It’s also not much of a shop management game. Moonfighter would be more appropriate, except you don’t fight an actual moon, as far as I know.

Moonlighter boldly strides into the genre of game that is the dungeon shopper. That is, a game in which you both explore dungeons, securing a variety of loot, and operate a shop of some description to sell your variety of loot in. It’s a genre that now has roughly two installments into it and it’s safe to say that Moonlighter is definitely the second best installment into the genre. Congratulations! Moonlighter’s strength comes from its solid dungeon exploration and tough bosses, but ultimately falls flat when it asks you to operate a shop and sell your wares. Capitalism, ho?

You are Will Moonlighter (you’re not actually, but I can’t remember his name) and you’ve recently inherited the titular shop, Moonlighter, a seller of various wares, specifically those found in the mysterious and magical dungeons that sit just outside of town. However, the town has been severely lacking in local activity ever since the dungeons shut down and all the “Heroes” have long since moved away, probably to another town with a bunch of mysterious and magical dungeons a hundred meters down the road. This means it is up to you, Will Moonlighter, to take the fight to the dungeons and loot and pillage all you can from these ancient and magical dungeons. Apparently you don’t get regular stock deliveries to your store, which could also explain why it’s close to going out of business. As well as the ghost town thing.

But you’re just a slowly shop clerk, how will you ever cope in doing the work of a “Hero”, you’re not really built for taking on giant slimes, ancient golems and a variety of other foul magical beasts. Thankfully you’re a surprisingly daft hand when it comes to combat as you’ll use a variety of weapon types to swing, shoot and dodge roll your way through the various randomly generated hellscapes. Despite all the warnings provided to you by old man Jenkins (not his actual name) about how “shop owner” and “hero” aren’t the same occupation, and nor should they mix, you’ll find yourself diving deeper and deeper into increasingly dangerous dungeons and disastrously dying all too regularly.

Moonlighter is very much so a dungeon crawler as you roll your way through procedurally generated dungeons, grabbing randomised loot from chests and trying to get far enough into the dungeon to secure only the fanciest and highest selling items before you eventually die and lose everything. The rogue-like elements of Moonlighter keep things increasingly tense and the high risk/reward of descending to the deepest levels of the dungeon add to that all the more. One moment you could’ve unlocked a chest rife with only the rarest of wares, the next moment you risk one more room and are accosted by a number angry dudes who smash you down to size. And then everything drops on the floor and you cry deeply at all that lost loot, never to be seen again. But it’s okay as you can just try again in a slightly different dungeon fighting the same dudes for more or less the same items.

While the items all start out fairly simple, some twigs, some bits of rock, etc, you rapidly begin to find rarer items that’ll sell for a high price, but that’s not all, as items begin to have some level of magical curse on them which turns your backpack into a a bizarre puzzle of placement. Items will destroy the item in a certain direction of them come the end of the dungeon, others will transform whatever is next to them into themselves and sometimes you’ll have items whose curse is that it just sends an item to your shop instantly. These variety of curses come at just the point in most dungeon expeditions where your inventory is getting particularly stuffed and trying to decide what items to take with you and what items to leave behind becomes a tough choice and it’s kind of wonderful. You’ll find yourself looking at an expensive and rare item that wont stack with anything due to its curse, but you place it adjacent to a bunch of low cost items so that when you escape the dungeon your profits multiply with rapid pace. You’ll find difficult decisions on what to keep pile up more and more as this maze of conditions in your inventory take up almost every space you have. Then you’ll find that those mental gymnastics you’ve been pulling are all for naught anyway because you accidentally got stuck in a slime and died.

The inventory management of Moonlighter is one of the strongest aspects of the game, which makes me sound like a middle aged man explaining how the most exciting part of his model train set is painting the faces of all the passengers. The constant stress and relief that comes from shifting your inventory around and not really having room for anything, only for that to ease up as you stumble upon items that immediately cure any curse or send those items straight home is kind of magical. It keeps the dungeon exploration fun and engaging, and there’s an added feeling of satisfaction that comes from the super rare chests as not only have you stuffed your pockets with items, that probably belong in a museum, you’ve also solved the Millennium Prize Problem that is your inventory’s layout. As fun as the dungeons are to explore in Moonlighter, things can feel a tad frustrating, though. Most of it comes from a variety of monsters that boil down to just awkward hit encounters. There are large slime creatures that when they get close enough to you will eat you, in which you can no longer move and everything wails on you and then you’re released, but when you walk up to the slime to try and swat it with your big sword again, you’ll be consumed once again and the cycle continues. There are flying enemies that swoop down to smash your face in, and only then can they be battered with any kind of weapon, except they’ll only swoop when they’ve the utmost confidence of connecting with your poor shopkeep face, which turns into an annoying test of running back and forth trying to goad this floating testicle to take a dive at you/ All in the hopes you avoid it and can also then hit it. Specific annoyances, but boy can some of the enemies in the game become a tad annoying in their loops of death.

Despite all that, the majority of monster experiences are at least unique and fun enough to keep things different with each new dungeon you explore, but by the 20th or more time you’re making a run through the dungeon things can begin to feel a little tiresome and repetitive, maybe I’m just bad at the game and was never meant to do that many runs before beating the boss.

