Moonlighter is a Spanish Indie game.
Respect to the studio, Moonlighter can now join fellow games from Spain like "Blasphemous" and "GRIS".

The pixel art is beautiful and the music is great.
The story is nice and surprisingly non-fantasy, very nice.

Crawl through dungeon rooms like "Binding of Isaac" and dodge easy mechanics.
Difference is that you move and attack slower but that is intended, I believe. In order to sell that you are no hero or warrior but a wannabe merchant MOONLIGHTING as a fantasy adventurer.

Enemies are damage sponges and upgrading your gear is vital, but is very costly so you grind loot and sell it in an economics mini-game.
The game is tedious but if you have patience and tolerance, won't be an issue.

Once the Bank is figured out, you can make millions easily, but the cooldown gets in the way.
Can be circumvented if you sleep through days. This has no repercussions anyway.
The Mimic companion is the BEST, you get a free safe chest following you around in dungeons for that extra loot space. (Get him early on!)


The DLC adds a new dungeon but is also as tedious as the main game. I see how that is not for everyone.

Overall, a decent little indie game that I played with controller while doing something else like work or watching movies.
Not my favorite, but a good time.

Moonlighter is not bad, per se. You go into a dungeon comprised of one-screen square rooms, fight random enemies in them, loot their drops, go back home, sell what you got in your shop during the morning, close down for the day, and restart the cycle at night.

OK -- so far, there's nothing wrong.

But the combat sucks. You attack in the direction you are facing/moving towards, and only in four directions (no diagonals).

Keyboard+Mouse input seems to have been an afterthought, as the above is typical console-BS and the default keyboard bindings are also complete trash (you will have to rebind a bunch of keys if you intend to play this with K+M. And it'll still feel weird anyway). You can bind stuff to your mouse, though.

Navigating your inventory -- which you'll have to do a lot -- is a nightmare, because the mouse pointer doesn't work at all in the game. Only the clicks. You have to navigate it, your "notebook," trader-screens, etc. with W, A, S, D plus the keys you felt the least uncomfortable binding"Interact," "Back," "Close" and four other things to.

Character-growth is almost non-existent, as there's no skill tree in Moonlighter. All you can do is upgrade your helmet, armor, boots and weapons (of which you can hold two). You can pick 2 out of 5 types of weapons, and there are 3 different sets of armor, which give either a low amount of health and +speed, a moderate amount of health and nothing else, or a large amount of health and -speed. Each type of weapon also has two "paths" available -- high, sheer damage, or lower damage with an elemental debuff. But the problem is: once you decide what armor set and weapons you want, they evolve completely linearly afterwards.

What happens, in the end, is this: you go to Dungeon 1, get its loot, craft the strongest possible chosen armor and weapons you can, then kill Dungeon 1's boss. Then you go to Dungeon 2, and do exactly the same thing. You upgrade your items once per dungeon, and that's it. The only thing that changes is the monsters you face in each dungeon, but the way you play and the relative damage you do is always the same.

The whole game consists in repeating the exact same thing 4 times over, and then facing the final boss.

On top of that, I only died once, to the aforementioned "final boss." Killed him on my second attempt. And it also took me just 11 hours to finish the entire game (somehow, I still got the "finish the game under 10 hours achievement").

So, as the title of this review stated, Moonlighter is a mediocre game. It's the very definition of it -- it's not bad, but it's not good either. It works fine, it's a little fun, but it's also soulless and unexciting. Serviceable, but uninspired.

In itself, that's not particularly bad; alone, it doesn't earn Moonlighter a negative review, as I assigned it.

I paid $5 for the game (plus the DLC, which I'm still deciding whether I'm going to try out or not), which makes it the cheapest game I bought in the last 5 years or so. Maybe 10. I had some fun with it, and I don't regret my purchase.

So, why is this a negative review?

For two reasons:

1 - Because if we don't put some honest thought and effort in what we do, if we don't try to make things better, we'll never cease being the sh!t we, as individuals and as a species, are, and;

2 - Because there's a chance the developers of Moonlighter deliberately opted to abuse Steam's black-and-white review system (positive or negative only), predicting successfully that a mediocre, low-effort game would lead the vast majority of people to give it a positive review rather than a negative one.

The first reason is enough. If the second one is also true, though, then this is sociopathic and manipulative behavior, and I cannot endorse it.

The game's art style is fine, as is the soundtrack, and Moonlighter is bug-free. Its game-designer is some lazy and/or ill-intended fellow, but the other folks who worked on it did their job well.

Still, given how average Moonlighter is, the fair rate for it would be a "Mixed" review-rating, with 50% positive and 50% negative reviews. So, I'm contributing to balance here.

If you can get the game for $5 or less and you are in the mood for some rather casual, simple gameplay, by all means, do go ahead and get the game. Moonlighter will do the classic, stale rabbit-out-of-the-hat trick.

One of my all time favourite games, idk it just is fun, kinda simple and has its own charm to it.
I've played it A LOT on my switch.
Do recommend a lot -> do yourself a favor and use a controller <3