2.5/5 ★ – Nazo_KG's review of Moonlighter.

Moonlighter is a quaint, charming game from the outset, and presents a genre that is rarely explored in the landscape of video games - Manning your own shop while hunting your resources. And it does it well, to a degree. Indeed, Moonlighter is far from being a bad game, but for as much as the presentation and charm serves well to invite you, the overall repetitiveness of the gameplay loop will start to wear out its welcome very quickly. By day, you run the shop where you try to gauge your prices on the loot you bring back from the dungeons. While a neat idea and fun for the first hour or so, I found myself looking up guides for the pricing as it became tedious and more of a chore than a puzzle or fun mechanic. Unfortunately, apart from a few very minor additions, this straightforward process is mostly all there is to it regarding manning the shop itself. There is no competition, economy changes etc., the prices remain static and your biggest thing to worry about is a thief coming in and stealing something. The Dungeon gameplay isn't any more complex, you'll think the first two dungeons are pretty fun and get excited to see what's in store but you'll find that the dungeon layouts, despite being "randomised", aren't actually that much different in layout, and they all don't differ that much in general, sans the visual themes (stone dungeon, forest dungeon, desert dungeon etc.). The items are dungeon specific but it still feels like you're doing the same thing over and over. To add to this, the bosses aren't all that exciting, you can spam attack + dodge roll constantly and still win, last 2 bosses I barely got hurt and just stood in specific spots and somehow didn't get hit. Another big problem Moonlighter has is that the player can move in 4 directions but enemies can attack at a diagonal, so it becomes more of a fight with the hitboxes and tanking hits rather than actually getting skilled at the game. The armor and weapon buffs can feel really strong at times but have no other features or modifiers other than "big numbers". The elemental weapons' collateral damage do little to make up for the downgrade in raw power of the other weapon class. I think underneath it all, this game suffers from a (rather large) list of small problems that eventually add up - and ultimately hinders the experience. Despite all this, I still had fun with the game for a time and considering this is Digital Sun's first and only actual game that they put out, I think it should be taken into account. Pushing aside the negatives, Moonlighter has an appealing and charming pixel art style, with lively animations and very cool monster and character designs. The enemies are especially well designed and feel like they have personality to them. The soundtrack is quite good and fitting for the game's various locations/scenes, and I do like that there is variations for the three floors of each themed dungeon. However, some of the tracks did get stale after a while or upon revisits. Being middling all in all, it's honestly a shame considering Moonlighter has a fantastic idea on paper; and it's evident that the developers clearly care about the game and put a lot of effort in it. But, somewhere along the way, the execution just didn't end up landing quite right.