Among the many professions represented throughout video game history, one is held in the highest regard above all others--the shopkeeper. Whether it’s Resident Evil 4’s unnamed merchant or The Legend of Zelda’s Beedle, it is the shopkeeper who often proves the source of a critical piece of gear, a potent new ability, information or simple companionship in the face of overwhelming isolation. These steps toward progression are often inextricably linked to our memories of an experience with a game, and yet so often shopkeepers in games are relegated to the dusty store shelves they so dutifully maintain once their function is served.

Moonlighter (available for Steam, PS4, Xbox One and, eventually, Switch), the first effort from Spain-based 10-person studio Digital Sun Games and publisher 11-Bit Studios, flips the paradigm by dropping players into the well-worn boots of Will, the especially-willful proprietor of Moonlighter by day and plucky adventurer by night.

Moonlighter’s core premise is a simple one despite its novelty. Each night, after closing up shop, Will dives headlong into Dungeons, mysterious underground lairs hiding wealth, knowledge and danger in equal measure. And each day, he sells his spoils, and with the gold earned he’ll buy new gear, improve his store and attract new industries to the ever-expanding village of Rynoka.

Much like Will, Moonlighter juggles several tasks at once, each to varying degrees of success. Will’s adventure makes for a competent dungeon crawler thanks to its luscious art direction, engaging combat and the dopamine drip feed associated with surviving a run, haul in tow, and the knowledge that you are about to irrevocably damage Rynoka’s economy. Though Moonlighter’s many systems fit together to form a well-constructed jigsaw puzzle, their somewhat shallow nature could leave players wishing for a higher puzzle piece count.

The rounded, expressive sprite work evokes classics like Golden Sun.

Moonlighter’s presentation is arguably its most striking feature, thanks in no small part to an extremely talented art team composed of David Aguado, Rocio Gutierrez, Ester Mari and Odei Pagola. The whole package sings, but the latter pair’s animation work is a sight to behold. The detailed, colorful sprite work and animation (seriously, everything is always moving) makes the world feel all truly alive. In a veritable sea of sprite-based indie titles, it’s a feat that Moonlighter stands out at all. Also, the soundtrack is pretty rad.

Isometric camera, swords, a plucky hero with a disdain for pottery... surprisingly, the Zelda comparisons aren't all that apt.

The game’s four Dungeons, each comprising three floors with a remarkably well-animated boss awaiting at the end, are procedurally generated. Will finds a merchant’s pendant early on which grants him the ability to flee a dungeon with all of his loot in exchange for a little gold. The price for defeat inside one of the dungeons is, predictably, the loss of all progress and all discovered items save for five special slots representing items carried on Will’s person. Moonlighter is certainly a rogue-lite, a far more forgiving subgenre of the notoriously challenging roguelike genre that often features permanent loss of progress for failure. In fact, Moonlighter’s systems are so forgiving that it barely even qualifies as a rogue-lite. (a rogue-might?) Sure, you will inevitably crawl to a dungeon’s end boss only to come within a hair’s breadth of victory and status as the richest man in town. But even when you do, the penalty for failure is noticeably lighter in comparison to other roguelites. Moonlighter offers several mysterious means of sending loot back home from within a dungeon, and much of the game’s most meaningful progression--health, weapons, armor, etc.--are thankfully immutable.

Death won’t come easy for the adventurous merchant, though. Will is surprisingly proficient with five different weapon types, including a short sword-and-shield combo, greatswords, spears, bows and even gloves for the pugilists out there. No matter how you choose to outfit your shopkeeper, each weapon type offers a light and heavy attack with varying utility. And each style offers a distinct advantage: the sword and shield approach lacks range, but is balanced by the ability to guard; equipping the greatsword tacks on a speed penalty, but offers remarkable damage and invincibility frames during swings; the spear provides quick stabs in melee range from a relatively safe distance. The bow alone is indispensable, often trivializing most encounters (including boss fights) with infinite range and a charge shot that ignores walls and other terrain. Will is allowed to use up to two at once, with a quick switch between the pair via a press of the left bumper (the game doesn’t advertise this, but Will can even change weapon mid-combo by pressing the left bumper with the appropriate timing). Add a roll with some generous invincibility frames into the mix and Will grows from bumbling mop warrior to T-1000 in no time (or both, if you elect to land the killing blow on each boss with the actual mop the game starts you with for the Janitor achievement). Though the game makes more than a few homages to a certain other beloved isometric action-adventure franchise, the simple but nuanced combat helps to distinguish it among a laundry list of peers.

