Moonlighter the duality of disappointment
Moonlighter is a game I have been keeping an eye on for a while, it seemed like it would conveniently scratch 2 gaming itches I have. On one hand It would be a shop management skills where I could spend hours theory-crafting in game economics and on the other hand have an engaging top-down dungeon crawling experience.
Audio and Visuals
The reality of the situation fast became clear once I began playing, this is a game that on the surface level looks great. Graphically the game pulls off an attractive presentation of pixel art which is a discipline with increasingly impressive standards to compete with. The soundtrack does not stand out too much but it does the job without fault, and at first glance the gameplay seems solid at its core.
Shopkeeping
So where does the game fall down?
Upon the second glance at the gameplay.
We will start with the shopkeeping part of the game. What I was hoping for with this was something along the lines of Receteer (check it out if you want a better alternative to this game and are able to look past or enjoy the cutesy anime art style) with a large variety or recipes to learn and simple but engaging market/customer dynamics to keep track of. What I got is a painfully shallow system where most of what you sell is just the trash you have picked up in the dungeons. The crafting system is primarily for getting you gear with very little reason to bother with crafting things to sell.
As for market dynamics they exist but can largely be ignored, the inherent value of an item will change over time based on some invisible factors in the background but your only way of knowing this is trial and error with adjusting the price you attempt to sell something at and gauging the customer reaction of one of four emojis they can display. Now in theory this actually sounds okay but in practise you end up doing a couple of trials with each item to figure out the optimal price and then keep using that until a customer gives you a different emoji which doesn't happen often.
So overall the shop management half of the game takes no real thought or strategy and basically plays itself, but what about dungeon crawling?
Dungeoneering
This side of the game holds up better but still falls flat. Gameplay is highy reminiscent of the combat from older 2D zelda games such as link to the past which is fine but those games also had clever puzzles and more interesting boss designs. There are no real puzzles in this only combat and though it feels crisp and doesn't actually have any glaring flaws it suffers from a similar problem as the shop management in that it is too shallow. The combat is fun for a few hours but then begins to feel samey and without puzzles or enough challenging boss fights to break it up it soon falls into tedium. There are a variety of different weapons but they don't do enough to change up your tactics or the gameplay as a whole. The enemy variety is also quite solid but again it doesn't take too long to learn an enemies patterns and then just rinse and repeat for ever bringing as back to feeling like there is just a little something missing.
Conclusion
I realise this review has had quite a negative tone and I don't want to give the impression that this is a terrible game, it has no glaring flaws its good to look at not buggy and the gameplay is adequate. My disappointment comes from recognising the unmet potential of this game on both sides of its gameplay loop. If the dungeon crawling had zelda-esque puzzles to break up the combat and perhaps some innovative mechanic to make the combat just a bit less generic it would stand out. And for the shopkeeping it just needs a bit more depth and challenge adding into the equation. Moonlighter comes so close to being a gem of a game but falls just short and this feeling of near-greatness makes it frustrating to play.
5/10
Thanks for reading
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