I’m not mad, I’m disappointed… The premise of Moonlighter is appealing, manage your little shop by day, slay by night, very reminiscent of Rune Factory. It works! Just not most of the time. This game was addicting when I first started playing it, the formula is just so charming. The shop aspect was the most endearing if you can believe it. The problem is progress is slow… very much so. It gets to a point where you know you’ll make more money if you progress the dungeon instead of managing the shop, but the upgrades to help you do so get very expensive. The money you’re getting isn’t enough since you’re stuck in the lower floors. This leads to the grind, don’t misunderstand me, clearing the floors is very doable it just becomes boring. This isn’t helped by the fact that once you move from one dungeon to the next, there isn’t much there besides a new colour palette. The same grind as the last dungeon but with higher numbers. I would guess they did this to squeeze some more playtime hours from the player, but if the devs had tweaked the sliders more in favor of faster player progress it would’ve made the experience more digestible.

I played the complete edition in 2024, possibly the best Moonlighter experience. Looking up trophy guides and wiki entries it seems this was bug riddled mess on release, with most issues persisting for years. I didn’t find any of that, but I found myself pleasantly surprised the glitch to get infinite money was still present. It trivialized the shop aspect, but the faster progress made up for it. That is until I reached the dlc.

The Between Dimensions DLC fits the definition of “more content”. It’s higher numbers and more grind, I quite liked the idea of it, but many of the base game problems are made even worse here. For starters “Le Retailer” doesn’t sell you any of the items found in the new interdimensional dungeon, you’re either on your own looking for them or trading them with the new Rat vendor. These new items are essential to get through the new dungeon as with each floor the damage values get absurdly high. This isn’t helped by the fact you can only trade the rarest items. Carbon Plate Fiber for example, has a low value amongst the new materials, it only drops in the very first two floors and it’s not a very common drop. It’s loop after loop after loop after loop until you can get enough materials to craft new armor, make it a bit further and then loop again.

You’d think I rate this game lower with all I’ve said but there was a lot of care and love put into it, the art work is charming, the gameplay is pretty decent as well as the core idea. This game had a lot going into it but it just didn’t know how to fit all the pieces properly. It’s not bad for a first studio’s release, I’m looking forward to see what they put out next and hope they learned from the cracks this game had.

This game is one of, if not the most insane sci-fi story out there, touching on nearly trope the genre has to offer making it a unique and memorable experience. It’s hard to grasp the scope, to piece together what you’re consuming and how it fits in the puzzle. Confusion haunts the majority of the game. It’s part of the formula that keeps 13 Sentinels so engrossing.

It’s tough to review this game without telling you what it’s about, and I don't mean the plot but the experience itself. Let me elaborate. Whenever you start a new game you’re not familiar with you trip and stumble doing silly things, you attack everything around you to see what breaks, you try talking to every NPC to get something. In a nutshell, you try every action available and learn from the responses you get. That’s our way to understand the worlds we get into, how we get familiar with the rules the game devs set. In your first 5 hours, 13 Sentinels will toy with this idea, it will teach you using deceit. After finishing the first set of prologues the game opens up to an overwhelming degree, letting you continue the story of the characters you just played as at your own leisure. This is where the guess work begins, picking up a character’s story will leave you at a state that doesn’t quite make sense. There isn’t a linear progression from where you last left it at, sometimes it will be as if you never did the prologue at all, you’re back to square one, but things seem a little different. You get the flowchart. A web of seemingly interconnected events that more often than not take you back to the same starting point despite progressing further. The game is certainly teaching you something, though you start doubting what is shown to you. This is where your mind starts to wander. What is happening? Is this an alternate story? A different character? Time-period? Timeline? Universe? My mind surely went through these theories and more.

There is a golden rule in horror media, “Don’t show the monster”. When you do it stops being scary. The reason is because what is the scariest is what your mind comes up with, your thirst of expectation grows wild as it brews in your head. When you show the monster, it becomes underwhelming compared to whatever you concocted in your mind. 13 Sentinels gives me a similar feeling throughout, where my theories were put to test with each new reveal, to my surprise what lied behind the curtain was an escalation, an even crazier idea than the concepts I thought of. It tore down what I planned, and where did that take me? Back to square one. In a funny way the gameplay loop is the ideas that run through your head and the re-conceptualization at each step. Your experience is likely to be different than mine, the plot can be tackled in any order feeding reveals at different paces. 13 Sentinels balances this by locking you out of some events until you have better understanding of others. This is a fail-safe that keeps the sense of escalation going. Of course, it doesn’t do so infinitely, it has to crescendo at some point. Whether the final reveal and conclusion is satisfying is up to how your expectations were met, and whether your head went beyond what Vanillaware had in mind. I for one, was pretty satisfied with the conclusion, the epilogue was a wholesome cherry on top of the whole experience.

The plot of 13 Sentinels is boxed in the “Remembrance” section, which I’d argue is the gameplay itself, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t talk about “Destruction”, a complete subversion of the formula. Much like in the game I wasn’t quite sure where it fit in this review. Destruction takes place in the very final battle, but is introduced at the very beginning. It’s very akin to an RTS and possibly added as a selling point. I understand the idea of a visual novel is a very hard sell to your average gamer. Destruction has a complex UI and as such the game holds your hand through the majority of it. It starts too slow and seemed like a distraction from the main plot… at the start. In time I really started to enjoy it. The strategic scenarios are clever, it becomes a decent challenge towards the end of the game. I just found it a shame it took so long to click.

I’ve played several graphic novels in the past and let me tell you, most of them aren’t good. 13 Sentinels is a cut above the rest, with better looking sprites and more interactivity than its peers you should not sleep on this one even if you’re sour on the genre.