and reflexes like bullet hells, so take my experience with a grain of salt.

Despite this, I still felt okay with the game at first. I honestly didn't explore too far after a couple attempts since on top of feeling too easy for me, the combat was kind of clunky, but it was passable enough. Weapons aside from the sword/spear felt not great to me, but I also generally dislike bows in video games especially in a top down where I can't really aim comfortably. But while in dungeons, you're main goal is typically fighting and exploring for loot to sell in your shop. To me, this could have EASILY redeemed the game for me. Instead, in my little time with the game the store aspect felt really... boring? Easy. Also a little confusing? I just kinda want to sigh when I think back on it.

When I think of an amazing capitalism simulator, I think of Recettear. It also has a very mid dungeon system, but MAN the actual store aspect is so fun. I cant help but compare them to a degree. One thing that came to mind in my playthrough is the idea that different customers of different wealth brackets can shop, & you can sell things to each person with different prices because of what they are willing to accept. Similarly, there is a sort of supply and demand system that comes into effect that shows you if things are being sold for higher or lower than normal retail, and I would like it but I felt like. A little lost? In deciphering when it changes, by how much, etc. You have to FIND what the range of prices is for an item through trial and error which is totally okay, but when the specific item is being sold at market none of your recordings are saved in the log book and you arent given any type of ballpark estimate for the resources worth that you find. For example, in Recettear, if you sell a short sword, putting it in your display and selling to a customer will bring up a default price of say 500 gold, and you can adjust to 120% markup or 80% discounted rate or adjust to whatever arbitrary number or percentage you like & work within that system to find the sweet spot in different customer demographics, sales, price drops, etc. It is a really indepth system that takes something simple but elevates it. Moonlighter attempts to do the same and honestly does, but worse. When you find an item, you have no clue if you are pricing something at 100 gold when it should really be 8. This sounds like not a big deal, except the price ranges between items on the first floor alone goes from 3 coins to over 1k. How am I supposed to guess anywhere near accurately? Especially when pricing things poorly also reflects on your relationships with different classes or affects the popularity of items. Its really frustrating.

To speak more on the sales aspect, I really, really dislike the actual ui for it. I like the little idea of setting up items in the boxes you want and customising your store. Its really cute!! Recettear did similar and I truly loved it. Unfortunately, I feel compelled to compare the 2 once again to accurately demonstrate my issue with the games approaches to fulfilling the actual sales. In Moonlighter, an NPC will approach the box with an item, inspect it, then make a face that shows how happy or upset with a price they are. They will then leave the store angry, or leave money at your register and dip. In Recettear, the npc approaches the item, and then prompts a screen where you see the person who wants to buy, the base price of the item/what they are offering, & then are given the option to adjust and haggle. They give dialogue to indicate their feelings and leave either successfully paying or in anger. These function very similarly, but Moonlighter takes the individual sale out of the equation which circles back to the idea of different classes having different budgets and hurts that part of the system. It is impossible to tell who is going to buy what. NPCs approach multiple items and pick what they are going to buy, and you cant adjust the prices in preparation for each customer. It is just so hard to do that. Not to mention that in my experience, distinguishing who is wealthy or poor or what was so HARD for me. In Receattear, you are told what the person wants to buy, they clearly are wearing tattered clothing if they are poor, fancy clothes and dresses if rich, etc and you can engage accordingly and react. In Moonlighter, I could not do this effectively. I struggle to find the proper words, but the system just felt unsatisfying. This piece of interesting depth felt like something I couldn't actually play around, and I wish that wasnt the case.

This game very clearly has so much love in it and so much attention to detail that I want to like it. The art is very pretty, and the various character designs are very cute. I like the aesthetics and the feeling of the town and I love that your business helps the town flourish too. I like that the dungeoneering and the store front feel equally important, and I like the thought put into it. Unfortunately, the balancing and minor flaws add up for me in this game and ultimately made my experience feel like a boring slog, where I never actually had a piece of the game I could appreciate. If 1/2 of the systems were very good, I could rate this well. But for me, I just couldnt enjoy it. It was incredibly underwhelming. I hope you can find more fun with this than I, but unless you are very new to these systems in games, I think your experience will be sullied by its minor but additive flaws.