Otherwise there’s nothing too outlandishly outstanding about the dungeons themselves. You’ve got all your themes you’d expect, Dungeon Dungeon, Forest Dungeon, Sand Dungeon, Robot Dungeon and so on and so forth. The bosses are imposing and challenging and the combat is simple enough with a handful of weapon types which all have secondary abilities: the sword and shield blocks, the big sword spins and the bow fires a curved arrow. Alongside the swinging of your weapons, you’ll be dodge rolling out of the way of all danger and occasionally inhaling a potion to try and heal up, if you’ve got them. It all feels very Legend of Zelda, which is fine as it’s a tight experience, but things can begin to feel a tad annoying when you’re searching for a specific item or trying to get to the boss room to move the game on, without getting relatively stomped on along the way. Again.

But what about your day job? Lest we forget you are a humble shop owner moonlighting as a hero, and your store happens to be called Moonlighter in a bizarre sense of nominative determination. Sadly once your tired feet land back in town everything becomes all too formulaic and boring. You can open your shop for the day in which you place your items across the limited space you’ve got and set the price. Customers will slowly trickle into the store, look at an item and do one of three things: pick up the item to buy with a happy look on their face, pick the item up with money in their eyes as you’ve priced the item too low and you’re basically giving it away, or not pick the item up and be angry as it’s too expensive. The majority of the shop management comes from trying to find the optimum prices for your ill-gotten gains. This can easily turn to accidentally putting a super rare item down for too low a price, and then some, as you try and slowly tick it up in price, but keep going too low. Eventually you’ll reach a point in which you’ve determined the perfect price for every item you’ve currently got access to and then all you’re left to do is stand at the till and wait for the adoring public to buy everything, as well as running out back to find more stock to place on the shelves while everyone’s running about buying everything. Eventually you get things like thieves, who’ll try and steal your items until you tackle them to the ground, and high paying customers and heroes who come to store. The former will pay an extra premium on your items (if you can change the price of the exact item they’ll look at in time) and the heroes want nothing but weapons and equipment, which you’ll normally not have. Otherwise it’s streams and streams of people coming to buy your stuff for little or no reason. Most of the items don’t actually have a use outside of well… being sold.

This is how Moonlighter’s shopping falls flat, in that it’s a flat experience. Much like an actual sales assistant you spend a lot of your time just at the checkout hitting “okay” whenever anyone brings something up to the till. Stacking shelves and scanning items through the checkout, what a way to make a living. Yes the puzzle of working out the right price for items is fun, but it’s a very limited experience. Not to mention you have to ask yourself what the point of all this money is? You can upgrade the town and the shop itself, increasing the size of your shop and the amount customers will tip as well as unlocking new shops in the town, of which you’ll only ever use the blacksmith and sometimes the potion seller, to buy their strongest potions. The blacksmith will upgrade your equipment so long as you bring him the correct materials from the dungeon, as well as a fat stack of cash, and you might be foolish enough to think that this could be an efficient way of making some money. Selling equipment to those heroes that were previously mentioned. In short, no. In long, the items needed to craft equipment are among the cheapest items you’ll find on your travels, they’re not really worth even putting on display, so being able to convert useless items to an actual sword sounds like a master plan, except the fat stack of cash required to even craft these items destroys any and all profit you could make. The blacksmith is there for you, and you only, to upgrade your equipment to make the act of exploring the harder dungeons more palpable.

It all feels a tad disappointing as there’s no feeling of complicated process to making money. The act of exploring the dungeon alone will line your pockets with enough gold to see you through for the rest of your life and all the junk materials just become nuisances that occupy space in your chests and inventory. The town is also barren of character, the whole game is even. Sure Old Man Jenkins gives you a dire warning as you delve into deeper dungeons, but that’s it. NPCs simply exist in town and sometimes ask for you to get them ten blocks of stone from the sand dungeon before Tuesday. That’s it. In the truest sentiments of “Capitalism, ho!” there’s just no soul to the experience. In the other game of this genre, Recettear, there’s this crippling sense of time limitation as you jump to the tavern and talk to a hero and try and convince them to work for you, before going on an expedition into the dungeons to try and grab as much loot as you can to sell in your shop, in which you then actively change the prices in a wild shotgun ride of commerce depending on the customer, all so you can get enough money before the next time limit so the repomen don’t break your child legs. There’s none of that in Moonlighter, you just sell items during the day, and then go explore in the dungeon at night, or during the day. It doesn’t matter! Don’t open for 7 days in a row as you try and defeat the boss and fill your store with masses of loot, who cares? In my current game I’ve nearly one million money, I’ve bought all the possible upgrades for the town and shop and I’m only in the third dungeon, out of five. The only things left for me to acquire are those unlocked upon entering the next dungeons and they’re a slightly larger shop and new weapons. All that money, for nothing.

Moonlighter feels like a dungeon exploring rogue-like game that realised that it needed SOMETHING to do with all the loot you acquire on your dungeon runs. While you could’ve easily just mass sold it to an NPC, instead you wait as NPCs come in and buy it all off of you, or if you upgrade your shop enough you can literally hire someone else to do the work for you, essentially removing half of the game. Capitalism, ho!