Moonlighter 2: The Endless Vault (Early Access)

This review is based on the content currently available in the game and its status at the time of writing. We will follow up with a full review once the game transitions to 1.0.

Moonlighter 2: The Endless Vault has finally arrived in Early Access, seven years after the original from 2018. Developer Digital Sun has replaced the pixel art style of the original with stylised 3D, but the protagonist Will is back as a shopkeeper and adventurer, so the core concept is of course intact. Does the mix of cosy shop life and roguelite action in 2025 hold up, and is there enough meat on the bones already for Moonlighter 2 to be worth buying in Early Access?

Even if, like me, you don't have much experience with the original, Moonlighter 2 is very easy to get started with and feels familiar if you've played indie games of this ilk over the last few years. Your shop is in the town of Tresna, and you sell items from different worlds that you can teleport to. The overall vibe is very reminiscent of a modern take on a Zelda game, with a cosy home town, melee-focused combat, and beautiful, stylised graphics. The whole game is very intuitive, but has enough new twists on the formula to keep it from ever feeling boring.

The game has three separate parts that make it work dynamically: dungeons, inventory, and town life/shop. The first part, combat, takes place in the game's roguelike dungeons, which are divided into randomly generated "rooms". Here you fight in frantic battles, which are almost bullet hell-like, requiring you to really find the flow of the fight and use a combination of melee attacks and your blob gun. The individual battle may not be deadly, but you have a fairly limited amount of healing, so if you make too many mistakes, well, you won't get very far. A dungeon culminates in a boss, if you get that far. The enemies are very diverse, and you primarily use a combination of dodging, quick attacks, special attacks (depending on your weapon), and a pistol. When you play a dungeon, you get loot in the form of relics - which you sell in town - or upgrades that make you better in this dungeon run. This way, you balance between greed for loot and upgrades so that you can make it all the way to the boss.

The game's second component is more puzzle-oriented and consists of managing the inventory you build up during a dungeon run. The relics you can collect have varying degrees of rarity and quality. The more of both, the better. But they also interact with each other in your inventory, laid out in an inventory grid, and vary depending on the world you are in. In the world called The Gallery, which is very tech-like, your relics can, for example, shock each other, giving them the status of "overcharged", which means they will be destroyed if they are shocked again. Other relics can then remove the overcharged status. More rare relics can have special abilities that expand this system. Ultimately, of course, you need to bring a valuable backpack back to your shop and sell everything.

You return to Tresna by teleporting, dying, or defeating the boss. If you die, your backpack loses considerable value. Back in Tresna, we find the game's third component. Here you can relax and enjoy the cosy village life, where you talk to the locals, who sometimes give you a quest (find X material, defeat X enemy, etc.), or you can buy things from them. This is also where you have your shop, which you can upgrade in various ways. The most important thing in Tresna is to open your shop daily and sell the items you have found in one of the game's various dungeons. Here you have to price your relics and balance between keeping customers happy and getting the most value possible.

All these parts are kept fairly simple and user-friendly, adding a sense of coherence and synergy that works really well. In the beginning, I got beaten up quite a bit in the fights, mainly because you have very few healing potions. As you get better gear and upgrade in various ways, things gradually get better. It was especially necessary to get more healing potions per run, as well as to purchase an onsen (hot spring) just before the final boss in a dungeon. Of course, you can also customise your shop with cosmetic elements and upgrade it to hold more relics and squeeze more money out of your customers - true cosy capitalism. In this way, all parts of the game contribute to the meaningful progression of the entire game.

Although the game can feel like a life-sim game, you actually spend most of your time fighting. Fortunately, it's a lot of fun. Each encounter is short and satisfying, with good variety. A nice touch is that you have different weapons to choose from before you start a run, and each weapon has a basic and special attack. I'm a big fan of the game's spear, which gives you good range on your attacks and allows you to stick a spearhead in the ground with each strike. Your special attack is to recall your spearheads. This gives you an extra ranged attack, in addition to your blob gun. When you use your basic attacks, you earn shots with your gun. As mentioned, the battles are almost bullet-hell-like, and it's essential to get into a kind of flow with the battles. It works really well.

The sales part of the game, i.e. when you have to sell your relics, is short but sweet. There are special visitors who can give you special sales boosts if, for example, you sell them a relic cheaply, and during a sales run you get boosts that change how things go while the shop is open. It takes no more than a few minutes to complete this part of the game. Perhaps this part of the game could use a little more depth, but it doesn't bother me much that it's not more elaborate.

The game's atmosphere is quite Zelda-inspired, with the very Link-like main character and the homely, pleasant atmosphere in the town. The visual style is beautiful, and although it may be reminiscent of other stylised games, Moonlighter 2 manages to establish its own universe and its own feel. The three main worlds you can travel to also have their own distinct feel - these are Kalina, The Gallery, and Aeolia. Briefly outlined, Kalina is a more desert-like world, The Gallery is sci-fi oriented, and Aeolia is more sky-like. Especially in the latter two, there is a lot going on in the background, which really brings the worlds to life. The city of Tresna itself is also well realised, with cute animals bathing around and NPCs living their own lives.

Like all good roguelikes, Moonlighter 2 gives you the feeling that you can just take on one more dungeon. I've played it myself on Steam Deck, and Moonlighter 2 feels like it was designed for the Deck's play style. A dungeon lasts about 20-30 minutes, without me actually timing it. Every little bit of the game is bite-sized, something you can play for fifteen minutes or an hour, depending on how much time you have. It's the kind of game that's perfect to play between bigger games.

Moonlighter 2 fits particularly well into this category because the game feels familiar and yet new. You can return to Will's business adventure in two months, and the controls (at least with a controller/Steam Deck) as well as the game's structure will feel completely intuitive. There is a vague story about returning to the residents' original hometown and an evil villain who contacts you from time-to-time. And then there is a main quest about the titular "endless vault", a mysterious floating box in the middle of town that gives you perks as you reach sales benchmarks, etc. However, all of this is a backdrop and is kept sufficiently in the background that it is more of an atmosphere than the reason you are playing.

It's still difficult to say whether Moonlighter 2 lives up to its subtitle "The Endless Vault", if that is to be understood as meaning that the game has infinite play value. However, there are many hours of fun to be had here, for a fairly reasonable price. I still have lots of things I haven't done yet, and I haven't grown tired of the game in the slightest. Even if the game isn't completed (which I strongly doubt), Moonlighter 2 is currently more complete than many games that are released as full releases, and it's already well optimised. Therefore, it gets a good recommendation, and even though the game doesn't lack anything as such, we hope to see more worlds and perhaps a little more depth in the shop part of the game. Otherwise, it's really just a matter of getting started selling some relics.