Developer: Digital Sun
Rrp: £11.39 (Gog.com) £15.49 (Humblebundle, Steam and Epic)
This is a game where you’re the owner of a store that sells fantastical artefacts to adventurers before they go off to the local dungeon. In order to get these artefacts you yourself have to delve into the dungeon, slay the monsters and bring back the spoils to sell on. Hang on, that sounds awfully familiar… ah yes, it’s because that’s essentially the gameplay of Recettear: An Item Shops Tale. But all of that is just a surface level similarity.
Once you go into the dungeons themselves the game shows itself to be more akin (at least in this aspect) to the original Legend of Zelda game as it shares an extremely similar top down view point with that title. Each dungeon is randomly generated from a bank of room types so that all the rooms have a cohesive look to them.
I found my enjoyment of this game to be relatively short lived, lasting maybe only a few days. However I started to find myself getting bored of the gameplay loop there’s only so long that I can enjoy a gameplay loop of; go to the dungeon, fight the same set of monsters, collect loot and sell. Sure, over time I grew more skilled as a player, started to level my equipment up and unlocked a new dungeons to go to but it would always devolve back to that kill, collect, sell loop. The thing is with Recettear there was a sense of pressure your actions, you had a limited time to find, collect and sell the items so you could pay rent, in Moonlighter there’s no such pressure and therefore one less reason to really care.
I’d say give it a go, its quite a lot of fun. I just hope you can enjoy the repetition.
