Moonlighter, a “2D action RPG with rogue-lite elements,” has just recently launched on Kickstarter, and within 1 day, has already reached half of its funding goal. It’s actually no surprise—the game looks damn good and really brings out the nostalgia feels. The campaign will run until July 3rd, releasing on PC, Mac, and Linux first, and then the game will come to Xbox One and Playstation 4 at a later date.
Moonlight’s Kickstarter Trailer
In Moonlighter, you play as Will, a humble shopkeeper with big dreams. The game has two main modes of play—dungeon crawling and shop management. Will roams through dungeons, kills lots of monsters, and brings back the loot to sell at his shop. The dungeons are randomly generated, and I love that aspect. From the looks of the trailer, it seems like the dungeons are tackled one randomly generated room at a time, giving Moonlight a real Zelda meets The Binding of Isaac feel. Here’s a small list of some features.
• To earn his daily bread, Will needs to venture into the dungeons near his town, defeat strange enemies and obtain loot to be sold at his shop.
• Wisely managing the gold from those sales is the only way he’ll grow strong enough to risk the deeper gates and, maybe, open the sealed one.
• Moonlighter has endless randomly generated dungeons, a myriad cool and expensive items, many weapons, dozens of weird enemies, five incredibly tough bosses and gold… tons of gold!
• You start with 100 gold coins, some cheap equipment… and a shop.
According to the game’s Square Enix Collective page,
“Moonlighter has a dual nature. At its core, it is an action rogue-lite: focused on combat, looting and exploring procedurally generated dungeons. Though, in order to get stronger and become hero, the player will need gold, a lot of gold. To get it, he will need to sell the items he finds on the dungeons and wisely invest the money on shop upgrades, new equipment, etc.
We want the player to have a lot of fun exploring dungeons, defeating enemies and getting more powerful, but also to worry about questions like: How much money should I ask for this item? Should I keep or sell this artifact? Should I invest my money on more shop space or potions? Which weapon should I upgrade? How do I get enough money for that?”
The game is partly doing so well because it was well-received on the Square Enix Collective, an “initiative to help developers get their games out to the masses,” receiving a 95% approval rating. This may have helped jump-start their Kickstarter campaign, but really though, Moonlighter is getting by on its own merit—the game just looks fun.
