The game it's pretty repetitive and the main gimmick doesn't evolves that much
Loved the dungeon crawling. Couldn't get into the shopkeeping.
Definitely pick this up if you're into both.
Definitely pick this up if you're into both.
várias partes do jogo são desnecessárias, desinteressantes e ignoráveis, mas o jogo é bem bom.
bit sluggish for my current mood
boring. play other shopkeep games theyre better
Love the game but it can get repetitive which is why I put it down for a while in favor of other games.
Just a bit too boring and clunky for my liking. I'm glad I gave it a shot though.
In Moonlighter you play as a shopkeeper who takes on the family business. You will have to enter dangerous dungeons filled with beasts and monsters to gather antient relics and artifacts. That's only half of the game loop as you will later have to sell those items you collected at your shop. Finding the right price for each item is key to success in the little shop mini game as money is the key resource to upgrade your shop and equipment which will allow you to get deeper into the dungeons and find more valuable relics that you can sell later at a higher price. And that's Moonligther in anutshell basically; enter the dungeons, collect items, return home, sell those items for profit and repeat over and over again.
I felt like the gaming loop was quite satisfying. The shop mini game felt original and refreshing at first even tho it became a little too repetitive over time. There's multiple weapons and armor sets as well that you can try until you find the ones that fit best your playstyle.
Overall Moonlighter is a cute, fun, indie, roguelite game with a smart twist that brings something new to the table and is definately worth playing. I enjoyed the game a lot and would absolutely recommend giving it a try.
I felt like the gaming loop was quite satisfying. The shop mini game felt original and refreshing at first even tho it became a little too repetitive over time. There's multiple weapons and armor sets as well that you can try until you find the ones that fit best your playstyle.
Overall Moonlighter is a cute, fun, indie, roguelite game with a smart twist that brings something new to the table and is definately worth playing. I enjoyed the game a lot and would absolutely recommend giving it a try.
Final comprensible para un juego español
Moonlighter is a good idea and generally rather enjoyable game, but is plagued with many smaller issues that detract from the overall experience.
There is a strong game loop and strong sense of progression which drives the player through each dungeon. Small story beats along the way also help guide the player along. However, as the player progresses through each dungeon, they will find that nothing changes between each level in the game except the behaviour of the enemies. For example, weapon upgrades that supposedly change the element of your weapon has no real functional change to how your weapon behaves. The game is so well balanced between you growing stronger and the enemies growing stronger that there may as well be no progression at all. In the end, the game starts to drag.
The game also has many small bugs that have not been fixed over years of development.
There is a strong game loop and strong sense of progression which drives the player through each dungeon. Small story beats along the way also help guide the player along. However, as the player progresses through each dungeon, they will find that nothing changes between each level in the game except the behaviour of the enemies. For example, weapon upgrades that supposedly change the element of your weapon has no real functional change to how your weapon behaves. The game is so well balanced between you growing stronger and the enemies growing stronger that there may as well be no progression at all. In the end, the game starts to drag.
The game also has many small bugs that have not been fixed over years of development.
Moonlighter is a great game on paper: roguelite dungeon-crawling plus shop management and rebuilding a town, all accompanied by beautiful pixel art -- quite possibly the most fluid pixel art I've ever seen in a game. It's so incredibly disappointing to see that the final product is much less than the sum of its parts, and leaves a lot to be desired.
The game puts you in charge of a shopkeeper named Will, who makes a living by exploring magical dungeons that exist close to his town, and dreams of unraveling their mysteries. The core loop has you entering the procedurally generated dungeons, fighting enemies and collect loot, then leaving with your stuff and putting it for sale on the shop. There, you can set the placement and price for each item: clients will react to that price with satisfaction, or shock, or ecstasy, and from that, you can gauge how much people are willing to pay. Money you get is used to improve the town's facilities and craft more equipment, so you can afford exploring the dungeons further.
The issue is, every one of those systems is incredibly shallow. Take the game's combat, for instance: you have a choice of four melee weapons, all of which require the same materials to craft and upgrade per tier, and also play the exact same, with a three hit combo as well as a special attack you'll likely never use because of how it leaves you open. There's a bit of a Lords of the Fallen-ness to the weapons in that the game tries to get you to be mindful of your attacks by making wind-up and recovery animations uncancellable and slow, but overdoes it, and instead makes even the fastest weapons in the game dissatisfying to use.
