Moonlighter

« Moonlighter is a wonderful game that uses a delightful separation of tools to make you want to keep playing. It innovates the dungeon crawler genre in the most ingenious way possible. »

« Moonlighter manages to perfectly balance the best bits of Stardew Valley, Dark Souls and Binding of Isaac for a game that just keeps you coming back for more. »

« It’s all here in one gloriously gratifying package that will have you coming back for more, more, and more again. An incredible dungeon crawler with a cutesy consumerist twist that’ll provide you with some of 2018’s best moments – and capital fun it is, too. »

« Moonlighter is a refreshing take on the rogue-like that not only adds to the genre with the use of its shopkeeping mechanic but makes use of its rich environments and items to tell a truly interesting story. Despite some performance issues my experience with Moonlighter was extremely positive, and I can’t wait to return to Rynoka and revisit the story of Will and Moonlighter once again. »

« Moonlighter is a wonderful combination of Zelda and Animal Crossing that easily commands your constant attention. It looks beautiful with a lovely, pixelated style; music from the shop and the dungeons will be stuck in your head for days. The only fault I could find with Moonlighter it’s relatively short — I wanted more dungeons, more enemies to topple, more items to sell. »

« Moonlighter is an exciting action adventure-shop simulator game that shouldn’t be skipped. If you have any interest in running a shop and dungeon diving, then this game is for you. »

« One of the best news for the indie scene in this year. Moonlighter is old-school RPG with a pinch of roguelike, which combines real time battles with looting and shopping mechanics in a very innovative and effective way. »

« A deft marriage of dungeon crawling, shop management elements and infectiously twee audiovisual presentation, Moonlighter makes a fine addition to the upper echelon of action adventures available on PS4. »

« Moonlighter had a lot of potential. It's hardly the first game in the action/shopkeep hybrid genre, but it's one significantly held back by the rogue-lite elements it insists on using. Rather than making steady progress through the game, using gear and your shop as a sort of level up system, Moonlighter decided to go the Binding of Issac path where each dungeon is a fixed 3 floors leading to fixed bosses, and fixed loot, but randomizing the layout and enemy formations each time you re-enter. What sounds like a fun, infinity dungeon rapidly spirals into tedium. You see, since the shop you run is functionally your rogue-lite upgrade system, there's never anything to find in the dungeons except trash to sell. Rarely will you find a potion, only from mimics which are also rare, and any equipment is several tiers lower than what you can craft at that moment. This means after just a couple attempts at each dungeon, you're only goin in to find the bosses as quickly as possible to make progress through the game. Which generates frustration with how hard the enemies hit. The early dungeons seem tuned towards a Dark Souls style"our game is HARD!" While later dungeons are significantly easier for seemingly no real reason. Almost like the late game gear is overpowered and the early game stuff is too weak. Whatever the case may be, this leads to more frustration than anything while you spend time clearing out rooms trying to progress only to die to some random mob that does half your hp with a tracking projectile. Even if you didn't lose any of your loot, it wouldn't matter since you're fully upgraded and simply trying to finish the dungeon and progress the game. Ultimately, the problem is how divorced the dungeons are from the shop. Yes, I'm dungeon diving to stock my shop, but the shop and gold in general, becomes useless after just a couple of attempts at each new dungeon, putting more emphasis on the game's rather bland combat and annoying difficulty spikes. The game feels very bare bones once you get to the 2nd or 3rd dungeon and it doesn't really improve from there either. »

« I'm not usually into indie games like this, but what a pleasant surprise! It's incredibly addictive going into dungeons at night and during the day, opening the shop and selling all the loot you've collected. Perfect for playing while watching or listening to something. »

« This game is ideal for playing it in the background while you listen or watch something that is not fully engaging. For that reason I really enjoyed it as it helped me relax. It was fun delving into dungeon and gathering ingridients to sell them as another minigame in your shop. Very good game. »

« This is what you would get if Zelda games were still retro 2D games / market sellingSIM. Great fun building up character and shop »

« Literally horrible. No tutorial No walkthrough. You just start in a dungeon and it’s hard to beat the enemy. Then you start a shop but it doesn’t tell you anything on how to price them. Went back into the dungeon and kept dying. Changed to it the easiest setting and it’s still just unplayable. Not worth it. »

« ive come back after playing quite a bit more to reduce my rating from 6 to 3. the further you get into this game, the worse it gets. we are punished for exploring, punished for selling items, money means nothing, we cant unlock literally *anything* until we beat a brick wall of a boss fight thats literally never skill based, its just trading hits and hoping your potions last to the end of the battle. the inventory system is horrendous, the PC controls are so bad that it literally took me more than 2 years of owning the game to even find a layound that was halfway workable. pressing the hotkey to quick transfer ALL items moves your entire inventory the INTO chests in the middle of dungeon runs and completely disorganizes them. hitting sort will completely and utterly unsort your inventory due to 50% or more of all items being cursed. inventory can't be accessed during combat, meaning that tons and tons of items fall into the depths because we can't drop enough junk to pick them up. everything about this is a hassle, and the more that i play, the more i realize that the late game is the worst part. please, don't punish yourself with this crud, it only has good reviews from people who haven't made it very far yet. besides all of these issues, there's still everything else i had a problem with in my original review, but that can be summarized with "these are some ridiculously lazy devs who will literally charge you for an asset flip before they fix a bug that makes their volume sliders stop working 6 years after the games release and even after dlc came out, the game still has a day 1 volume bug that makes the music and sfx ridiculously loud. there is a lot of potential for a good game here, but there are some issues with pacing in the mid to late game, and far too few gear options. money is utterly pointless after a while, and loot can be rare, so you are de incentivized to even open the shop. many boss fights are basically impossible without first maxing out your gear, and you can't get the ingredients for better gear until you beat the bosses because money cant buy anything besides potions once you are about halfway through the game. not enough upgrades for the shop, some upgrades dont make sense while others are hugely imbalanced to benefit the player's income. there is no guide whatsoever on what prices you should sell your goods at, and the highly successful business next door easily sells goods at 10x the price you could get away with, which can make finding the value of your goods a misleading and confusing endeavor. movement, especially in combat, is sluggish and limited most of the time, and it's not generally possible to dodge all of the bosses or enemy's attacks with this system, so any serious fight is going to consist of just trading hits and chugging potions. there's a lot of charm in moonlighter, but it feels that the effort wasn't really put in to make it a cohesively paced or balanced title. playing this after dave the diver, i can't give moonlighter more than a 6/10. the devs need to finish their game, because the DLC is pretty feeble as well. »

« Great rougelite with an interesting shop management twist. Enviroments and enemies had good diversity but progression was a bit linear for my taste. »

« A game with a very good store mechanism but the content is a bit limited. I don't appreciate the movement system. Moonlighter is great for those who like simple gameplay. »