Moonligher - no.

Before Play

I thought to myself while looking though the preowned section of Switch titles: Most of these covers I flip through don't engage me. Some of them almost do, but I look over the back and see it's actually a Fortnite clone, or something to that effect. Some of them, though, from their covers alone, give me a sudden spark of excitement.

 

Moonlighter I recalled being one of 2018's indie darlings. Turning it over I saw it was a unique blend of a rogue-like and shop management system. That sounded promising. On the car ride home, I opened the box to find an actual, physical manual inside - which transported me right back to excitedly doing the same thing back in the early 2000s.

First Impressions

When I first began playing the game, a couple of things struck me: One, I was very frustrated the tutorial locked me out of input until it was ready to explain each individual mechanic to me. I much prefer to learn by doing and experimenting.

Those feelings past quickly as I got into the game, as the first thing I thought was: This game is polished. Juicy. A lot of thought had gone into the visuals and feelings of every input.

Those feelings were magnified when I opened the UI. It was so clear, I could instantly understand what elements did what. It wasn't just the readability of the UI that struck me, but the seeming depth. When I explored further, I was met with this book:

 

(source) 

I was so intrigued... a popularity scale. A curious set of emotions with associated price ranges. In these first half hour of picking up the game, I was sold a promise that I was going to get to play and explore these gameplay concepts. I began to relax and anticipate with excitement where this experience would take me.

Play

As I delved deeper into Moonlighter, I found the experience I was expecting was not the one that I got. Before I began playing, I made a commitment to stick to it for at least 5-7 hours before calling it quits. After the 6th hour, I could safely say that this game was not for me. I don't want to claim the game is not well made, but I found it riddled with design decisions that did not gel with me.

The main issue I found was the fractured loop between the dungeon crawler and the shop management. I'm trying to digest exactly what it is, and hopefully by talking it out, I can work out why this game didn't work.

Most importantly in my opinion, failure ground the game loop to a halt: The idea behind the game is that you must safely exit the dungeon with your loot in order to sell it, so if you fail, the incentive to try again is there. If I had seen it on paper I would have thought it was a solid design decision, but it just didn't play out for me in practice. On death, the player loses everything. (Except for a few inventory slots, but it wasn't enough in my opinion to combat this issue.) I'm not one to shy away from challenge, and I don't mind being brutally punished, if there's a reason for me to continue my experience after I fail. The game didn't have any elements to kickstart me into the next phase of my play, either for the dungeon or shop component and instead essentially reset my save-game to an earlier state. It didn't matter if it was fair or not, all I knew was that I felt like I had lost all my progress, and I just didn't feel like repeating the experience.

Perhaps I wouldn't have had any qualms in repeating the same experience if I enjoyed it enough to begin with, but I found a few design choices preventing that. The calculated, Dark-Souls-esque combat style seems unrelated, but after dying with nothing to show for it, the thought of repeating the same dungeon through slow, deliberate fighting was not appealing. And I think the reason it was not appealing here was really down the the previous issue I had, where the game presented nothing to incentivize me to try again. In Dark Souls you drop things in death, and that can motivate you to carry your way through the level again. And if you die again during the quest to recover those items, you can recover instead those items and so forth. Some magical mechanic like that in Moonlighter might have made the idea of trying again seem more appealing. 

In general, I don't think this combat style merged well with this overarching game concept. By having a combat system with interrupts and mid-movement control, basically making it a more fluid, faster combat system, I think I would have responded better the game as a whole.

I didn't only find issue with the combat system, though. The storefront elements seemed like they would house a lot more depth than I got the impression they would at the start. I didn't feel like I had a choice or anything to explore in this pricing system. It was a matter of finding out the price of the items, and selling them. In the game, you're meant to acquire funds to upgrade your shop capacity, but I was finding the initial selling component so lackluster, I didn't feel much of a desire to upgrade things further.

You could save up and buy more weapons/armour, but I found that I didn't really enjoy the two classes of weapons I tried, and I didn't feel like saving up for a third would really address the major issues I was having.

There were also numerous issues I had with bad tutorialization or unclear enemies. I remember the first time I had carefully planned my exit, knowing that if I went into the next room and I was in over my head that I could hold the Y button to exit. Unfortunately, it was never explained that an enemy hit would reset the escape's progress bar. Quite the opposite, I was under the impression that so long as I survived for its duration, I would exit safely. This particular element of the game left me dying to attrition more often that I would have liked. While I also sometimes like puzzling out how to defeat different enemies in game, the fact there was such a brutal failstate against something I had no idea how to defeat, nor was able to escape due to the reset of the escape bar on hit, made for some frustrating deaths.

I think there is an argument to be made that sometimes a cog in a machine must be crafted this way to make the whole contraption tick, and there may be reasons that an overriding escape bar, or a fluid combat system wouldn't have complemented the whole. Unfortunately just because a cog is perfect for its job does not mean the machine as a whole is a good one. That can probably sum up my feelings towards Moonligher - a well-polished game that might technically fit together, but that created an experience that completely missed the mark for me.

Why do I hate games?

I've been wondering that for years now - after almost every game I play, I feel a deep sense of dissatisfaction. I expect at least some games I pick up to not leave me forcing myself through, and yet game after game, after a few hours I put it down forever and think "that was a waste of time".

This has turned into a two pronged problem: 1, why the hell do I find it so awful to play games now, when I loved them growing up? Is it just nostalgia? Are games in general less fun the older you get? 2, every time I go to play a game I get a twang of anxiety: If the past 100 games have been such a downer, forcing myself to begin the 101st game when the outcome is near guaranteed to be a bad experience makes me afraid to even start.

This relationship with video games has been cycling in a feedback loop for a while now. So I decided to write about it:

After every game I play, I'll write about my time playing, and why I felt it didn't work for me. If my playing-new-games experience has some sort of silver-lining in the form of a critical analysis after the fact, I might at least have that to look forward to. Perhaps I'll be able to get to the bottom of why gaming is so stressful for me, and maybe after the law of averages kicks in and I'm lucky, I'll finally find a game that I actually like, too.