I was immediately struck by the elevator pitch behind Moonlighter - a roguelike where you play as a shopkeeper who's forced to become an adventurer to find wares for his store. But for some reason I never got around to playing it. So when its sequel, Moonlighter 2: The Endless Vault, arrived in Steam Next Fest, I knew I had to rectify that.
Moonlighter 2 kicks off not long after the somewhat apocalyptic events of the first game, but this time in a new world. I won't go into specifics as to exactly what happens, but if you want a (spoiler-filled) rundown, you'll find it right at the start of the game. Suffice to say that protagonist Will returns, in a new store with a landlord who's pretty keen on getting as much cash from him as possible.
That means that the store has to open, and Will has to find stock to put in it. With the help of the local blacksmith and potion seller, you'll have to dive into a portal, slaying the foes that lie within to collect the treasure that awaits at the end of each stage. Combat is a case of dodge-rolling around ranged attacks or beyond melee hits, weaving your own sword slashes between your enemies' onslaughts and using them to charge your own goopy ranged weapon.
It's decent fun (even if some of the platforming sections had me fuming), but it's immediately elevated by Moonlighter 2's risk vs reward payoff. You have the option to end your run at any time, teleporting back to town with whatever loot you've been able to pick up already. That means that every decision to go onwards is laced with a touch of danger - if you don't manage to escape safely with your loot, it'll lose a lot of its resale value later.
Even holding onto loot is an interesting balancing act. The demo only gives you access to a relatively small backpack, which means that picking which loot to keep is an important decision. That's especially important because certain items synergize with others - in a recent run, I stacked up two items that would trigger their effect - adding their sell value to any normally-worthless Firewood in your pack - only when you arrived home.
That meant I was incentivized to fill my pack with kindling. Normally, Firewood is only worth a single gold piece, a price so low that it's not really worth picking up unless you already have a way to augment its price. But having two of those items meant that I added 300 gold to each piece of wood once I got back to town, turning this worthless fodder into high-value items that I could shift for hundreds at a time.
That price gouging only got better once I laid out my wares. Once you've collected your relics and returned to town, Moonlighter 2 becomes a shop management sim in which you can build on the combos you've already established in your pack. Each sales opportunity lets you use Will's natural charm to bump up the price a little further by sweet-talking your customers, and boons earned over the course of each day stack up. In the end, one of those humble pieces of firewood might sell for 1000 times its original value, as a concoction of different effects all combine to drive up its price.
The actual selling was the part of Moonlighter 2 I was least interested in at the start, but as soon as I was given a target to aim for - 5000 gold earned in a single day - I was doing everything I could to push my wares as hard as they could go. Making sure to keep the shop as tidy as possible, all while rushing to replenish sold items and keep busy customers happy quickly became a task almost as fraught as battling my way through the mobs I'd earned the relics from in the first place.
I already knew that Moonlighter 2 was pretty much two games in one - a roguelike combined with a management sim. What I didn't appreciate was that it was actually three games in one, with an effective inventory management game thrown in for good measure. Strangely, I think it shines brightest outside of the action - the roguelike is fun, but with so little of its upgrade paths available in the demo it was a bit limited. By contrast, I had far more fun than I expected in sorting out my pack and running the store - so much so that I'm pretty sure it's time I go back and check the original game out for myself.
Check out our list of the best roguelike games.
