Moonlighter is a quaint, charming game from the outset, and presents a genre that is rarely explored in the landscape of video games - Manning your own shop while hunting your resources. And it does it well, to a degree.

Indeed, Moonlighter is far from being a bad game, but for as much as the presentation and charm serves well to invite you, the overall repetitiveness of the gameplay loop will start to wear out its welcome very quickly.

By day, you run the shop where you try to gauge your prices on the loot you bring back from the dungeons. While a neat idea and fun for the first hour or so, I found myself looking up guides for the pricing as it became tedious and more of a chore than a puzzle or fun mechanic.

Unfortunately, apart from a few very minor additions, this straightforward process is mostly all there is to it regarding manning the shop itself.
There is no competition, economy changes etc., the prices remain static and your biggest thing to worry about is a thief coming in and stealing something.

The Dungeon gameplay isn't any more complex, you'll think the first two dungeons are pretty fun and get excited to see what's in store but you'll find that the dungeon layouts, despite being "randomised", aren't actually that much different in layout, and they all don't differ that much in general, sans the visual themes (stone dungeon, forest dungeon, desert dungeon etc.).

The items are dungeon specific but it still feels like you're doing the same thing over and over. To add to this, the bosses aren't all that exciting, you can spam attack + dodge roll constantly and still win, last 2 bosses I barely got hurt and just stood in specific spots and somehow didn't get hit.

Another big problem Moonlighter has is that the player can move in 4 directions but enemies can attack at a diagonal, so it becomes more of a fight with the hitboxes and tanking hits rather than actually getting skilled at the game.

The armor and weapon buffs can feel really strong at times but have no other features or modifiers other than "big numbers".
The elemental weapons' collateral damage do little to make up for the downgrade in raw power of the other weapon class.

I think underneath it all, this game suffers from a (rather large) list of small problems that eventually add up - and ultimately hinders the experience.

Despite all this, I still had fun with the game for a time and considering this is Digital Sun's first and only actual game that they put out, I think it should be taken into account.

Pushing aside the negatives, Moonlighter has an appealing and charming pixel art style, with lively animations and very cool monster and character designs. The enemies are especially well designed and feel like they have personality to them.

The soundtrack is quite good and fitting for the game's various locations/scenes, and I do like that there is variations for the three floors of each themed dungeon. However, some of the tracks did get stale after a while or upon revisits.


Being middling all in all, it's honestly a shame considering Moonlighter has a fantastic idea on paper; and it's evident that the developers clearly care about the game and put a lot of effort in it.

It's just that, somewhere along the way, the execution just didn't end up landing quite right.

Moonlighter is a very simple and barebone game that somewhat reminds me of the more complex Flash games from an era ago.

The game is divided in two different parts and they're both fairly limited.

The dungeons are a roguelite loop where you go inside four dungeons looking for loot and to try to beat the boss on the third floor. All dungeons are pretty similar and there's little evolution except an increase in numbers (compensated by your own increase in stats), the enemies are very samey and all of the loot is either materials or random things to sell. There's a limited potion system but all you do is buy them and you can only heal and use things to help you reach the last floor, which makes the game extremely easy to beat.

There's little incentive to grind a single dungeon once you have what you need to craft your armor and weapon, as there's an exponential increase in the value of items and newer dungeons allow you to make better weapons. The low amount of novelty in dungeons also encourages you to rush them.

The merchant side is pretty boring, once you figure it out and improve your shop to make it a little faster, it can be fun fixing item prices but there's not much else. I found the thieves to be annoying and it wasn't worth messing around with prices for rich clients or whenever there was an item becoming popular.

The game has a NG+ with new things unlocked but honestly, I was pretty bored by the time I beat the game and I don't understand why, in a game with so little content, they'd keep things for NG+ instead of including everything at once.

Sidenote, I got an achievement for beating the game in under 10 hours (9h42) and I have to say I really hate this type of steam achievements (though I'm not achievement hunter). There's also one for beating the game with the base brush.

Moonlighter... y'know, I feel bad rating this as low as I do, because its not like I didn't enjoy it. Honestly this game is very cozy, and its just a nice world to exist in for a while. The music is superb, the visuals are bright and vibrant, the location and enemy designs are fun and varied, and you can really feel the love that's been poured into that side of things. But I just think that, fundamentally, this game doesn't really work.

So it's going for a 2-seperate-games-bolted-together premise, with the idea being that progress in one can be turned into progress in the other and vice versa. The only other thing I've played like that would be Cult of the Lamb, but neither game has exactly sold me on the concept. The two subgames seem a fair bit less disconnected in Moonlighter than they did in Cult of the Lamb, but I still found the structure led to a rather oddly paced experience.

The main compounding problem in Moonlighter is that, frankly, neither of the subgames are very good. The combat in the dungeons is clunky and awkward and felt weirdly unresponsive at times. Add to this the small and unupgradeable inventory size, which means each dungeon run ends up with you spending about 60+% of your time managing your inventory... seriously, the whole game is about looting, why can I only carry 20 things at a time? There are so many games that do this combat style so much better, and Moonlighter's combat comes off as a bit phoned in, as something just made to fill a 'combat goes here' space on a concept board.

The shopkeeping side of Moonlighter is less generic but still really quite undeveloped. The main thing you do is... guess what prices to charge for things. That's it. The core of this part of the game is essentially "Guess what number I'm thinking of". Sure you occasionally have to tackle a thief or assist a confused customer, but the shopkeeping in this game is honestly very disengaging, especially after you've worked out the prices for most things and you're literally just stood there at the till waiting for customers to come give you money.

Remarkably, the aesthetics and tone of the game did actually make these two paper-thin minigames feel quite charming. But that's the thing with Moonlighter; in the moment I was quite enjoying it, but I never felt that enthused to go back to it after each session. I dunno, I think I did enjoy this overall, and I definitely don't regret playing it, but I really don't think I'd be comfortable saying this was a good game.

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.

Very simple and short game which is easy to understand and play. Animation is fantastic and charming. Merchant selling mechanic was really addicting and the town-building was really simple. Soundtrack is great. The ending wrapped around in a really logical and fun way. The grinding in this game wasnt obnoxious either, which is a big pluss.

Organizing your inventory to accommodate curses on items was a really unique and refreshing concept. I would love to see this more often in roguelikes.

Sadly, Moonlighter lacks depth.

Combat feels janky and the ability to experiment with weapons are locked behind rerunning dungeons, which is unfortunate considering I don't want to waste more time when I want to progress, making it feel monotonous and a chore.

Some vendors were either useless or not really useful; take or pick. Your rival merchant shop wasn't useful in any way. The relic vendor was okay, but not necessary at all when I can essentially use my gold on something more useful. The banker wasn't really as useful either considering I could make 10x of the interests he could return.

Dungeons were repetitive and the "random" factor didn't really play a strong factor. Bosses felt repetitive.

Overall, this game was still a good playthrough and I would honestly recommend the game to a kid. It's short and fun. I really love the animation in the game too.

The game however, could have been fleshed out more both in story and combat if it truly wanted to stick out and be remembered.

Stiff controls and delays in combat. After a mediocre combat tutorial and an interesting introduction to the games shop management system you are immediately set free, and what are you going to want to do right away? Obviously go to the dungeons to try your luck at the arguably more fun half of the game.
But then you get dumped into the dungeon only to find that the tutorial didn’t give you any real experience in combat as you are immediately dropped into cramped rooms filled with sometimes over a dozen enemies. Immediate turn off from the game the several times I’ve attempted to play it.