The Moonlighter games cast you as Will, a dungeon merchant hybrid, diving into randomly moving battle arenas at night and selling the treasures you unearth there by day. In dungeons you fight various monsters and beasts and are then offered upgrades to your battle build or a handful of relics that you must put in your bag. In the store you find out how to get the best price for these items. And then you spend that money on upgrades that help you explore dungeons better and start all over again.
All the while you will be thinking about multipliers.
The least complicated version of these multipliers is combat, so let’s start there. You can choose between one of four weapons, each having an attack and a special, and you always have a gun and, of course, your trusty backpack that you can use to knock stunned enemies out of the level. These steps combine to form excellent choreography, especially as you develop your build further into the dungeon. You could, for example, unlock a perk that means your attack deals extra damage after shooting something, or a perk that gives you a healing point every time you knock an enemy off the level with your backpack, or a perk that adds fire damage to your basic attack, so no two dances are the same. But overall you’ll find a familiar core and the extra damage will be a benefit rather than a necessity.
Combat in Moonlighter 2 isn’t particularly difficult, and death, while rare, isn’t punishing either. Will has a pendant he can use to get out of danger, but if you do it wrong and bite the dust, your treasures will simply lose half their quality. And it is in these quality points that the real multiplicative tricks come into play. Many items have rules that activate when you place them in your bag. An item can double the value of the treasure in the location to its left or, conversely, it can destroy it. Knowing where to place an item is essential to maximizing the value of your combo loot. Complicating matters is the fact that in each of the three (six if you include variants) themed dungeons, items placed in your bag can have additional specific effects on other items. In the museum, for example, shocking and repairing treasures will increase their quality, and other items can produce cascading effects, such as adding to the quality of whatever is in the bag when adjacent to a shocked item. Placement and timing become extremely important, creating a confusing respite throughout the dungeon’s few rooms.
Once you escape with these treasures of varying quality, the multiplication only becomes more complicated. Will must determine how much people will pay for an item in his store, but they can be persuaded to pay much more than its base value based on the furniture in the store, the perks you’ve unlocked using your trusty robotic chest, and the adorable teacup pig mascot you decided to pet that day. It’s extremely satisfying to spend an entire dungeon improving the quality of an item, then place it perfectly to craft tens of thousands of gold pieces.
And you’ll need every single one of them, as Will fights to buy back his house. The events of Moonlighter are recapitulated very briefly early in the game, and the entire story of Moonlighter 2 is very light, but there’s enough there to give a decent scaffolding of meaning to what would otherwise be a simple number going up. The main quests to “make a lot of money” help keep the game at a steady pace and space out upgrades to the various village shops that exist in a symbiotic relationship with you, providing potions and weapon upgrades and the like. As you need to earn more and more money, you can invest money in them, and they will help you earn even more money, and so on. Support small businesses! Keep cash in the local economy!
I was pleasantly surprised that this story didn’t overstay its welcome. This suggests that it’s going to be about 25% longer than it actually is and when I reached that marker I started to worry that the game was becoming, well, routine. But then it takes a side step and ends perfectly where it should (I finished in just under 30 hours). This makes the pacing a bit odd, but with the story itself being secondary to the experience of hell, yes, a huge number! it doesn’t really affect the experience too much. And there are plenty of side quests, side challenges, and, as the name suggests, endless modes if you’re craving more.
Overall, everything I’ve detailed here is perfectly enjoyable and easy to recommend. But that elides the thing that surprised me most about Moonlighter 2, which is that every single thing I’ve talked about is a detail that blows the original game out of the water. Either these are new additions or they are something that has been significantly improved. This goes for small but extremely important changes in quality of life (you can see the base sale price of an item without having to press additional buttons) to the overall structure of the game (having the challenge of earning huge amounts of dough rather than beating every dungeon means it can be much more relaxed and enjoyable). And each acts as a multiplier that turns something that could have been decent into something much more remarkable.
