Moonlighter ($11.99). A store, a story, a legacy, a game. First announced on mobile at GDC last year, it has finally been released. Part dungeon crawler, part shop manager, it is entirely fun. Players follow Will, proprieter of the Moonlighter, as he gathers materials for his shop, crafts weapons, potions and enchantments, and enters dungeons to find fame, fortune, and just maybe learn a little more about them.
While a shop simulator and a dungeon crawler are distinctly different, they are both RPGs, and it isn’t surprising that they blend together well. In a dungeon crawler you will frequently find junk items that serve no purpose other than to fill your all-too-limited inventory, forcing a decision between holding them until later for some coin or discarding them now in hopes of filling that space with something more useful. Some dungeon crawlers will allow you to turn those junk items into enchantments, or gems, or perhaps even crafting them into better equipment. Others try to limit or completely remove the trash with filters, or automatically smelting it down? but, inevitably, some gets through.
Shop management games, on the other hand, have to get their merchandise somewhere. Most of the time raw materials are simply? conjured up from the base code to be turned into useful items. Once in a while, though, you can buy rare or interesting components from adventurers for much more expensive products. The question, however, is what if you combined these two gen...