A beautiful game with lovely music and interesting sense of aesthetic. Unfortunately, that's the most I could give it. After looking for more commerce sims after having an itch needing to be scratched from Recettear. Unfortunately, this was not it. The combat is ok, but that's really the most I could give it for me, though I do think the dungeon design is mostly unique with the roguelite elements, but the combat is mostly rudimentary in my opinion. While I wasn't expecting a full-fledged in-depth combat system, given how much this game relies on going into dungeons to collect loot to sell, it felt a bit monotonous at times.

When it comes to the commerce part, it feels kind of like an after thought. The first chunk with it was good, figuring out prices and juggling low shop space with getting stuff from my inventory and chest to put on sale, but after a while it felt more like a chore than anything else, which doesn't seem like was the intended effect of running the business. Work orders you get after you start upgrading your shop feel like an afterthoughts, with the payouts feeling mostly too low for the effort/remembering to get them done. There's things like thieves to take items from your shop, but you usually only get one a day at most and they're so easily stopped it feels like a non-factor. Add in the registers that earn you extra money and decorations that give you even extra tips, and you're swimming in money.

Which is good, considering how much items and upgrades cost, but towards the end of the game I was only opening the shop once or twice just so I could get the last bit of money to get a new piece of armor and some potions, and then gunning dungeons.

It's an interesting game, but ultimately, it didn't scratch the itch I had, as much as I hoped it would.

The best thing I can say about Moonlighter is that its pixel art is incredibly detailed and textured. Everything else about the game feels like video game comfort food.

The core loop involves selling items in your shop, to upgrade your equipment, and then find new items in dungeons to sell in your shop. Both the selling items and running through dungeon halves of the game are quick and rewarding enough to make you want to always do the next step. It feels very similar to the "just one more turn" feeling you get from being in the middle of a game of Civ. Unfortunately, one of those halves lacks enough teeth to make it interesting, while the other progresses way too slowly in complexity.

Combat in the game is an uncomfortable mix of modern 2d action game verbs (dodge rolls, switching weapons, elemental damage, etc) and classic Zelda action verbs (you attack the direction you're moving, no animation cancelling). It's a serviceable set of systems, but it never feels great to play. Often it feels like enemies are simply more nimble or versatile than you. All you can do is rely on damage output to compensate, which is easy enough to do. It's just not very frenetic or strategic, unlike a more thoughtful 2d action classic like Hades.

The selling systems are the real highlight of the game. It is extremely satisfying to find the right price for an item you're selling, then selling 10 of them at once for lots of money. There is a progression of more interesting mechanics than price setting as the game goes on. You can sell items for a high price with higher demand in display cases. You have to stop thieves from stealing your items. Customers can put in special orders. But i found this progression a little slow for my liking. By the time I got to the more interesting mechanics, I was making enough money to avoid penny-pinching, giving all these new systems way lower stakes. Your mileage may vary.

Here are other things I neglected to mention. The weapon upgrades are fairly shallow, making it less satisfying as time goes on. The townsfolk don't really do much aside from telling you canned phrases. The backpack mechanics are fairly thoughtful, and packing your bag while dungeon diving is usually a fun puzzle to engage in.

All in a, the whole game feels like indie comfort food. If you want a low low difficulty roguelite, this is a good option. Otherwise, I'd recommend Hades if you haven't given that a go.

5/10 - PC
This game was initially intriguing as I enjoyed Recettear but it really failed to deliver despite giving it about 6 hours, this is a game I would recommend anyone to try on Game Pass before purchase if it wasn't for the fact that Game Pass->Steam is a pipeline most devs shoot down aggressively. Getting to the 2nd area the combat didn't get much better and after you beat the 1-1 and 1-2 boss once or twice you can burst them down in under 2s with a great sword. The store side of things is fairly mild, if it wasn't for the fact that it was so involved this is a game that at least has a cozy atmosphere so might be nice to play if you want to get into that feeling.