Moonlighter (PC)
Moonlighting is the practice of taking on a second job, often as a way to earn more money and make ends meet. In Moonlighter though, the silent protagonist Will’s first job really couldn’t exist without his second. To actually have wares worth selling during his merchant dayjob (at a store funnily enough named Moonlighter), he has to spend his nights as a dungeon-delving hero, scrounging up what valuables he can to keep the shop afloat. One potential issue with moonlighting though is that splitting your focus can lead to weaker work for both jobs, and in a sort of appropriate way, Moonlighter the game feels like its split focus between action and shopkeeping comes with a cost.
Moonlighter takes place in a small town called Rynoka that is positioned near a set of dangerous dungeons. With all but one of the dungeons closed, the once prosperous settlement has calmed down, but the orphan Will has no other way to earn gold and plunges in to try and fight his way to riches. Along the way though, he discovers that each of the four dungeons contain a special key, a large mysterious gate opened should he collect them all. Propelled forward by the mystery and a desire to do right by his deceased family’s business, Will fights through the dungeons at night and sells whatever he finds in treasure chests or picks up off of defeated monsters by day, and over time he can even start investing in the town of Rynoka itself. Admittedly, building up Rynoka is a somewhat small element, the town always remaining a fairly manageable space even as you fund the arrival of new businesses. The compact size of the town makes it easy to check in after each dungeon visit at least, the player able to drop by the potion saleswoman for healing items and armor enchantments or talk with the man at the forge to make new gear with little fuss. Investing in shop upgrades increases how well you can sell what you find and store any useful items needed for weapon and armor crafting, so there is usually something of value to do with the gold you earn from working at Moonlighter.
The most important part of the game though will be the time you spend in dungeons. Each dungeon has three floors with a boss at the end, the final floor having a much more involved and unique one while the earlier floors can sometimes just be brute forced since healing springs are always positioned before the fight. Exploring the actual dungeon is not about just fighting your way to these key fights though. Every time you enter a dungeon the floor layout and enemies present will be somewhat randomized, the player needing to find their path forward each time while also unsure what treasures they might find on that run. There is a bit of excitement in that bit of discovery, killing unfamiliar fiends for new items and opening treasure chests revealing loot you do not yet know the value of. Unfortunately, your backpack has very little storage space. You can store a few items on your person, but the rest are stored in your bag and if you should die in the dungeon, you’ll lose everything but those on hand items and be spat out of the dungeon with little to show for it.
Death isn’t that much of a concern unless you plunge forward foolishly though, the greater issue being just how quick your pack will be filled to its limit. Not counting equipment you’re wearing, you have 20 spots for items and even on the first floor of the smallest and easiest dungeon, you’ll probably fill up those spots if you explore all of its rooms. You can teleport back to town easily and only for a small (but gradually increasing) fee to go store or sell the items, but since the dungeon is reconfigured every visit, you’ll also need to go back through it again and potentially get more backpack clutter as you enter. You can later get the means to set up a teleport in a dungeon and you can ditch items you don’t want to bring back, but the value of items scales pretty well with where you are in the game so it’s not that easy to justify dumping them when they could be the key to a useful weapon or armor upgrade. It ends up a bit hard to get on a roll in a dungeon when it’s either going to involve a trip back to town rather early when exploring or require you to overlook opportunities in favor of delving in deeper, and while there is a rare way to get a bit more storage on your runs, it likely won’t crop up unless you look up specifically how to get it online.
The pack limit does make some sense, it is a way to motivate you to head back to town and engage with the item selling side of the experience, but so often it feels like you can’t get much done going in a dungeon because you have to head back and offload finds that are valuable enough that you can’t justify passing them by. In the dungeons though there is a bit of a more effective means of item management implemented, lower floors starting to add item curses that impact how you arrange your backpack’s storage. Curses clear when you return to town, but they can include things like requiring object be placed in certain rows or even destroying a nearby item when you go to town. You can have the item destroyers point outside the pack with smart arrangement, but that might clash with those limited space curses, adding some thought to what you gather in a more involved way than just realizing your bag is full and heading home. There are beneficial effects on some items though, such as clearing away another item’s curse or sending it immediately to storage back at the shop, and with a few hidden elements like a treasure chest that teleports as much as you can put into it back to Moonlighter, there are definitely moments where you feel a run invigorated by some smart bag arranging and lucky exploration.
The actual battles in the dungeons though are not too involved. While each dungeon has its own theme like a forest or desert, you’re limited to equipping two weapons and they mostly have a basic attack and a charge move that usually isn’t worth the effort compared to rapid attacking. Often to leave a room you must beat every baddie inside, there being some decent variety like little leaf waving imps that launch homing wind bullets at you, teleporting bird jesters who try to charge fire attacks if they can keep a safe distance, and weapon bearing golems that will do things like slash repeatedly in front of them or have a shield that requires you to get behind them to even hurt them. Your basic attacks will always do the job well enough and a dodge roll gives you the means to avoid attacks, but even with some weapon variety like a spear for long forward strikes, a bow for firing from across the room, and bladed knuckles for quick close range strikes, most conflict loses some of its edge as you invest in superior weaponry. The bosses can involve a good bit of dodging still and big bosses sometimes have a good trick or two that means you can’t just stand in front of them and slash away, but the fighting often doesn’t excite that much because you just need to run in and attack for many foes. The dungeon specific dangers aren’t too unique either, often just a floor hazard blocking off some of the room, but changing that from poison to lava isn’t exactly making the randomized rooms feel tangibly different from what you’ve seen before.
