Moonlighter

Genre: Top-Down Roguelike Action-RPG / Management Sim

Players: 1

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Review:

Moonlighter is kinda’ like what you’d get if you wanted a game like Stardew Valley, but with a greater focus on the action, or if you combined a game like Zelda with a shop management sim. If you ever played the PC game Recettear, it’s kinda’ like that.

No? Need more than that? Okay.

At its core, this is a game with two parts, and while neither on its own is particularly noteworthy in the genre it represents, the combination of the two is something magical.

The first part is the top-down dungeon-crawling. You venture into dungeons, fighting monsters and raiding their loot. The dungeons are randomized, so each time you enter them, the layout and monsters change, and as you get better equipment, you’re better able to venture farther into the dungeon.

Getting that equipment isn’t so simple though. You can’t just sell it and buy what you need. And that leads us to the second part:

During the day, your character runs an item shop in town where you sell your loot. To do so, you must try to determine your loot’s worth by watching the reactions of the townspeople as they consider buying. Too high and they won’t buy, but too low and you could be missing out on a fortune. In addition to keeping track of the prices of items, you’re also working on upgrading your shop, investing in the town, and holding aside items you need for crafting.

Separately, each of these halves is not quite what you’d look for in their genre. Combat in the dungeons is fairly simple, with the variety coming not from your attacks, but from the different patterns of attacks monsters use, and the different combinations of monsters. But it’s not as deep or engaging as a game like Zelda. Likewise, the shopkeeping in town isn’t as involved as managing your farm in Stardew Valley, where you maintain relationships with townspeople, have calendar events, and a multitude of varied activities – there’s none of that here.

But while each half is lacking compared to contemporaries, together the two halves of the game make for an addictive experience, where you feel compelled to keep dungeon raiding but need to stop to manage your shop so you can afford new armor, but then you want to manage your shop but you’ve run out of supplies so you need to go dungeon raiding. Keep on with this pattern for a while and you’ll find it’s 3AM on a work night and where the hell did the time go!?

Complimenting this addictive experience is an aesthetic that combines simple but charming 16 bit-esque graphics with solid animation and a nice, addictive soundtrack that perfectly compliments the experience.

While there are absolutely places where this game could do better, on the whole it is a fantastic experience, and one I think that fans of both Zelda-esque games and Stardew Valley-esque games would do well to look into.

tl;dr – Moonlighter is an experience somewhere in between a game like Zelda and a game like Stardew Valley, where you balance dungeon raids and shop management. What that amounts to is an addictive experience that’s greater than the sum of its parts, and a game that should be played by fans of either genre.

Grade: A

Note: This is one of the first reviews ever written on eShopperReviews, all the way back when it was just a community on another website. It was originally posted on the very first day of that community’s existence, on Saturday, June 29, 2019. My, we’ve come a long way, haven’t we!

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