There’s a reason why I’ve never tried heroin. I know, deep down, that I would become dangerously addicted to it and would lose everything good in my life. As strange as it sounds, I knew going in, based on my knowledge of the game, that Moonlighter would be just like me trying heroin. A game that is half top-down Zelda adventuring and half shopkeeping/daily life sim, is just the perfect mix of my favorite types of games. I knew that once I booted it up, I would be sucked into it and have no control on how it would drive my life. Like heroin.
Moonlighter, from developer Digital Sun, is the story of a small village called Rynoka that years ago discovered five mysterious gates. Four of these gates led to dungeons full of monsters and treasure, but the fifth gate was an enigma. One day, a lowly shopkeeper decides to brave the first dungeon to seek the untold wealth inside, and so each night, he closes his shop and goes adventuring. His quest allows him to farm the dungeons for items to sell in his shop, and he can even begin to craft new, better items. As his retail success grows, he is able to attract other vendors to Rynoka, like a blacksmith and an Apothecary and more, so his success is the village’s success.
The daytime portion of the game is a shop sim. Players set up items for sale and dictate their prices. The customers will let the player know if the price is too high or too low, and finding that retail sweet spot is the key to retail success. As the sun goes down, the shop closes, and the shopkeep goes on his second job — hence the game’s title — as an adventurer, exploring randomly generated dungeons for monster parts, loot, and more. Since the dungeons are randomly generated, exploring them fully and solving them to get to the boss at the end is key to success. Once the boss is killed, one of the locks on the mysterious fifth gate disappears, so exploring and defeating all four dungeons and their bosses becomes the driving force of the narrative.
Moonlighter is a roguelike game, so dying in a dungeon forces you to lose all that you’ve collected and you will have to restart from the entrance on the next night, with a new dungeon with new paths and rooms and new loot and treasure to find. Players will have focus on item management, as pocket space is limited. You’ll also have to gauge your HP and decide if going into that next room is worth it, or just wait out with what you have and try again the next night (you can warp out of any dungeon at any time with no penalty).
The daytime shop portion is also incredibly addictive. Adding new items and setting prices — while also keeping an eye on an item’s popularity and demand — all comes into play. Moonlighter’s shop sim is the perfect exercise to highlight the tenets of economics that we all learned in high school; tenets like supply and demand, cost vs. price, and more. As the game progresses, you will even have to deal with thieves, who will try to steal items, so running around the ever-expanding shop seeing to customers’ needs while also handling security/inventory control makes this a full-fledged gaming experience in its own right.
The addiction in Moonlighter comes in the fact that it’s hard to shut it off. I found myself saying, “I’ll play for one more night (dungeon exploring),” and then when I was done with that, “I’ll run one more business day,” and then the cycle would repeat itself over and over for hours. Digital Sun has done a wonderful job and mashing these two very different game genres together into one amazing amalgamation. This is an incredibly deep playing experience, one that sucks me in time and time again, for long play sessions.
The music and graphics are both solid, with a sweeping score and pixelated characters that keep with that 16-bit SNES feel. The hit detection is spotty at first, but as you craft bigger and better weapons, learning how to use them in the best ways helps to alleviate some of those issues.
I knew going in that Moonlighter was going to be a dangerous game for me. I knew that I would become obsessed with it, and I knew that it would hit all the right notes with me. This is a mix of two of my favorite game genres and I know that when I boot it up on the PS4, that I am in for a solid four or five hours of non-stop play until I’m finally able to pull myself away. That’s the sign of a great game, and Moonlighter is definitely a great little game.
Moonlighter is available now for the PS4, Xbox One, and on Steam. This review is based off the PS4 version, and a code provided by the publisher, 11 Bit Studios.