It's demoralizing how much faster basic enemies are compared to you, and also how bulky they are. The latter is part of how the game handles progression in an annoying way: the main game is composed of four dungeons with three very floors each, which is not a lot. The floor map is procedurally generated and extremely simple, enemies being the only thing in your way. Whenever you move between floors, enemy stats jump. That's it: nothing else changes about the dungeon itself except that the same enemies can now kill you faster and you'll need a turbo controller to bring them down. It's a cheap -- and grindy -- method of adding difficulty to force you to go back to town and upgrade your stuff.
One of them, anyway -- it's easy to name a few others. For instance, Will has few iframes, leading to a lot of near instant deaths, and a lot of enemies (including bosses) do not telegraph their attacks, forcing you to rely on rote memorization of their timings and/or spamming your stilted dodge move that is likely to lead you into a pit, a wall, or a damage source. Speaking of which, as beautiful as the game looks, it leaves a lot to be desired in terms of visual clarity. Enemies and props blend into the backgrounds too easily, often leading you into walking straight into them. It's rare for 2D games to have these issues, because generally, it's an easy issue to fix with outlines or by choosing contrasting palettes. Moonlighter is the first case I've seen in many years.
But anyway, you get tired of dealing with that and exit the dungeon, finding yourself in the town soon after. Rebuilding the town is locked behind dungeon progression, so you don't have much freedom in that sense. As for the shop, you place the items you want to sell and assign a price. It's super uninvolved: each item has a set price people are willing to pay for it, which never changes, and you have to find it through trial and error. Or just use a guide and get through that faster, especially since the menus are super clunky and you don't want to get stuck doing inventory management for too long. Sometimes, NPCs make item requests, which are never worth it, and maybe once a day you have to stop a thief. The shop is just a section of the game you want to end faster.
The icing on the cake is in how buggy the game is. To the developers' credit, in the three to four years since the game released, they have fixed a lot of stuff: it used to be so bad, people openly recommended not buying and instead waiting for more patches. But even today, there's a lot of bugs that show up through normal gameplay. Some stuff is pretty minor, like audio fading out or cutting off when it shouldn't, but a lot of the time the game screws you pretty hard. To list a few cases, the game will randomly softlock in places such as the shop. it will routinely miscalculate your stats. There's collision issues, and it's not rare to get stuck inside walls. There's problems that stem from control remapping. There's even a bug on the final boss where it can just kill you randomly through invisible damage sources that has caused people to drop the game on the cusp of finishing it.
Which is what I feel I should have done. I gave the game too many free passes because of its indieness and (admittedly, incredibly pretty) sprite animations, but having gone through the whole thing, it just wasn't worth it. Moonlighter is a clunky, glitchy grindfest that plays like a prototype of the game it wanted to be. With so many great indie roguelites on the market, it's hard to recommend it.
The game puts you in charge of a shopkeeper named Will, who makes a living by exploring magical dungeons that exist close to his town, and dreams of unraveling their mysteries. The core loop has you entering the procedurally generated dungeons, fighting enemies and collect loot, then leaving with your stuff and putting it for sale on the shop. There, you can set the placement and price for each item: clients will react to that price with satisfaction, or shock, or ecstasy, and from that, you can gauge how much people are willing to pay. Money you get is used to improve the town's facilities and craft more equipment, so you can afford exploring the dungeons further.
The issue is, every one of those systems is incredibly shallow. Take the game's combat, for instance: you have a choice of four melee weapons, all of which require the same materials to craft and upgrade per tier, and also play the exact same, with a three hit combo as well as a special attack you'll likely never use because of how it leaves you open. There's a bit of a Lords of the Fallen-ness to the weapons in that the game tries to get you to be mindful of your attacks by making wind-up and recovery animations uncancellable and slow, but overdoes it, and instead makes even the fastest weapons in the game dissatisfying to use.
It's demoralizing how much faster basic enemies are compared to you, and also how bulky they are. The latter is part of how the game handles progression in an annoying way: the main game is composed of four dungeons with three very floors each, which is not a lot. The floor map is procedurally generated and extremely simple, enemies being the only thing in your way. Whenever you move between floors, enemy stats jump. That's it: nothing else changes about the dungeon itself except that the same enemies can now kill you faster and you'll need a turbo controller to bring them down. It's a cheap -- and grindy -- method of adding difficulty to force you to go back to town and upgrade your stuff.
One of them, anyway -- it's easy to name a few others. For instance, Will has few iframes, leading to a lot of near instant deaths, and a lot of enemies (including bosses) do not telegraph their attacks, forcing you to rely on rote memorization of their timings and/or spamming your stilted dodge move that is likely to lead you into a pit, a wall, or a damage source. Speaking of which, as beautiful as the game looks, it leaves a lot to be desired in terms of visual clarity. Enemies and props blend into the backgrounds too easily, often leading you into walking straight into them. It's rare for 2D games to have these issues, because generally, it's an easy issue to fix with outlines or by choosing contrasting palettes. Moonlighter is the first case I've seen in many years.
