What’s Good About… Moonlighter
“There is no Avarice without Penalty”
While this may be the name of a single achievement for dying with a full bag in Moonlighter, it does a lot to hammer into your head that this is a game about calculated risks. A game where you need to temper your lust for profits and explorations with caution and even-handedness, lest you lose everything delving too deep into the unknown and get yourself killed fighting an unforeseen threat. But I’m getting ahead of myself, I still need to explain the basic concept of what Moonlighter is and I should have led with that. But I’m going to do that now, so get off my back, yo.
SO. Moonlighter is an RPG that is a combination business simulator/roguelike dungeon crawler where you play as the shopkeep/would-be adventurer Will. Will recently inherited his family’s shop and needs to keep it from going belly up in a town that’s also in the process of basically dying. How does he do that? By raiding the sealed-off local dungeons like an opportunistic tomb raider as opposed to sending in mercenaries to do it like a reasonable person, that’s how.
The game is split down the middle between running Will’s shop, conveniently (and also thematically appropriately) named The Moonlighter during the day to sell the stuff you find in dungeons to the other villagers and the odd adventurer who comes to your shop. When the sun goes down, you (as Will) venture into the dungeons to restock his wares and potentially learn more about the places and why his Grandfather was so obsessed with the damn place. This is a pretty intriguing setup for a video game and I won’t lie, working two jobs and getting little sleep in the process is possibly the most relatable millennial mood I’ve seen in a video game yet.
The first half of the game is focused on economics and light municipal planning by way of running/upgrading the family shop and investing in the town itself. These can range from the expected stuff like a blacksmith and a witch who does enchantments and potion brewing, to more esoteric vendors like LeRetailer who simply sells you items from the dungeons you go into if you don’t feel like trekking into the older stuff and there’s an item in demand; the shop itself can also have larger show floors put in to accommodate for more merchandise and even display cases for the particularly foolish-, I mean, wealthy connoisseurs who’ll drop the big bucks on your wares. And that’s not even getting into how you need to adjust your prices to gauge the customer’s interest accordingly to turn a profit and even stop and whoop the nearest thief that tries to steal your stuff. While the management aspects aren’t as in-depth as, say, Recettear (a game that has the literal catchphrase of “CAPITALISM, HO!”), it’s still a fun and engaging aspect of the game’s loop.
But the other half of the game, and the one that you are going to be spending the majority of time on, is going to be the actual going into the dungeon bits. From here the game plays more like a roguelike Zelda in that you have isometric combat where you use various weapons and dodge rolling to explore procedurally generated dungeons that ramp up in difficulty. So you know, the usual. This is the part of the game where the business half of the game is invested into because the deeper you go into the dungeons, the stronger the enemies get. The Stronger the enemies, the more you need to make decisions on whether or not you want to keep the stuff you find in the dungeons because those items you find off of dead enemies also serve as materials for crafting and upgrading. This bit is where the super sick, aforementioned “There is no Avarice without Penalty” quote comes from because you can very easily put yourself into situations where you can die with a bag full of goodies meaning you get no cash to spend on stuff and no crafting materials to make new stuff and get upgrades. This is where recalling early and using the mirror come in handy; the former lets you vamoose the heck out of whatever dungeon you are in to fight another day (permitted that there are no enemies within striking distance) and the latter for when you need to free up the bag for some extra space and make some extra gold right that very second.
All of these add up to create a dungeon crawling experience that is more or less the embodiment of risk vs reward. Because you will constantly be asking yourself if you ** need that broken sword hilt after picking up about ten of those suckers a good few minutes before this one. It feels daunting at first, but as time goes on and you get better and better at making a balance between what to sell and what to keep for upgrades, things eventually get easier. Not enough for you to steamroll, but enough so that you can not get bopped every five minutes and lose all of your inventory.
Oh and that’s before mentioning that the game decided to take a chapter from Spelunky and sic an unkillable and kind of fucked up looking monster after you if you spend too much on a single floor because THAT was a thing my anxiety needed to also think about.
Overall, that’s Moonlighter in a nutshell. It’s an interesting game that manages to blend both adventuring and small business ownership into one neat, cohesive package. Just remember what I said about being calculating your risks at the beginning of this piece. For there is no avarice without penalty.
In-Game screenshots and Title Art from https://www.igdb.com/games/moonlighter/presskit
Corgi Picture from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welsh_Corgi
