In a sea of Legend of Zelda homages, 2018’s Moonlighter stood out with its lovely art style and a cool hook: What if the loot you gather on your dungeon-delving adventures wasn’t just power-ups, but the wares you sell as part of your day job? Following Moonlighter’s release, a number of smaller games, like Cult of the Lamb and Dave the Diver, have found success in complementing action mechanics with light management elements, so it’s clearly a combo that works. It would have been easy for developer Digital Sun to simply give us a shinier, more polished version of that original concept in a sequel. Instead, Moonlighter 2: The Endless Vault, which has just released in version 1.0 after an early access period, surprisingly rethinks what a Moonlighter game is at its very core. That makes it comfortably live alongside the original, offering an experience that’s distinct enough to enjoy both–or to come to the series anew without feeling lost.
The visual differences between the first game and Moonlighter 2 are the most readily apparent changes. While characters like your shopkeeper, Will, are perfectly recognizable, they’re rendered in a new 3D style with an isometric camera angle. That’s already a huge change from the original, which was modeled after top-down Zelda games.
Instead of procedurally-generated dungeons, you work your way through isometric roguelike stages with randomized assortments of enemies, building your strength as you go. You can imbue your attacks with effects like Poison and Hex to ramp up for the increasing challenges, or take your chances with a riskier build that relies on taking advantage of environmental hazards like Spikes.
Moonlighter 2’s Endless Vault is a an ominous glowing cube at the center of town
Those elements make Moonlighter 2 feel more like a ground-up remake than a sequel. The core game design is similar, but it’s a completely fresh approach. Your goal, ultimately, is to feed your wealth into the Endless Vault, unlocking greater rewards as you progress through its tiers. This mission creates a sense of meta progression, adding another layer to the run-based action and shopkeeping mechanics. Additionally, the roguelike structure helps the action feel more refined, as you can build your power set in various ways that emphasize melee, gun, or environmental damage from run to run. This sense of variety is heightened even further by Moonlighter 2’s biomes, which all feel very distinct from each other.
The best differentiator, though, is the new inventory system. Rather than simply storing your loot, this new system transforms every treasure chest into its own little puzzle game. In the first biome, for example, you’ll find lots of items with special Burn effects that destroy items placed next to, below, or above them in your backpack slots. That would appear to be a disadvantage, giving you less loot to sell at your shop at the end of the day. But other items will react to burning with bonus effects, like enhanced quality to drive up their prices. You can also counter these negative effects by equipping some items with Armor, protecting them from the burning effect while still getting its benefits. With some clever inventory management, you can turn a relatively low-value item into a priceless artifact.
And that’s just the first biome. The subsequent ones introduce their own puzzle elements, like crystals that can transform into other relics or dolls that absorb surrounding relics to boost their value. Those differentiated puzzle types help every biome feel distinct, on top of the different enemy and power-up types you find.
The inventory system is a major puzzle element
The slight downside of all these interlocking systems is that you have to enjoy them all. If you’re in it for the action-RPG or shopkeeping elements that made the first game so fantastic, but you don’t particularly like these puzzles that are everywhere in the sequel, then Moonlighter 2 can be a drag, especially in regards to your feeling of momentum. But so far, I’m finding the creative application of all these interlocking systems to be a delightful mix, alternatively tickling different parts of my brain and swapping between them frequently enough to constantly feel engaged.
In many ways, Moonlighter 2 feels like a completely different game than the first one, but in a way that makes them feel like complementary experiences rather than iterative ones. That makes this the rare game sequel that’s worth playing alongside its original, as they represent two different approaches to the same goal, with wildly different results.
