GAME REVIEW: Moonlighter (2018)
Back in the late spring/early summer, I decided to pick up an OLED Nintendo Switch, as I am one of those people who tends to wait for the second generation of a console to come out before I commit to it, especially since I tend to have an endless backlog of games that I haven’t finished or started. The Nintendo store has some interesting deals now and then, as is normal for digital gaming by this point in time, and we’ve been trying out a few games that were on discount that looked interesting from the trailers. Among these were Children of Morta, which we loved, and Moonlighter. To our surprise as well, we realized that the games were both developed by 11 Bit Studios, so we were expecting an incredible gaming experience, akin to what we had with Children of Morta. That was not the case, but let’s get into it.
First of all, while both games were developed by 11 Bit Studios, Children of Morta was made by Dead Mage, while Moonlighter was made by Digital Sun, so they don’t really have much in common, except perhaps the use of large-scale pixel art, though Moonlighter uses a significantly simpler color palette. Morta was very much a Diablo-like RPG, whereas Moonlighter is a rogue-lite dungeon-crawling game, mixed with a shop/sales mechanic.
The plot of Moonlighter revolves around a mysterious dungeon near the town of Rynoka and the concept of the Heroes and Merchants who explore it, for very different reasons. You play Will, a Merchant who runs a shop on the edge of town near the dungeon, but who perhaps has more of the soul of a Hero. Will is known for following in the footsteps of Crazy Pete, who seemingly died in the dungeons, and now some random old man from town, Zenon, is worried that Will is going to follow in the footsteps of Crazy Pete. This old dude seems to have been friends with Will’s grandfather and encourages Will to curb his curiosity and just use the dungeons to gather items to sell in his shop, rather than trying to proceed deeper and find the keys to unlock the final door. It’s noteworthy and strange that Zenon constantly mentions that he thinks Will’s grandfather would be very proud of him, while always asking if Will would listen if Zenon asked him not to keep going deeper. It’s a bit clunky, logically, giving the player the impression that Zenon knows something more, or has some ulterior motive—he doesn’t, he’s just a kind of overprotective old man, which ultimately just makes him a bit annoying, since Will ultimately proves himself to be a capable Merchant and Hero.
Within the dungeon, you find tips and hints that help you learn a bit about the lore of the dungeon, and sometimes there are journals from Crazy Pete to add onto these. The main lore from Pete is found in dead-end tent rooms and other notes can be found on skeletons within the dungeon. It’s worth mentioning that you should always smash the skeletons, because they have the best drops, like potions and weapons. There are also sparkle marks, that indicate that if you fall into a hole, you might find something useful (like a rare item, a chest that will transport your inventory back to the shop, or a fight challenge that tends to have low-quality rewards that aren’t, frankly, worth it, since you are often just clearing your inventory to make more room for the same things you already have too much of). Furthermore, as is common in some rogue-lites, a weird green blob monster will appear if you spend too much time in one level and start chasing you.
Conceptually, the game isn’t bad, though this is certainly far from the most interesting concept anyone has ever come up with, feeling like someone thought it would be fun if you could also play the shopkeeper from Ocarina of Time. There’s a basic supply and demand shop mechanic, so Will must first establish the prices of the items he finds within the dungeon, and then he can adjust accordingly per whether they are in high or low demand. As the game progresses, he has more tables in the shop, some with glass cases to deter thieves, a shop assistant, and a sale box. Eventually, thieves and birds (why birds?) can come into the shop and mess things up, and later on, some customers seem to need assistance (for no apparent reason, you just have to go talk to them before they’ll bring their item to the counter). A lot of this, frankly, feels like a waste of time sometimes. The idea was novel and kind of fun at first, sure, but you have to wait for customers to find something they like, consider the price, and make a decision, all of which takes time. Chasing off thieves and birds is more of an annoyance than anything. There are things you can buy from the falconer eventually to decorate your shop that, for example, increase the tip, scare off thieves, increase the number of people who can be in the shop at any time, and increase how late the shop is open. Unfortunately, a lot of this seems like a lot of not-very-interesting or -fun things to do in order to do something that itself isn’t particularly fun. I never had an issue with people waiting too long in the line and getting angry, so managing the shop isn’t really a challenge. All these progression mechanics do is give you annoying little time-waste tasks, when really, you just want the sales day to be over as quickly as possible so you can go dungeon crawling again. The shop-side aspect of the game isn’t really fun enough to justify taking as much time as it does.
Another major issue is that it’s unclear when and where the game saves. It for sure saves when you go to bed for the night, and it (probably) saves after you leave a dungeon. But there is no manual save space besides the bed—which changes the time of day—to save the game, so a lot of the time I felt like I was doing full dungeon runs just so I would be in a place where I wanted to have Will go to bed for the night, or I had to force another sales day with nothing on hand to sell, so I wouldn’t miss a customer with an order showing up to pick up their items by going to bed. I also definitely lost progress a few times because I didn’t know that my game hadn’t saved.
