Moonlighter is a great game on paper: roguelite dungeon-crawling plus shop management and rebuilding a town, all accompanied by beautiful pixel art -- quite possibly the most fluid pixel art I've ever seen in a game. It's so incredibly disappointing to see that the final product is much less than the sum of its parts, and leaves a lot to be desired.
The game puts you in charge of a shopkeeper named Will, who makes a living by exploring magical dungeons that exist close to his town, and dreams of unraveling their mysteries. The core loop has you entering the procedurally generated dungeons, fighting enemies and collect loot, then leaving with your stuff and putting it for sale on the shop. There, you can set the placement and price for each item: clients will react to that price with satisfaction, or shock, or ecstasy, and from that, you can gauge how much people are willing to pay. Money you get is used to improve the town's facilities and craft more equipment, so you can afford exploring the dungeons further.
The issue is, every one of those systems is incredibly shallow. Take the game's combat, for instance: you have a choice of four melee weapons, all of which require the same materials to craft and upgrade per tier, and also play the exact same, with a three hit combo as well as a special attack you'll likely never use because of how it leaves you open. There's a bit of a Lords of the Fallen-ness to the weapons in that the game tries to get you to be mindful of your attacks by making wind-up and recovery animations uncancellable and slow, but overdoes it, and instead makes even the fastest weapons in the game dissatisfying to use.
It's demoralizing how much faster basic enemies are compared to you, and also how bulky they are. The latter is part of how the game handles progression in an annoying way: the main game is composed of four dungeons with three very floors each, which is not a lot. The floor map is procedurally generated and extremely simple, enemies being the only thing in your way. Whenever you move between floors, enemy stats jump. That's it: nothing else changes about the dungeon itself except that the same enemies can now kill you faster and you'll need a turbo controller to bring them down. It's a cheap -- and grindy -- method of adding difficulty to force you to go back to town and upgrade your stuff.
One of them, anyway -- it's easy to name a few others. For instance, Will has few iframes, leading to a lot of near instant deaths, and a lot of enemies (including bosses) do not telegraph their attacks, forcing you to rely on rote memorization of their timings and/or spamming your stilted dodge move that is likely to lead you into a pit, a wall, or a damage source. Speaking of which, as beautiful as the game looks, it leaves a lot to be desired in terms of visual clarity. Enemies and props blend into the backgrounds too easily, often leading you into walking straight into them. It's rare for 2D games to have these issues, because generally, it's an easy issue to fix with outlines or by choosing contrasting palettes. Moonlighter is the first case I've seen in many years.
But anyway, you get tired of dealing with that and exit the dungeon, finding yourself in the town soon after. Rebuilding the town is locked behind dungeon progression, so you don't have much freedom in that sense. As for the shop, you place the items you want to sell and assign a price. It's super uninvolved: each item has a set price people are willing to pay for it, which never changes, and you have to find it through trial and error. Or just use a guide and get through that faster, especially since the menus are super clunky and you don't want to get stuck doing inventory management for too long. Sometimes, NPCs make item requests, which are never worth it, and maybe once a day you have to stop a thief. The shop is just a section of the game you want to end faster.
The icing on the cake is in how buggy the game is. To the developers' credit, in the three to four years since the game released, they have fixed a lot of stuff: it used to be so bad, people openly recommended not buying and instead waiting for more patches. But even today, there's a lot of bugs that show up through normal gameplay. Some stuff is pretty minor, like audio fading out or cutting off when it shouldn't, but a lot of the time the game screws you pretty hard. To list a few cases, the game will randomly softlock in places such as the shop. it will routinely miscalculate your stats. There's collision issues, and it's not rare to get stuck inside walls. There's problems that stem from control remapping. There's even a bug on the final boss where it can just kill you randomly through invisible damage sources that has caused people to drop the game on the cusp of finishing it.
Which is what I feel I should have done. I gave the game too many free passes because of its indieness and (admittedly, incredibly pretty) sprite animations, but having gone through the whole thing, it just wasn't worth it. Moonlighter is a clunky, glitchy grindfest that plays like a prototype of the game it wanted to be. With so many great indie roguelites on the market, it's hard to recommend it.