The dungeon diving ends up a bit so-so since you’re pulled from simple fights earlier than you’d like to go back to the shop, and the item selling has its ups and downs as well. When you first discover a new artifact or bit of monster loot, you’ll have no idea what its value could be. You have to set it up on the counters in your shop and assign it a price you feel matches its value, but when you open up and customers begin looking around, you need to watch their reactions to know if you gauged the value right. Their expressions will show above their head in a thought bubble, indicating if they absolutely will not buy an item, feel it is overpriced but could begrudgingly by it, if the price is set just right, or they feel like they’ve found a bargain, the player then able to use that reaction to adjust the price whenever they sell that kind of item again. A journal helps keep track of the reactions even if you don’t spot them yourself and can be easily consulted on a per item basis, but even after you know how that first price you set went over, you then need to try a new price and see if that’s closer to what works best for your profits and your customers’ happiness. While customers like to amble around the shop a fair bit, this does give the shopkeeping side some energy, the player needing to be ready to spring and adjust prices to get as much gold as they can off their latest load of loot, sometimes feeling the excitement of realizing you found something extremely valuable but also perhaps making you grumble when you realized you had the price far too low on something and made the wrong judgment call. Moonlighter autosaves to try and make you commit to choices and you should get a fair idea of pricing before you’ve finished the first dungeon and start progressing to more valuable loot, but the shopkeeping can be slow since you’re often waiting around for someone to smile or frown, then adding or subtracting some gold from a price, and waiting again for another reaction. Some later complications like thieves you need to tackle and benefits like an employee add a bit more to the process, but it mostly just expands in terms of shelf size and item prices. Later in the game, you can even end up rather flush with gold which makes the shopkeeping lose some of its importance, but before then there is at least a clear link between how satisfying dungeon crawling can become when you start to know in advance how good a find is and can look forward to a helpful payday from the latest acquisitions.
While neither side of the experience really feels like it grows enough and even the town itself feels small in scope since there are hardly any characters of note to interact with, one thing that must be commended is the game’s pixel art. A greenish goo is a common fixture in many of the dungeons and ties to some of their greater mysteries, but Moonlighter shows off by animating the goo intricately and has other little carefully realized moments like Will setting down his pack to talk with his old mentor that had some clear love putting into making them feel smooth and weighty. The extra artistic touches invigorate areas that could have felt lifeless otherwise, some of the repetitive nature of popping back to town before you really feel like you want to eased by elements that are interesting to watch in motion and a lovely soundtrack. The style is the one part that feels like it has gone above and beyond, the game showing far more care for little elements like lava flowing into basins than what your gold can go towards as you reach the later dungeons.
THE VERDICT: In Moonlighter, running the item shop and clearing out dungeons don’t quite have the level of depth needed that they could work on their own, but intertwining them does add an appealing loop even if it comes with some downsides. Having to leave dungeons early and often takes the wind out of the action’s sails, but knowing you’ve found something of value or eagerly anticipating what a chance find could be worth still adds an exciting layer. Manning the shop is mostly a matter of watching customers react which can be rather slow at times, but you will feel its value when you can get better gear to start trivializing some troublesome foes. The music and especially the pixel art bring their A game, but your time as a merchant and a hero only works because the two professions prop each other up despite also inherently distracting from the other side of the experience.
And so, I give Moonlighter for PC…
An OKAY rating. It is possible the thing most to blame for the delicate balance in Moonlighter is the dungeon randomization. The design elements for the dungeons are kept simple so they can be easily swapped around and they’re not too distinct so its harder to point directly at repetitive elements, but this means exploring them isn’t always interesting and your backpack’s limited size means you have to teleport out and inevitably trudge through nondescript rooms again on the next visit. While earning money as a merchant does pay into the adventuring as you can buy stronger weapons and better gear, the weapons are often pretty simple in their use and the enemies stay somewhat straightforward as well, the excitement meant to come from the items found more than the action outside of bosses. Merchant work mostly just feels like it moves too slowly; it could work as a short task between longer dungeon delves in its current form. The pricing process isn’t that expansive and ideas like taking contracts to have items available on later dates are often not worth the trouble though, so if it was to be the main draw instead it would need more worth doing than bumping the prices around a bit. It really is those moments where you can feel the interconnected relationship in a good way that give Moonlighter a somewhat addictive loop that helps it not go under. When you’re collecting items you can be excited thinking about what their value will be or feel that sting if you do die and lose so much, and in town you know new gear and enchantments will come with an increase in battle competency you’re eager to check out. If Moonlighter instead had longer dungeons with set jumping out points or there were more involved battles where you could buy useful tools or special edges beyond just strictly stronger gear, the relationship could maybe start to hold your interest in the moment more often rather than your eyes often on future prizes.
Moonlighter did seem to have some unfortunate hitching issues as well, the game freezing up for a second and then the action resumes as if it had been playing out, Will even appearing inside a block at one point and a boss was out of its arena for a bit before things eventually corrected. It’s another part of the overall experience that feels like it didn’t get the attention needed, most major elements instead relying on the presence of other ideas to make up for their simplicity or shallowness. For the most part, the many parts of the Moonlighter experience work just enough, but it lives in the shadow of Recettear: An Item Shop’s Tale, a game that had a smarter sense for how much its systems should relate to each other and where it needed depth. Moonlighter wants to be a game about balancing both halves of Will’s life through the way the professions connect, but it feels like more time was needed to flesh out the basics so being a merchant and hero are satisfying on their own but even better together.