In the world of dungeon crawlers, 11-Bit Studios is bringing a new take with some new aspects to the genre in Moonlighter. As someone who isn't a big fan of the repetitive dungeon crawling style games, I actually found myself having quite a bit of fun playing this new upcoming title! It is expected to release during Q4 of 2017 on XB1, PC, and PS4.
The new aspects that I found interesting were from the start to the tiny stuff. You play as a merchant owner that has to collect items from the dungeon in order to sell them to the townspeople to make money in order to buy potions, upgrades, new armors, weapons, which are all items that can be made for less gold at the cost of material requirements. For instance, there is a witch, which is the only shop in town open 24/7, where you can buy a low grade potion for a chunk of gold or bring some potion items and pay less; pay for the service basically.
Aside from just randomly collecting items, you can talk to some of the townsfolk and obtain side quests that fit to their own background and situation within the Moonlighter world. Either way, everybody in town makes their money from the dungeons. While the people in the town will be able to help you set up, just as you can help them, but they will not be able to team up with you and raid the depths below.
While you are in town, you are able to also enchant items and armor to make them more powerful and helpful, with a multitude of enchantment options! All these aspects will need to be put together to make sure you survive within.
As I said before, only the witch is open at all times which includes your own shop. You can only be open during daytime hours, which works out because the dungeon is more profitable at night (hence the "Moonlighter" title). When it comes to selling items in the shop, you have to set the prices yourself and gauge how valuable items are based on the peoples reactions. You will have a chart book to record the different reactions you are getting and find the best price that way.
Now, let's talk about the main gameplay. You will be spending about 80% of your time within the dungeons, hunting the various type of enemies within. It is a very punishing game, so potions will be a must and skill will need to be used to be able to survive! Your inventory is a total of 20 slots and many items are stackable (with a limit), but on death you lose majority of the items and only keep what you put in the top 5 slots on top. No, you can not just go back and recover your items either!
Each time you enter, or restart, a dungeon it is randomly generated so the pathway is always different. The goal is to get to the third floor and kill the boss to unlock the other dungeons. After the fourth dungeon you will open the final, longest, tallest and hardest dungeon of the game. The further your progress and the higher level within the dungeon you are, the better the worth of your loot will be.
The various amount of aspects that go into playing this game and making actual progress through the game made this one really stand out as a dungeon crawler to me and I look forward to its final release!