Moonlighter’s greatest sin is that its execution outpaces its ambition in nearly every facet of design. Many of the game’s systems, particularly on the shop management side of things, merely allude to hidden depth that is rarely found. For instance, early on the game’s shopkeeping tutorial places a much higher emphasis on supply and demand than is necessary. An item’s demand rarely decreased unless it was sold multiple times for a noticeably higher amount than its actual value.

Also, the game’s calendar feels completely inconsequential. There are no special events, sales or other occurrences of note; the calendar, and by extension the passage of time, exists only to track the days remaining until you can fulfill a customer’s request for a specific item. To further underscore how incidental time is, one of the many shop upgrades available is a for-sale box, which allows Will to dump his less interesting wares in a box at a discounted price to free up inventory space. Ostensibly, the box is used to free up shelf space for the things that will earn Will the most gold during limited hours of operation, but ultimately there’s nothing stopping players from just saving those unwanted items for the next day and selling them at full price.

Though Moonlighter adds enough wrinkles throughout the experience for a longer list of what the player can do, it never amounts to changing how the player plays. This is evident even in the game’s strengths; developing new weapons and armor typically offer generic stat increases or status effects, but Will’s skill set remains the same from the opening floors of dungeon one to the journey’s end. I also found myself wishing the procedurally generated dungeons didn’t feel so formulaic by the third or fourth visit to a given dungeon, though that is a problem that the genre as a whole faces.

Here's a weird occurrence that's barely worth mentioning.  Sometimes, switches in the form of gray pillars spawn randomly in rooms that unlock chests and doorways.  The random factor was a bit too high in this case, though, as the switch b… — Here's a weird occurrence that's barely worth mentioning. Sometimes, switches in the form of gray pillars spawn randomly in rooms that unlock chests and doorways. The random factor was a bit *too* high in this case, though, as the switch blocked a doorway completely.

In my 19 hours with Moonlighter, I encountered a handful of bugs, many of which seem to have been eliminated in the game’s first PC patch on June 2 (console patch certification takes a bit longer), but they’re worth mentioning here. One bug of note involves the quest system, which sees Will gathering specific items from enemies for customers in exchange for gold. On the day a particular set of quest items was scheduled to be delivered, I found myself locked in my shop after hours and unable to advance the game by manually closing shop or even hopping in bed to trigger the passage of time. In the end, the solution was to ignore the quest altogether, but that’s obviously a less-than-ideal solution. Also, if one’s controller disconnects during play, there seems to be no means of reconnecting it. The game permanently defaults to its inferior keyboard controls until the program is closed. As a message from Digital Sun states upon booting up the game, keyboards are fine, but you’ll definitely want a controller for this experience.

My critiques are numerous because it is exceedingly obvious that Digital Sun is onto something here. The game’s inherently repetitious nature often works against it by highlighting how bare-bones some of its systems are, though Moonlighter’s core strengths are undeniable. There’s gold in them hills; I trust this studio will find it in time.

Tips for aspiring merchants

-The glass displays may seem meaningless once you upgrade your shop sufficiently, but they do attract the attention of a certain wealthy type of customer. Moreover, you can charge up to double an item’s actual value by putting them behind a display case.

-It can feel like a guessing game when trying to figure out how much loot is actually worth, especially when arriving to a new dungeon. But in the inventory screen, tab over to the journal page (just right of the main inventory screen) to see where an item falls on the loot sheet. The least and most-valuable items have their values listed, and as you fill out the journal page by discovering loot, you can intuitively surmise how valuable items are in relation to one another.

-Enchant your armor ASAP. By default, armor actually offers only extra health, and not defense. Enchanting armor is the only way to ensure that Will takes less damage per attack. The defense modifier seems to be percentage based; a defense rating of 50 reduces all damage taken by half.