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.

I'll say 2 nice things about this game.
The art style is quite pleasing and locations all evoke a different atmosphere well.
The inventory system is actually very clever as well, especially in a game all about retrieving and selling artifacts. I also like that I can use items in chests at the shop from anywhere in town, very convenient. Shame its not in a better game.
Misleading, unresponsive, unsatisfying and generally not fun.

Moonlighter? More like gas-lighter.

Mezcla de rogue like y minijuego de gestión super sencillote. La premisa es que eres un vendedor que debe meterse en mazmorras hechas aleatoriamente con el fin de conseguir objetos para vender en tu tienda y mejorar tu propio equipamiento. Eso molaría mucho si no fuese porque se queda a medio fuelle en ambas.

La tienda es super fácil de manejar, y más pronto que tarde romperás el juego vendiendo objetos por miles de oro sin mucho esfuerzo. Tiene mecánicas de oferta y demanda, y al poner un objeto a la venta no sabes su precio, debes ir tanteando según la reacción de la gente, pero pronto encuentras el precio justo.

En cuánto a la parte de combate la esquiva es bastante mediocre, las armas, aunque diferentes, no son tampoco la gran cosa. Puedes ir haciendo que tu tienda crezca asi como tu pueblo para tener gente que te venda pociones o adornos para la tienda, pero al final consiste en pegar y esquivar de una forma muy tonta.

¿Y porque le doy positivo? Porque el rato que he jugado me he divertido. Es cierto que al final me estaba aburriendo bastante, pero han sido unas horas entretenidas.

I didn't play Moonlighter for long enough to give it a confident score and I'm sure it's a great game but I found myself struggling to go back to it. I found the controls clunky and, even when I changed the key bindings a few times, I struggled to find a setup I could work with which made combat very difficult. I did enjoy the concept of dungeon crawler meeting shop manager but I was a bit overwhelmed by the many items I could sell at any time. Hopefully I'll go back to this game in the future, when I've got little else to play.

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.

An interesting game that has 2 play modes. One has you delving into the crypt in the form of a roguelite to collect rare drops and treasures, then by day you sell what you collected at your store and try to earn gold.

It's a cute concept with a whole story wrapped around the town, the danger of the dungeons, and your inexperience as an adventurer that can get a little preachy. Still the idea works but I don't know about the longevity. The loop is interesting to begin with but after a few hours the store side of things can be tedious as you have to carefully manage prices against demand and juggle sales against defending from shoplifters.

The adventure side of things is pretty standard roguelite fare as you learn to delve into ever more dangerous areas, each with their own knowledge locks that cost some suffering to learn to survive in. The challenge of the adventures is fine and I was curious to delve deeper but the reward is more shop gameplay and that ended up putting me off on the whole.

A cute gimmick but I think this one will take a certain kind of player to really vibe with both sides of the gameplay and see it through. That said it's a pretty game with some solid mechanics.

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.