My brother once, a few years ago, gifted me a copy of Recettear: An Item Shop’s Tale. I was a little reticent, because anime, but I found myself really enjoying it. The characters were cute, and I loved finding the perfect price to sell the items I had hunted down. I thought it was a really fresh, unique roguelike.
The problem was that Recettear is unplayable about 4 hours in- there’s a massive difficulty spike (I was maybe right to be reticent) that neither I nor my partner could get over.
So when I heard about Moonlighter, I was excited. The art was beautiful, and everything I’d heard was positive. It had a real shot of being what I wanted Recettear to be.
Thirty plus hours later, and I’m not sure how I feel. There is so much about Moonlighter I love, and I think it has a lot of potential. At the risk of sounding like a real estate agent, it has great bones. It needs some work, but the foundation is there. Metaphors abound. Anyway.
Moonlighter’s core gameplay is divided into two sections, and it does both of them well. The roguelike dungeoneering is exceptional. There’s a variety of combat options: sword and shield, bow, spear, bladed boxing gloves. Each one feels different than the last, but in my experience bow and spear ended being a cut above the others in terms of balance. Big sword had massive damage output, but was naturally much slower as a result and I found myself getting killed before I could put out that damage. Sword and shield let you block, but blocking pushed you back and often forced you to take other damage unnecessarily, and in a game with as fluid a dodge roll as Moonlighter you really didn’t need to be blocking.
Spear and Bow have marked advantages over the other weapons: they both keep you at a range from your enemies, which minimizes damage. Neither are slow enough that you’ll be spending too much time charging attacks, and the kicker: both can attack through walls, which almost no enemy can do. Meaning the spear and bow can deal damage in such a way that guarantees you no harm which, as far as i can tell, makes them the best option. I’m always a little bummed when a game has a ‘mechanically best’ option, especially a game with as many options as Moonlighter has.
Shopkeeping is also loads of fun, and managing what’s on your shelves along with your customer’s wait time and keeping an eye out for thieves makes for a really delightful rhythm. It speaks to the quality of Moonlighter’s design that both of it’s core gameplay elements would make for an excellent game just by themselves.
Shopkeeping, like dungeoneering, needs some tweaking. When you upgrade your shop to a specific point, you unlock an assistant who, in exchange for a percent of the day’s profit, will run the shop so you can spend more time dungeoneering. This is, in theory, a great reward for people who don’t enjoy the dungeoneering as much or find themselves short on cash. The problem is it doesn’t work. At all. The shop assistant took my items, didn’t sell a single thing, and the items vanished.
One of the less stressful parts of managing your shop is keeping an eye on a customer’s wait time. If a customer waits too long, they won’t buy the item and will walk out. The problem is, they’ll steal the fuckin item! Instead of just leaving the item on the counter, you lose not only the opportunity to sell the item, but you’re out whatever the item is worth too. This means I can be late talking to a customer because I’m stopping a thief, and then have my customer turn thief in the middle of the interaction, and there’s not a thing I can do about it. Even if I’m right at the counter, I get to watch them walk out with my shit.
If that wasn’t frustrating enough, something about the ‘customer setting the item on the counter’ interaction is clunky as hell. You see the ‘sell’ prompt, the customer sets it down, the prompt instantly vanishes, and takes about 2 seconds to show up again- leaving me sitting there spamming the sell button so that the line moves as fast as possible so that the weird mandatory wait time doesn’t make a thief out of my honest customers.
With both of it’s core mechanics developed, Moonlighter becomes a game of small design choices, and there are plenty. Most dialogue options are simply ‘yes’ or ‘no’, but each option has a really cute animation of a head nodding to accompany it. Not every customer is the same- some are ‘generous’ customers, which only buy items in display cases, but they’ll pay more than necessary. Some customers are ‘adventurers’ who only buy weapons. Some are ‘tourists’, who operate on a different pricing range and don’t update your pricing guide.
Perhaps my favorite part of the game is the secret rooms you can find in the dungeoneering segments marked by sparkles above pits. These vary, but my favorite is a pedestal with an expensive item on it- but if you take it without replacing it with something, you’ll trigger an exceptionally deadly enemy.
Moonlighter is full to the brim of good design. The dungeons are a delight to explore even as they get more difficult, and the enemies are consistent enough to be understandable but unique enough to still be interesting four dungeons in. There’s always something for the player to work towards, some new piece of gear to buy or boss to beat. Moonlighter has an absolutely fantastic rhythm to it.
It’s really frustrating, then, that a bug prevents me from beating the game. It crashes completely as I enter the climactic final dungeon, no matter what. There’s an update available for the PC version of the game that hasn’t come to the Playstation version, but this bug isn’t even on the list of problems that patch fixes.
I loved all of my time with Moonlighter, but between the shop assistant not working at all, the game occasionally not starting at all, and the final dungeon being entirely inaccessible, I’m angry. I don’t hate Early Access games or betas, but Moonlighter isn’t one. It’s a full release, and I paid full-release price, and I can’t beat it at all. I’m angry not because Moonlighter is bad, but because it’s extremely good, and a well-documented bug renders it unplayable.
Moonlighter is very good, and you should play it- but you should also wait until the game is out of the beta it appears to be in.
