Unfortunately the overworld doesn’t quite have the same character and charm as the dungeons. All of this is clearly an intentional choice and it works really well with the colourful, pixel art style. Enemy and boss designs feel like they wouldn’t be out of place in Hyrule and the dungeons feel more like Zelda dungeons than the divine beasts in Breath of the Wilds did (Oh snap son!). Unlike most of my other beloved rogue-lite titles which employ a side-scrolling layout, Moonlighter has a top-down view point akin to the 2D Legend of Zelda games and the similarities between the two don’t end there. More regularly than my body would like, I find myself up into the wee hours of the morning saying to myself “Just one more run. All the while trying not to get too greedy and bite off more than you can chew against often extremely challenging enemies and bosses thrills me. The tight, no-nonsense, combat and the risk/reward nature of squeezing the absolute most out of every run. Exploring randomly generated, often Metroidvania-Esque, areas. Let me say right now, I adore Rogue-lites. Moonlighter, developed by Digital Sun and published by 11 bit studios is one such game. Rogue-lites tend to share some of the same mechanics but try to bring something a little different to the table. Rogue-like is a term used for games that share almost exactly the same gameplay stylings as the original Rogue, these include but are not limited to turn-based combat, randomly generated maps, rewarding players for going out of the way and exploring and perma-death. Over the years Rogue has spawned a myriad of games with similar gameplay and mechanics and now uses it’s name-sake to define two different game genres Rogue-like and Rogue-lite.

In 1980, Michael Toy and Glenn Wichman developed and freely distributed a dungeon crawler named Rogue.

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