Artistically, there’s no faulting Moonlighter. Its pixel art is detailed while its soundtrack is beautiful and tranquil, and I can’t help but be impressed by both elements. I despise Moonlighter‘s gameplay, though, which puts a price tag on absolutely everything (including transitioning out of a dungeon to the village—why in God’s name would magic require money?) and quickly starts to feel like an unrewarding grind. To be honest, I don’t remember why I didn’t cover Moonlighter when it first came out. It was certainly on my radar. The most likely scenario is that I didn’t hear back from anyone and decided to move on with other things instead. That was probably for the best; Moonlighter is a game that you chisel away at inch by inch, unlike the similarly gorgeous but far better-paced Children of Morta, and forcing myself to finish it would have been truly miserable.

You play as Will, the owner of a shop adjacent to a series of randomized dungeons who dreams of figuring out their mysteries. It’s refreshing to have everyone recognize that randomized dungeons are a super weird part of the world. Most games with procedurally generated levels don’t bother. The gameplay here is just awful, though. You venture into vaguely Zelda-ish dungeons and beat monsters to obtain an inventory full of items, then spend what little money you have to warp back home, after which you engage in a long item-selling minigame where you figure out what items can sell for based on the reactions of shopgoers. Rinse and repeat.

That would be tedious enough, but dying in a dungeon causes all of the items that aren’t in your first couple of slots to be dropped, undoing almost all of your progress. Staying alive in Moonlighter isn’t easy, either, thanks to the combat’s insistence on being uncomfortable. You can attack in only four directions while enemies will mob you from all directions, for one thing, and the weird hit detection ensures that you’ll always miss one or two of them. Attacking is also a long animation during which you’re totally vulnerable. You don’t move around and attack in Moonlighter so much as you gently suggest to Will that he should dodge away from enemies and attack, at which point he disappoints you by doing the opposite. The controls feel like they’ve been filtered through a haze of Nyquil and Benadryl and are truly clumsy.

The best-case scenario is that you obtain lots of really good items that offset the cost of warping out of the dungeon, sell only the ones you don’t need to craft better items and gear (and since it’s hard to figure out what you need and remember those components once you do, good luck with all of that), and slowly make your way through Moonlighter‘s randomized—and bland, if I’m being honest—dungeons. I’m going to pass.

Moonlighter – Beautiful, calming, and bad: Game Pass, part 3 first appeared on Killa Penguin