Moonlighter had a lot of potential. It's hardly the first game in the action/shopkeep hybrid genre, but it's one significantly held back by the rogue-lite elements it insists on using. Rather than making steady progress through the game, using gear and your shop as a sort of level up system, Moonlighter decided to go the Binding of Issac path where each dungeon is a fixed 3 floors leading to fixed bosses, and fixed loot, but randomizing the layout and enemy formations each time you re-enter. What sounds like a fun, infinity dungeon rapidly spirals into tedium. You see, since the shop you run is functionally your rogue-lite upgrade system, there's never anything to find in the dungeons except trash to sell. Rarely will you find a potion, only from mimics which are also rare, and any equipment is several tiers lower than what you can craft at that moment. This means after just a couple attempts at each dungeon, you're only goin in to find the bosses as quickly as possible to make progress through the game. Which generates frustration with how hard the enemies hit. The early dungeons seem tuned towards a Dark Souls style"our game is HARD!" While later dungeons are significantly easier for seemingly no real reason. Almost like the late game gear is overpowered and the early game stuff is too weak. Whatever the case may be, this leads to more frustration than anything while you spend time clearing out rooms trying to progress only to die to some random mob that does half your hp with a tracking projectile. Even if you didn't lose any of your loot, it wouldn't matter since you're fully upgraded and simply trying to finish the dungeon and progress the game. Ultimately, the problem is how divorced the dungeons are from the shop. Yes, I'm dungeon diving to stock my shop, but the shop and gold in general, becomes useless after just a couple of attempts at each new dungeon, putting more emphasis on the game's rather bland combat and annoying difficulty spikes. The game feels very bare bones once you get to the 2nd or 3rd dungeon and it doesn't really improve from there either.

I'm not usually into indie games like this, but what a pleasant surprise! It's incredibly addictive going into dungeons at night and during the day, opening the shop and selling all the loot you've collected. Perfect for playing while watching or listening to something.

This game is ideal for playing it in the background while you listen or watch something that is not fully engaging. For that reason I really enjoyed it as it helped me relax. It was fun delving into dungeon and gathering ingridients to sell them as another minigame in your shop. Very good game.