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| Moonlighter blends dungeon crawling and shop management into a loop that’s easy to sink hours into. |
I brushed off Moonlighter when it first came out, but when I heard good things about it from friends, I decided to give it a try, and my gosh, what an addicting game.
The story is surrounded around dungeons that mysteriously appeared in a land. Adventurers were curious and explored while finding riches and such. They build a town near the dungeons which was growing steadily. But eventually, they had to close the dungeons due to too many casualties. And life became hard in the town.
You play as Will, a town shop owner who's been dreaming of exploring and unlocking the 5th dungeon. And this is where your adventure starts!
The Core Gameplay Loop
The gameplay loop is so fun! You start by exploring a procedurally generated dungeon during the night, and your main goal is to make it to the end. But it's not as easy as it sounds.
You travel with a giant backpack, and as you explore and kill creatures, you acculumate materials. It doesn't take long before it gets full, so you have to make sure that you manage what you have in there properly to be as efficient as possible.
Running the Shop
When you feel like you have enough exploration, you go back home. And during the day, you open your shop to sell the goods that you've found in the dungeon. This is a part where I thought that I would find boring before I even started, but I was pleasantly surprised at how easy and fun it is to manage that part.
All you have to do is set the price of your items, and you have to find the perfect price. You might sell it too low or it might be too high, so then you look at your journal for the price history and make sure the you price it better next time. I'm bored just listening to myself explaining it haha. It's really something that you have to try yourself to enjoy.
And that's it! That's the loop. Every time you close shop, you'll always want to do one more dungeon run. It's because the progression is so smooth. You'll always have just enough to unlock a new armor, or upgrade your weapon, or buy more healing potions. And you want to try it all and see how better you get.
Combat and Progression
The combat is very fluid and it doesn't take too long before you master it. You have your regular attack button that does a 3 hit combo, and then you have an extra ability. You'll get to block if you have the sword and shield, or you can charge up a swirl attack with the heavy sword, and other abilities like that.
You then get a dodge roll which is very similar to Enter the Gungeon. You're basically invulnerable during this roll. You'll definitely do that a lot.
Every dungeon have 2 sub boss, and then an end boss. After that's done, you unlock the next dungeon and keep moving forward with a difficulty spike. The nice thing is that everyone can go at their own pacing. If you can defeat the first dungeon with the initial sword, then great. If you struggle, just keep running your shop, keep upgrading, and you'll eventually get there. It's like making your own difficulty.
DLC and Future Content
There's also a DLC available called "Between Dimensions" which gives an extra dungeon with 8 levels total with the addition of new creatures and materials. The added content with extra gameplay are the best type of add ons if you ask me.
And then the release of Moonlighter 2 is approaching. They've already released it in early access on Steam if you want to have a look. Is this something you'd like me to review? Let me know in the comments bellow and I'll see what I can do.
Final Thoughts
Moonlighter is the type of game where you have to try yourself. The best games are the ones that goe beyond your expectations, and I rank this one high due to this. It definitely gets my stamp of approval.
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