Cards on the table, I loved the original Moonlighter. The combination of dungeon crawling and shopkeeping went together like rum and coke; a moreish combination where each half of the gameplay loop fed into the other (yes I do mix my rum and cokes half-half). By night you delved into procedurally generated dungeons where all the loot you collected was the stock you’d sell in your little shop by day. It put a nice twist on the familiar roguelike structure where in addition to progressing as far into the dungeons as you can you have the parallel objective of pilfering as much as possible; a good haul (and the lucrative day of sales that followed) often felt just as good as beating a dungeon.

Seven years later, The Endless Vault revisits that original hook with a bevvy of changes and new features, some great and some not so great. The new mode of presentation is the most striking of these and while the 3D isometric graphics are all quite nicely done, I can’t help but feel like it’s all a bit too clean. It’s kind of like a Canva design; you could never say it looks bad but it can feel a bit corporate at times. The real star of Endless Vault‘s presentation is its character and environmental designs. There’s some real creative gusto on show in things like the desert area’s irate bug guys who are obsessed with loud music and name their bosses after DJs, or the constantly shifting display cases, eyeballs and enclosures of the archive area.

Gameplay-wise the Endless Vault is more familiar than it is new, which is to say most of what was good about the first game’s loop applies here. A key addition is that you don’t lose items when dying this time around. While it certainly does take away from some of the tension of going for one more room on low health, it does a lot to balance the game’s two halves by making sure you’ll always have a reason to open up the shop in the morning; the slightly lesser stakes here are that items lose value when you die. It sacrifices some of the sense of consequence, but the tradeoff is eliminating situations I ran into in the first game where multiple botched runs in a row mean multiple dungeon plunges without any trading days because I’d keep losing my would-be stock. 

Combat feels a bit less like 2D Zelda and a bit more like Hades, which is good because Hades was great. I mention Hades because Endless Vault’s new combat perk system is essentially lifted wholesale from the Supergiant’s greek outing – which on its face is a bit disappointing, but the stolen goods are quite well incorporated here. The game’s branching paths create scenarios where you’ll have to choose between grabbing extra combat perks and filling your sack with stock; essentially a choice between a good shot at the boss or more profit in the next day’s trading hours. The new system for crafting materials adds to this choice; crafting materials come from combat encounters and not loot chests, so if you’re after particular materials for a new sword you’ll want to try to take down elite enemies, sub bosses and bosses. Backpack management expands the rudimentary relic curses of the first game into a more in-depth system of attributes, creating little loot puzzles that can leave you with more valuable booty if put together the right way. It’s really quite satisfying in action, especially on longer runs where maximising the value of each relic becomes essential to making the most of your haul.

The shop-keeping half’s facelift is a little less extensive. The thieves and hipsters are out and a perks system similar to the combat one is in, offering various kinds of bonuses after certain sales targets are met. Shop perks aren’t quite as exciting as combat perks and while the shop-keeping is good here it never feels quite as good as in the first game (something about stacking up goods and the sound effect when you sell things just felt better there). On the upside, you have a lot more options for decoration and you can actually sweep the floors so swings and roundabouts.

Between alternating rounds of stabbing bug audiophiles and selling historical artefacts to grandmas you’ll also have the chance to level up with really quite a lot of avenues of progression, not all of which are imminently intelligible in the earlier hours of the game Your upgrades are divided up between about a half-dozen different vendors all offering different improvements (though often using a lot of the same resources). Some of these progress bars are enticing but others veer into the kind of “increase chance to x by 2%” business that loses me real fast. That isn’t to say the progression system didn’t get its hooks in me at times – I got quite invested scrounging the archive for gooey microchips – but the bloatedness of the whole thing system made it a bit hard to get into at first.  

The game is in early access and currently offers three realms with 5 dungeons between them, with each dungeon featuring a unique sub boss and boss. I’d say in all it’s a plenty fair offering for the asking price and by the end of what is available of the “main story” progress I felt like I’d gotten about as much game as was in the whole of the original. 

I spent a lot of the word count here comparing this game to its predecessor but in the end I think that’s a good thing, since that first one was really quite good. The Endless Vault lives up to that experience in some places, exceeds it in others, and where it doesn’t quite hit the mark it at least offers something new. 7/10