Moonlighter 2: The Endless Vault review: "Dungeon delving, balancing sacks of loot, then hawking your wares is still a compelling loop – but the exchange rate between those pillars is wobbly in early access"

When I played Moonlighter 2: The Endless Vault during Steam Next Fest in June, I came away very impressed at the way the three main pillars of its gameplay loop overlapped. Alongside its more traditional dungeoneering gameplay were inventory management and shop keeping systems that worked beautifully, encouraging you to manipulate every aspect of the game to chase your goal. But while the core ideas are all still present, the five months since I last played have brought changes to this early access build that have left me a little cold.

Moonlighter 2 picks up the story of the original Moonlighter a few months down the line. Forced to flee their home at the end of that game, the cast end up in the village of Tresna, where protagonist Will has pushed the patience of his landlord a little too far. She's desperate for cash, so she sends you back to your adventuring life - dungeon-crawling to gather relics that you can sell in your store. It's a repeat of the original game's excellent elevator pitch, though Moonlighter 2 has replaced top-down pixel art with an isometric 3D presentation that offers a little more tactical breadth to some fights.

Early on, combat is a modest affair, Will armed with nothing more than his trusty broom. But soon he's packing a shortsword, and even has a Blob Gun to bring down aerial foes, staggering them so he can smash them out of the arena with his pack. On each run, while you can focus purely on finding the best loot, certain encounters will offer combat bonuses - damage over time or burst effects that let you change up your playstyle a little depending on what you find. Along with the risk/reward system of your locket, which allows you to teleport home in a pinch if you need to keep your gear safe, these help keep fights interesting, and are often key to succeeding against the bosses that lurk at the end of each run.

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You'll have limited pack space at the start of the game, so making sure that you make the most of your loot is crucial. Most relics can interact with each other in myriad ways, often meaning you'll get a substantial breather between encounters as you attempt to optimize the contents of your bag. Some relics might burn away their neighbors, but others might be made more valuable each time a piece of loot is reduced to ash. As you venture into new realms in search of even more expensive gear to sell, those interactions become more complex, but potentially more lucrative if you can get them right, turning Moonlighter 2's inventory management system into one of the game's most compelling features.

What's in his pockets?

Much of the core formula of Moonlighter 2 remains unchanged since that Next Fest demo, but the biggest change appears when Will returns to his store, where two systems have changed significantly. The first is the shopping minigame itself. Previously a system that required you to choose how to upsell each individual transaction as much as possible, it's now a perk-based system that only triggers every few sales, with no guarantee it relates to what's left in your bag. That ties to the second issue, which is how much money you're tasked with making.

In the demo, you had to make 5,000 gold in a single day of sales. Exactly how you chose to do that was up to you, but if you wanted to maximize your revenue, you needed to make use of each of Moonlighter 2's major pillars; a successful dungeon crawl, optimized inventory, and plenty of sales charm were all crucial to meeting that target. In this new early access build, however, your first revenue breakpoint is a cumulative 10,000 gold. That might sound like a lot more, but what it really means is that instead of having one excellent day, you can get by with a series of entirely average ones instead. Even as your target amount increases, your own upgrades and increased skill means that you're rarely tasked with grinding away for days on end. Progression is no longer gated by your mastery of Moonlighter 2's most interesting ideas, but simply slowed down.

Side hustle

That's a problem, because it doesn't sync up with how the combat system works. The most expensive loot can be found after you defeat the bosses, but some of those fights are agonizingly slow, often because they don't work with whatever combat build you might have focused on. Each zone has its own combat augment - spike-spewing plants, projectile-firing Genies, or time-altering tasers - that can be further upgraded through your run, but don't spawn in the boss room. That means you have to decide what the purpose of an adventure is before it starts - are you just trying to beat the boss, or are you hoping to make loads of money?

The answer is almost certainly the former, because you don't actually need to make that money to ensure you advance. That'll happen over time no matter what you do, but you'll definitely need to acquire the unique resources dropped by each boss in order to move the story forward. Yet focusing on combat upgrades means you're not filling up your pack, removing the impact of the inventory system that still manages to be the most engaging part of the game.

Eventually, as the combat stakes and gold amounts grow ever larger, Moonlighter 2 starts to settle into a more comfortable rhythm, but I never quite shook off my disappointment at the changes to the shop system. Even if the bones of the game were totally solid - I came across a number of bugs in this early access build that weren't present in the demo - it feels like the heart's been taken out of the overall experience.

The gutting of what was a smart, well-gated progression system that made excellent use of the game's core ideas is a real disappointment, and while there's plenty of early access ahead in which those ideas might be given a little more time to shine, Moonlighter 2 feels as though it's tripped at the start of the home stretch. For a game about making big sales, Moonlighter 2 enters early access unsure of the value of its own mechanical pillars. Now, it's up to community feedback to give ol' Will a steer, but I'm not quite sure they know what they have for now.

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