But anyway, you get tired of dealing with that and exit the dungeon, finding yourself in the town soon after. Rebuilding the town is locked behind dungeon progression, so you don't have much freedom in that sense. As for the shop, you place the items you want to sell and assign a price. It's super uninvolved: each item has a set price people are willing to pay for it, which never changes, and you have to find it through trial and error. Or just use a guide and get through that faster, especially since the menus are super clunky and you don't want to get stuck doing inventory management for too long. Sometimes, NPCs make item requests, which are never worth it, and maybe once a day you have to stop a thief. The shop is just a section of the game you want to end faster.
The icing on the cake is in how buggy the game is. To the developers' credit, in the three to four years since the game released, they have fixed a lot of stuff: it used to be so bad, people openly recommended not buying and instead waiting for more patches. But even today, there's a lot of bugs that show up through normal gameplay. Some stuff is pretty minor, like audio fading out or cutting off when it shouldn't, but a lot of the time the game screws you pretty hard. To list a few cases, the game will randomly softlock in places such as the shop. it will routinely miscalculate your stats. There's collision issues, and it's not rare to get stuck inside walls. There's problems that stem from control remapping. There's even a bug on the final boss where it can just kill you randomly through invisible damage sources that has caused people to drop the game on the cusp of finishing it.
Which is what I feel I should have done. I gave the game too many free passes because of its indieness and (admittedly, incredibly pretty) sprite animations, but having gone through the whole thing, it just wasn't worth it. Moonlighter is a clunky, glitchy grindfest that plays like a prototype of the game it wanted to be. With so many great indie roguelites on the market, it's hard to recommend it.
I desperately wanted to love this game. I even came back to it after shelving it for more than a year. The art style and music are charming, and the shopkeeping element is actually quite fun. However, this game made me realise that I’m just not into roguelites. The load screens can also take a while which just made the whole experience feel even more tedious.
Amazing concept, gorgeous pixel art but frustrating combat.
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.
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.
Passable hack'n'slash combat, repetitive dungeon crawling, and an under-baked town hub to rebuild. A cool concept poorly executed, to say I found this game disappointing is an understatement.
Really wanted to love this one. The pixel style is so lovely, and the game's premise seemed interesting, but I couldn't really get into it.
Fine
I didn't give this game a fair shake so I won't rate it. I was horrible at selling the items though.
a really nice art style slightly marred by repetition- and i have the same issue w the gameplay. i like this game a whole lot, but the loop of fight-shop-fight-shop, for me, just feels like doing the same thing over and over again. the upgrades aren't substantial enough to really change the way the game plays (just making you hit harder or take less damage), so i find it easy to "slide off" of moonlighter
Realmente lo que jugué me gusto, ósea nunca había jugado un juego de este tipo shopkeeper y la verdad mezclarlo con el rollito de ir a las dungeons farmear y ese puntito de push your luck para quedarte un poco mas de alguna forma enganchaba. El main problem es que las dungeons salvaguardando el boss y un par de npcs contados, son skins unas de otras y el juego en tema de progreso no va a mas si no que se estanca. Yo lo deje en la 4 dungeon y tengo intención de acabármelo pero de momento tengo otras prios.
The concept is really clever, but I didn't find any aspect of the game to be particularly well executed. The dungeon gameplay is a clunkier version of dozens of roguelikes/lites and the shop gameplay is shallow and a little obtuse. Good idea, sub-par implementation.
The shop sequences got to be too tedious for me.
i adore this game, the shopkeeping gameplay with the dungeon crawling was a really rewarding combo and i always recommend this game to friends :)
an issue with procedurally generated recurrable content oriented games like this is that they lack any real feeling of human design to their dungeons. idk whatever
really relaxing time playing , most notable thing about the game is the shop aspect rather than the classic rpg of poofing money to buy upgrades either out of thin air or oddly sized vases. 8/10.
this game gaslights you into thinking its good
Amazing looking pixel art game with shallow and boring gameplay. Nothing interesting to keep me going, even the story so far was lackluster. There is nothing that stands out about this game except for its art. Glad I got to try it for free from epic.
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!
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!
A refreshing concept with great gameplay being held back by an awful progression.
It was ok, didn’t get into it at all and I don’t see myself picking up this game ever again