Moonlighter 2 Made Me Reckon With How 'cozy' A Shopkeeping...

Moonlighter 2 combines the ideas of several games into one, though it doesn't yet excel at any one element.

When Moonlighter released in 2018, it was to a fairly positive critical reception. Players seemed to enjoy the combination of cozy shop simulator and dungeon crawling roguelite, inspired by the Rogue Legacies and Stardew Valleys of the time. Some grumbled about a lack of depth and incentive to keep returning to the dungeon again and again, and seven years later developer Digital Sun is ready to show us what it’s learned from those criticisms. Moonlighter 2: The Endless Vault is now available in early access on Steam. I spent several hours with it over the past week, and it already feels like a more focused and refined version of the original.

The premise remains unchanged: you play as Will, a shopkeep-slash-dungeoneer who is looking to turn his spoils into cold hard cash. The core loop involves diving into randomized dungeons, fighting the monsters there, filling your backpack with loot, selling it for a tidy profit, and doing it all again. Inventory management itself is a puzzle, as items interact with each other in your backpack, forcing you to think carefully about how you use the limited space. In essence, it’s three games in one, each section complete with its own rules.

While the concept of Moonlighter 2 is the same, it’s releasing into a very different landscape than its predecessor; where Moonlighter shared space with Enter the Gungeon and The Binding of Isaac, the followup has a whole new stable of contemporaries to draw from, and their influence is readily apparent. It’s impossible not to see the touch of Hades in Moonlighter 2’s combat (it's isometric now!), or in the way Will gets to know the characters loitering around town. The hub area of Tresna could be a respectable stand-in for the House of Hades or The Crossroads, and I enjoyed familiarizing myself with the town and its residents.

The combat and inventory management have been revamped quite a bit: Juggling your loot is much easier in The Endless Vault as the majority of crafting materials no longer take up inventory space, letting you focus entirely on the sellable relics Will accumulates during a run. This alleviates a big stressor. With upgrading and crafting resources moved to an invisible storage area elsewhere, Will is free to direct his attention to the shopkeeping aspect, sliding Moonlighter 2 into cozy game territory.

Running the shop itself is pretty similar to the pr

Source: PC Gamer