After having this game in my backlog for a long time after briefly playing it, I decided to come back to it and finish it. A sucker for pixel art, the graphics are pretty and I have little to talk about in that regard. TL;DR: Great concept, poor execution. Only play if you know exactly what you're getting.

One of my biggest gripes with this game while playing was its controls and mechanics that obviously favored controller use, so the play experience while strictly using keyboard and mouse takes some serious getting used to, but I 100% blame myself for being too stubborn to invest in a controller to use on PC.

The idea of managing your shop and selling items obtained during your dungeon runs is a great pull, but in this particular practice, it got boring quick. Most items felt like random junk with little cue on how valuable it would be, which was an important factor in making money. After finding myself selling high priced junk for low prices and vice versa, the entire concept of managing the prices of your stock got boiled down to setting the price for an item absurdly high and slowly lowering it until your customers were happy enough to buy it. The most interesting part about actually managing your shop was an uncommon event when a customer came in willing to buy actual weapons/armor, but between how inconsistently they would appear, how rare it is to find weapons/armor in the dungeon, and how much resources it costs to forge them yourself, it felt too much like a waste of time. Instead, I found myself itching to get the shop management portion of the game over with so I could go back into the dungeon.

That being said, the dungeon crawling experience left much to be desired as well. Combat felt wonky and unintuitive, but it may be important to note that I strictly used the Big Swords throughout the entirety of my playthrough. The enemies and bosses you come across can be difficult and it can be fun overcoming that difficulty through learning and upgrading your weapons/armor, but every run felt the same after a while. You go in, kill things to collect a bunch of junk that fills your inventory quickly, leave, sell that junk, maybe upgrade given you can afford it, and repeat until the big boss is defeated. There are very few interesting rooms that aren't purely enemy filled, one being a secret room with a chest that you can fill with your junk to send back to your shop without having to leave, which was an all too rare occurrence. Another secret room involves entering a portal to a special floor that rewards you with a random run-bound unique weapon that... I never used. After realizing how pointless they were to get, I stopped entering the secret floors completely. Between the little variety between runs and boring itemization, I was reluctantly clawing my way through completing this game just so I could scratch it off my backlog.

After beating the final boss which proved easier than expected, I was able to experience the Between Dimensions DLC, which, unfortunately, was the most fun part of playing this game for me. Despite being a lot of the same ol' same ol', the dungeon that was an amalgamation of the four previous dungeons you spent time in proved to spice up the game just a little more. Having a single, longer dungeon that you're able to unlock checkpoints in as you inch closer to the final boss gave me a better sense of progression, but before I knew it, and before I bothered with much of the new content other than upgrading my weapons/armor even further because that's what I was trained to do up to that point, I had reached the final boss and finished the game entirely. Finally, after a grueling 38 hours, I was able to uninstall the game and never look back (until now, I guess). I had initially planned on obtaining all the achievements for the game too, but after seeing the few that involved beating the bosses without getting hit or beating them using only the broom, I decided I'd rather eat chalk. Any other game... not this game.

All in all, it's an okay game and there's reason it has Very Positive reviews on Steam, so I reckon I'm an outlier, but its unfulfilled potential was too great for me to enjoy it as others have. Due to my eagerness to beat the game, I skipped what little dialogue there was regarding the story, so I won't comment on that. As long as you know exactly what you're getting into first, you'll enjoy Moonlighter.