The game puts you in charge of a shopkeeper named Will, who makes a living by exploring magical dungeons that exist close to his town, and dreams of unraveling their mysteries. The core loop has you entering the procedurally generated dungeons, fighting enemies and collect loot, then leaving with your stuff and putting it for sale on the shop. There, you can set the placement and price for each item: clients will react to that price with satisfaction, or shock, or ecstasy, and from that, you can gauge how much people are willing to pay. Money you get is used to improve the town's facilities and craft more equipment, so you can afford exploring the dungeons further.
The issue is, every one of those systems is incredibly shallow. Take the game's combat, for instance: you have a choice of four melee weapons, all of which require the same materials to craft and upgrade per tier, and also play the exact same, with a three hit combo as well as a special attack you'll likely never use because of how it leaves you open. There's a bit of a Lords of the Fallen-ness to the weapons in that the game tries to get you to be mindful of your attacks by making wind-up and recovery animations uncancellable and slow, but overdoes it, and instead makes even the fastest weapons in the game dissatisfying to use.
It's demoralizing how much faster basic enemies are compared to you, and also how bulky they are. The latter is part of how the game handles progression in an annoying way: the main game is composed of four dungeons with three very floors each, which is not a lot. The floor map is procedurally generated and extremely simple, enemies being the only thing in your way. Whenever you move between floors, enemy stats jump. That's it: nothing else changes about the dungeon itself except that the same enemies can now kill you faster and you'll need a turbo controller to bring them down. It's a cheap -- and grindy -- method of adding difficulty to force you to go back to town and upgrade your stuff.
One of them, anyway -- it's easy to name a few others. For instance, Will has few iframes, leading to a lot of near instant deaths, and a lot of enemies (including bosses) do not telegraph their attacks, forcing you to rely on rote memorization of their timings and/or spamming your stilted dodge move that is likely to lead you into a pit, a wall, or a damage source. Speaking of which, as beautiful as the game looks, it leaves a lot to be desired in terms of visual clarity. Enemies and props blend into the backgrounds too easily, often leading you into walking straight into them. It's rare for 2D games to have these issues, because generally, it's an easy issue to fix with outlines or by choosing contrasting palettes. Moonlighter is the first case I've seen in many years.
But anyway, you get tired of dealing with that and exit the dungeon, finding yourself in the town soon after. Rebuilding the town is locked behind dungeon progression, so you don't have much freedom in that sense. As for the shop, you place the items you want to sell and assign a price. It's super uninvolved: each item has a set price people are willing to pay for it, which never changes, and you have to find it through trial and error. Or just use a guide and get through that faster, especially since the menus are super clunky and you don't want to get stuck doing inventory management for too long. Sometimes, NPCs make item requests, which are never worth it, and maybe once a day you have to stop a thief. The shop is just a section of the game you want to end faster.
The icing on the cake is in how buggy the game is. To the developers' credit, in the three to four years since the game released, they have fixed a lot of stuff: it used to be so bad, people openly recommended not buying and instead waiting for more patches. But even today, there's a lot of bugs that show up through normal gameplay. Some stuff is pretty minor, like audio fading out or cutting off when it shouldn't, but a lot of the time the game screws you pretty hard. To list a few cases, the game will randomly softlock in places such as the shop. it will routinely miscalculate your stats. There's collision issues, and it's not rare to get stuck inside walls. There's problems that stem from control remapping. There's even a bug on the final boss where it can just kill you randomly through invisible damage sources that has caused people to drop the game on the cusp of finishing it.
Which is what I feel I should have done. I gave the game too many free passes because of its indieness and (admittedly, incredibly pretty) sprite animations, but having gone through the whole thing, it just wasn't worth it. Moonlighter is a clunky, glitchy grindfest that plays like a prototype of the game it wanted to be. With so many great indie roguelites on the market, it's hard to recommend it.
Reviewed on Aug 14, 2022