After sinking a fair few hours into this game, I feel like I am now in a position to give it a fair review.
In Moonlighter, you play as young shopkeeper Will, who runs the shop in the small town of Rynoka.
You run your store with items you gain from your dungeon crawling adventures, gain cash, upgrade your weapons and armor and more importantly expand your store to sell more items. This will be standard for your first few runs.
Once you've made a few successful dungeon runs filling your bag with loot and earning money from selling your items to customers willing to give you their hard earned gold, you can start making headway with building other external stores - A Blacksmith, An Enchanter / Potion Vendor, La Retailer (will sell you items you may have lost in dungeons) and a Banker.
Each of these vendors will help you in your quest, but they won't all be available immediately. I highly recommend keeping your Red Crystals to enchant you weapons quickly which will make the dungeons easier to traverse.
The DungeonsThe Dungeons are all randomly generated, everytime you leave the dungeon (or die) the whole dungeon will rearrange itself and becomes a whole new experience. There are 5 Dungeons in total, each Dungeon consisting of 3 floors and a boss room at the end of the 3rd floor.
You start with the Golem dungeon unlocked, once you kill the boss in this Dungeon, the next one opens...and so on and so on. Until you kill all 4 bosses in the main dungeons - then the final dungeon is unlocked, where you can proceed to the Endgame.
Graphically, Moonlighter is quite old-school with a retro bit theme. Personally I love this style of graphics with games at the moment and does make me feel quite nostalgic with games of the past.
If I had to compare this game to any other recent release that fully pulled me in, then the comparison would be Graveyard Keeper (My Indie GOTY Contender for last year for any of my friends who would listen). Also has some references of Old School Zelda games as well with the Dungeon Crawling.
If you've played Graveyard Keeper before, think of Moonlighter as a longer crawl through the dungeons with crafting elements that made GYK so much fun, just minus the morbidity of burying dead bodies.
AchievmentsAchievements wise, you may be in for a grind. There are 4 achievements for killing 1000 creatures in each dungeon and a final killing achievement for slaying 10,000 enemies across the board so there will be an element of grinding here to go for the full list.
There are also achievments for destroying the dungeon bosses and a seperate achievment for each for destroying the dungeon boss without taking damage.
Blitzing the game in under 10 hours and finishing in under 40 deaths as well may prove a challenge to some but others will relish the opportunity to take on a harder challenge.
Personally I absolutely love this Genre of game at the moment and have found myself looking for more and more titles to sink my teeth into. If you are a fan of games where you have more than 1 main goal (i.e not just hack and slash through levels or just manage a store etc), then this is for you.
5.0