The town mechanic is okay, but a lot of it, again, feels a bit pointless. You can invest in a blacksmith who makes your weapons, a witch who does potions and enchantments, a falconer who sells the items to decorate your shop, a competitor who sells the same things you do but at a greater price (why in the farque would you ever want to do that?), and a banker who invests your money and you have to check on it every day to see what the return is. From the blacksmith, there are five weapon options: sword & shield, big sword, spear, gloves, and bows. For gear, you can have a headband, armor, and boots. All of this is fine and necessary to progress in the game. Unfortunately, there’s a cap on everything, so there are a few options of each type of item (some of which seemed to just be different skins), but they can all only reach a fifth form. Everything the blacksmith crafts can be updated either once (for gear) or thrice (for weapons) at the witch’s shop, and that’s as strong as you can get.
The witch also crafts potions for you, which are considerably cheaper if you bring your own ingredients. The potions do scale well to the dungeon levels, but because you cannot access your inventory if you’re in danger, you can’t stockpile more than five on your body for active use in combat at any time.
The falconer shows up at a weird time but is reasonably priced and useful enough, for what he does (though, why is a falconer selling you shop decorations? Again, not much logic). I don’t understand the competitor at all, unless he happens to have things you’ve promised to a customer that you don’t have, but since there are no consequences for failing to deliver an order, it really doesn’t matter. The banker is also really badly designed and pointless—he can increase your profits, for sure, if you watch the account profile every day, but for whatever reason, he functions on a 6-day schedule and if you don’t immediately invest on the first day of the cycle, the man will not work for you until that cycle is over. I also swear that he appeared mid-way through a cycle when I invested in him to come to town (he asked me to return in 3 days and I guarantee I waited 1 day at most to talk to him after buying him), which makes me think he might even be programmed to the game’s calendar, which is even more annoying design than just having him stuck on a 6-day timer. Having a 1/6 chance of him being available on any day basically made me just completely not use him at all, and it wasn’t like I was short on cash anyways. If I needed more money, I did another dungeon run and some sales, and that would always be good enough to keep me going.
Now let’s get into the mechanics. This game is completely and near-ruinously plagued by wonky mechanics, both in and out of town. In town, for example, when Will has five chests to store his inventory in, he has to be very far below them to open them. Being directly beside a chest will open the one above him—annoying. Before Will has any weapons or skill whatsoever, the mechanics were so messy that the game was almost unplayable. It doesn’t help that he starts out fighting with a broom, so everything feels unnecessarily impossible and really dissuades you from continuing past the tutorial. My partner theorized that the game might be doing this on purpose, to point out that a merchant is, indeed, not a hero. If they had, in any way, run with that idea, I might have found it believable, but after playing the game through, I did not think the makers were that clever.
The player character seems to run on a 4-point D-pad compass when attacking, yet an 8-point compass when moving, making for really inconsistent attack and block potential when you are expecting him to be able to work on the 8-point compass and he just doesn’t. Will is extremely slow and if enemies have AoE attacks, he can get easily trapped by his own movement limitations. Furthermore, there doesn’t appear to be any form of target lock in the game, which means that his shield is often completely useless, because you’re almost never facing the enemy when you need to throw it up. The glove was good for speed, but the boss fights weren’t great overall, regardless of what weapon you used. The game site advertising boasts “very hard bosses,” even going so far as to call it Souls-like, which is frankly, bordering on being an offensive claim—the bosses are not very fun to fight because of the mechanics, so every fight ends up relying on potions to survive because dodging and blocking are way too clunky; they also aren’t remotely challenging if your weapons are upgraded and enchanted. All it amounts to is waiting for the enemy to stop attacking, so you can attack, or just suck up the hits and bash your way through. That not in any way, shape, or form Souls-like. At best it kind of like classic Legend of Zelda and at worst it’s hack-and-slash bull-honkey.
The endgame was nothing to write home about either. Story spoilers: Will finally enters the last dungeon and discovers what seems to be a low-tech lab, full of green tubes and a lot of strange bodies. Some tablets reveal that something had holed up in this place, suggesting that the dungeons were spawning as a result of these interdimensional creatures’ presence. Eventually, all of the beings except the leader killed one another off, having gone mad from being locked in a cave for decades. This leaves the final boss—some sort of interdimensional space pirate captain—without a ship or a crew, who had locked themselves in this place in order to hide from the Watchers. He offers to let Will leave as thanks for freeing him, but Will stays to fight. The first phase is a joke and the second phase plays more like the other final bosses—not hard if you dodge or block (which remains annoying, mechanically). Ultimately, the Watchers show up, who are some sort of interdimensional space police and have been hunting these pirates for longer than they’ve been missing. The dungeons are interdimensional portals and all of the Heroes and Merchants from Rynoka have been thieving, like the pirates themselves. They agree to ignore the thieving as thanks for Will defeating the pirate. As far as explanations for random-gen dungeons go, this is a decent enough reason for them to exist, but nothing to phone home about, when compared to games like Hades or even Enter the Gungeon.
For rogue-lite games that involve a degree of puttering around, this was an interesting concept but ultimately didn’t really end up being as fun as it seemed at first. If you enjoy rogue-lites, I would rather recommend games like Dead Cells, Enter the Gungeon, and Crypt of the Necrodancer, which have a lot more longevity and are much more fun. If you like slower games that allow you to putter around a bit, Spiritfarer is the most fun I’ve had with that recently. Moonlighter, unfortunately, falls short of its better-made and quirkier competitors.
