Moonlighter 2 review – the joy of shelf stacking and inventory arrangement

The indie game that’s part dungeon crawler and part shop simulator is back, with greatly improved graphics and a lot more stock that needs pricing.

Dungeon crawlers have been around for a long time. Starting with pen and paper role-players, before transitioning to computer mainframes in universities, and then home devices, their ubiquity has been so complete that they’ve become something of a video game cliché. One antidote to that is to subvert the genre by shifting the spotlight away from monster slaying and general heroics to the support structures that presumably exist to facilitate adventurers and serve those friendly, side quest giving townspeople.

Released in 2018, Moonlighter was partly about dungeon plundering, but it was also a game of shopkeeping, with the loot you gained from your underground expeditions filling out the shelves of your store. Money made from selling purloined artefacts went towards rebuilding your village, and upgrading your shop, weapons, and armour.

Moonlighter 2: The Endless Vault, has almost exactly the same premise. You may have moved to a new village, which has been taken over by smooth-talking bad guy Moloch, but what you do there is much as before, albeit refined in many different ways. The most immediately noticeable is that the cute top-down pixel art of the original has been replaced by a slicker 3D isometric view.

As before, your white-haired shopkeeper, Will, launches himself into roguelite runs through procedurally generated dungeons. They’re made up of discrete rooms, each of which comes with its own set of enemies, traps, and loot. At the beginning of the game you’re easy prey for even the most basic attacker, and at that stage success equates to scooping up a couple of relics and legging it before something has a chance to kill you. If that happens, you still get to keep your loot, but at a significantly reduced quality.

Back at the shop, your next job is to lay out your stock and decide how much you’re going to charge for each piece. Although you might think that’s purely a case of price maxing, fortunately there’s a bit more to it. When you open your doors to customers each morning, they’ll walk up to items, look at them briefly and emote, telling you all you need to know about the price you’ve chosen. If it’s too cheap they’ll be overjoyed and immediately buy it, which is clearly not the best outcome for your sales margins.

If it’s perfectly pitched, they’ll offer a satisfied look before bringing it to the cash register, and if the price is high but not excessive, they look pained but cough up anyway. If you’ve been too greedy, they get annoyed and abandon the item on the shelf, leaving you scrambling to reprice it before the next customer has a chance to see your mistake.

To add complexity, customers will leave tips if the price is right, which are in turn modified by a perk that lasts until the end of that shopping day. These can do anything from offering additional tips for selling certain rarities of relic, to rewards for pricing things just a little too high, your tip jar now eroded by perfectly priced items. It gives each session its own twist and rewards you for knowing the stock you’re selling that day.

Once you’ve sold a particular item once, it’s automatically recorded, so next time you find a similar relic you can see past price points, whether low, high or just right. That also helps decide where to put it. As you unlock decorations and furniture for your store, some come with upgrades to sales prices, making it useful to put your highest value artefacts on shelves conferring the biggest bonuses.

It’s pleasing to see your gold mount up as customers make purchases, and you’re continually working towards specific goals. Some of those are based on the cost of equipment upgrades or extra potion slots, but you’ll also get bigger sales targets from the Endless Vault. This is a mysterious cube floating in the middle of town, that you visit each time you manage to sell enough to meet its objective.

The town itself offers merchants to buy from, and a range of whacky characters who present you with side missions in return for power-ups. Those additional opportunities unlock as you become stronger and can range further into the game’s various dimensions, each of which adds new elements to the dungeons you explore, as well as more valuable loot to peddle when you get back.

Moonlighter 2’s final element is organising the inventory in your backpack, which far from being boring space management is actually its own flavour of puzzle game. Relics you find often have an effect on neighbouring items, and sometimes on entire rows or columns. That can result in the destruction of some and the enhancement of others, with knock-on effects whose interactions get more complex as items get more expensive. It becomes its own minigame, and positioning things strategically dramatically increases the value of your haul.

Progress can sometimes feel slow; a sense that extends to certain upgrades, which despite being expensive can make little perceptible difference. The game is also guilty of the usual roguelite foibles, where the difference between a disastrous run and a legendary one is often entirely down to the random selections of power-ups you’re presented with, rather than anything to do with skill – or those somewhat milquetoast equipment enhancements.

Still, Moonlighter 2’s three gameplay loops – combat, backpack management, and shopkeeping – work well together, its cartoon style visuals suit its none-too-serious subject matter and at normal difficulty there’s a decent level of challenge for what is a very amiable new indie release.

Formats: PlayStation 5 (reviewed), Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch 2, and PC
Price: £24.99
Publisher: 11 bit studios
Developer: Digital Sun
Release Date: 2nd September 2026
Age Rating: 12

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